your
victory.

Satan can stand anything better than neglect. If you ignore him he gets
disgusted and disappears. Jesus used to turn His back upon him and say,
"Get thee behind Me, Satan." So let us refuse him, and we shall find that
he will be compelled to act according to our faith.

OCTOBER 15.

"Faith is the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. xi. 1).

True faith drops its letter in the post-office box, and lets it go.
Distrust holds on to a corner of it, and wonders that the answer never
comes.

I have some letters in my desk that have been written for weeks, but there
was some slight uncertainty about the address or the contents, so they are
yet unmailed. They have not done either me or anybody else any good yet.
They will never accomplish anything until I let them go out of my hands
and trust them to the postman and the mail.

This is the case with true faith. It hands its case over to God, and then
He works.

That is a fine verse in the thirty-seventh Psalm: "Commit thy way unto the
Lord, trust also in Him, and He worketh." But He never worketh until we
commit.

Faith is a receiving, or still better, a taking of God's proffered gifts.
We may believe, and come, and commit, and rest, but we will not fully
realize all our blessing until we begin to receive and come into the
attitude of abiding and taking.

OCTOBER 16.

"Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, I will make thee a joy" (Isa.
lx. 15).

God loves to take the most lost of men, and make them the most magnificent
memorials of His redeeming love and power. He loves to take the victims of
Satan's hate, and the lives that have been the most fearful examples of
his power to destroy, and to use them to illustrate and illuminate the
possibilities of Divine mercy and the new creations of the Holy Spirit.

He loves to take the things in our own lives that have been the worst, the
hardest and the most hostile to God, and to transform them so that we
shall be the opposites of our former selves.

The sweetest spirits are made out of the most stormy and self-willed, the
mightiest faith is created out of a wilderness of doubts and fears, and
the Divinest love is transformed out of stony hearts of hate and
selfishness.

The grace of God is equal to the most uncongenial temperaments, to the
most unfavorable circumstances; and its glory is to transform a curse into
blessing, and show to men and angels of ages yet to come, that "wher