a spirit of divine life in our world calling
us out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful. Man
needs not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy
impulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.

The beauty of holiness is the beauty of character. It is the
adjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength
and harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of
praise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness,
of love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.

Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating;
cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially
religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so
make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other
worlds.

THE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS

Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what
has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have
had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we
despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of
our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.

We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find
happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has
been waiting close by our door all the time.

He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory
in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find
the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks
ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart,
he falls by the way.

The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in
the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any
heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that
is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even
now attainable.

Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once
were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of
felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in
the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the
passing hour or the present opportunity may have.

He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this
day, in the faces of living men,