n months,
Robert and his wife and Bess and the two boys sat together in the same
seat. George had not been to church for a year, and Will was very
irregular in his attendance.

The opening services seemed especially impressive and beautiful to Mr.
Hardy. He wondered how he had ever dared sit and criticise Mr. Jones'
preaching and his reading of the hymns. To be sure, he was not a
perfect speaker; but his love for his people and for all men and his
rarely good everyday life were so remarkable, that they ought to have
counted for more than they ever did. It is astonishing how many good
deeds and good men pass through this world unnoticed and unappreciated;
while every evil deed is caught up and magnified and criticised by
press and people, until it seems as if the world must be a very wicked
place indeed, and the good people very scarce.

Mr. Hardy joined in the service with a joy unknown to him for years.
He had come to it from the reading of his Bible instead of the reading
of the morning paper, and from prayer instead of from thoughts of his
business or a yawning stroll through his library. His mind was
receptive of the best things in the service. He entered into it with
the solemn feeling that it was his last.

When the minister gave out the text, "For we must all appear before the
judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in
his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad,"
Mr. Hardy started, and leaned forward intently, feeling that the
message of the preacher was peculiarly for him and strangely
appropriate to his condition. The first statement of the sermon
arrested his attention and held him irresistibly to the end of the
argument:

"The judgment seat of Christ will not be a dreadful place to a man
whose sins have been forgiven in this world; but if he comes up to it
seamed and scarred and stained with sins unrepented of and unforgiven
because he has not asked God to forgive him, it will be a place of
awful fear to his soul. There are men here in this audience who are as
ready to die now as they ever will be; they have made their peace with
God; they have no quarrel with their neighbours; their accounts are all
square in business; they are living in loving relations with the home
circle; they have no great burdens of remorse or regret weighing them
down; if God should call them this minute to step up to the judgment
seat, they would be ready.

"But ther