iness plans, our social converse our
heart's affections, our manual toil, our entire life, blending with all,
consecrating all, and conscious through all, like the fragrance of a
flower, or the presence of a friend consciously near, and yet not
hindering in the least the most intense and constant preoccupation of the
hands and brain. How beautiful the established habit of this unceasing
communion and dependence, amid and above all thoughts and occupations! How
lovely to see a dear old saint folding away his books at night and humbly
saying, "Lord Jesus, things are still just the same between us," and the
falling asleep in His keeping.

So let us be stayed upon Him. Let us grow into Him with all the root and
fibers of our being. He will not get tired of our friendship. He will not
want to put us off sometimes. Beautiful the words of the suffering saint:
"He never says good-bye." He stays. So let us be stayed on Him.

OCTOBER 31.

"My grace is sufficient for thee; for My strength is made perfect in
weakness" (II. Cor. xii. 9).

God allowed the crisis to close around Jacob on the night when he bowed at
Peniel in supplication to bring him to the place where he could take hold
of God as he never would have done; and from that narrow pass of peril
Jacob came enlarged in his faith and knowledge of God, and in the power of
a new and victorious life. He had to compel David, by a long and painful
discipline of years, to learn the almighty power and faithfulness of his
God, and to grow up into the established principles of faith and
godliness, which were indispensable for his subsequent and glorious career
as the king of Israel.

Nothing but the extremities in which Paul was constantly placed could ever
have taught him, and taught the church through him, the full meaning of
the great promise he so learned to claim, "My grace is sufficient for
thee." And nothing but our trials and perils would ever have led some of
us to know Him as we do, to trust Him as we have, and to draw from Him the
measures of grace which our very extremities made indispensable.

NOVEMBER 1.

"We will come unto him and make our abode with him" (John xiv. 23).

This idea of trying to get a holiness of your own, and then have Christ
reward you for it, is not His teaching. Oh, no; Christ is the holiness; He
will bring the holiness, and come and dwell in the heart forever.

When one of our millionaires purchases a lot, with an old sh