ations and individuals, in the high
thought of Lincoln, "Under God."

* * * * *

This command carries with it the promise of a reward restated by Paul,
"Honor thy father and thy mother that it may be well with thee and that
thou mayest live long on the earth." In fact this is the logic of life.
This retributive justice is bound up in the laws of nature. Plants that
array themselves against these laws wither and die. And higher up in
the animal kingdom, Kipling's verse tells us that this inexorable
sequence prevails:

"And these are the laws of the Jungle,
And many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the law is,
And the haunch and the hump is--obey."

And it is true that obedience in a human being conduces to a long and
prosperous life. The beautiful truth is gradually emerging in science
and theology that religion is healthful. As one of my discerning fathers
was often wont to say, "The whole Bible is a text-book of Advanced
Biology, telling men how they may gain the fuller life."

* * * * *

Here and there the obedient die early, you say.--Yes; and this fact
sounds the deeper spiritual import of this promise, for they, sooner
than we, enter upon that eternal life, and pass over into that greener
Canaan, to that inheritance incorruptible and undefiled.

Standing one afternoon in the Gallery of the Louvre in Paris, a vision
of the perfect adjustment of our seemingly conflicting relations to
Caesar and to God shone forth to me, in the divine gesture of the Master
in Da Vinci's wonderful painting of the Last Supper, where the hand
turned downward lays hold of the things of earth, and the hand turned
upward grips the things which are eternal, both of which obligations are
glorified in those later words of the Saviour spoken out of the agony of
the Cross: "Son, behold thy mother! Father, into thy hands I commend my
spirit."

LIFE'S MORN[45]

BY WILLIAM C. JASON, D. D.

_Principal State College for Colored Students, Dover, Delaware_

[Note 45: An address delivered before the Wilmington District
Epworth League Convention.]

"Nature," says one, "is like a woman; in the morning she is fresh from
her bath, at noon she has on her working-dress, and at night she wears
her jewels."

Nature is most charming in the morning. The following extract from "A
Picture of Dawn" is a tribute Edward Everett pays to the morning.

"As we proceeded, the timid approach of the twilight be