doing the duty which lies nearest
you, avoiding sin as you would an adder, because it is sure sooner or
later to sting you, if you touch it, is the straight road, and the only
road, to happiness, either in this life, or in the life to come. Pleasure
and amusement, drinking and jollity, will not make you happy. Money will
not make you happy. Cleverness, and cunning, and knowledge of the world
will not make you happy. Scholarship and learning will not. But plain,
simple righteousness, simply doing right, _will_.

Do right then and be happy. Obey God's commandments, and you will find
that His commandments are _Life_, and in the pathway thereof there is no
death.

Make up your minds to do right, to be right, to keep right by the help of
God's Right and Holy Spirit, in the right road. Make up your minds
whether you will go through the world in God's way, or your own
way--whether you will taste what God has forbidden, and so destroy
yourselves, or obey Him and live with Him in bliss. The longer you
delay, the more difficult you will find it. Make up your minds now, and
ask God to teach you His own heavenly wisdom which is a Tree of Life to
all that lay hold on it.

V. I AM.

"I AM hath sent me into you."--EXODUS iii. 10.

Every day I find it more and more true, that the Bible is full of good
news from beginning to end. The _Gospel_--that is good news--and the
best of all good news, is to be found in every book of it; perhaps if we
knew how to search the Scriptures, in every chapter and verse of it, from
beginning to end. For from beginning to end, from Genesis to
Malachi--from the Gospel of St. Matthew to the end of the Revelation--what
our Lord said of the Bible stands true: "They (the Scriptures) are they
which testify of ME" (John v. 39). The whole Bible testifies, bears
witness of Him, the One Unchangeable Christ, who said to Moses, "Say unto
the people, I AM hath sent me unto you."

Now let us think a while what that text means; for it has not to do with
Moses only, but with all God's prophets, evangelists, preachers. David
might have said the same to the Jews in his time, "I AM hath sent me unto
you." Elijah, Isaiah, St. Matthew, St. John, St. Paul, might have said
the same. And so may God's ministers now. And I, however sinful, or
ignorant, or unfaithful to my duty I may be, have still a right to say,
as I do now say solemnly and earnestly to you, "I AM hath sent me unto
you" this da