th Him or without Him,--it is
hard, very hard indeed, to understand how a man or woman can believe
these things at all, and make no effort for anything beyond the temporal
elevation of those around, sometimes not even beyond their amusements!
'People must have entertainment,' they urge. I do not find that _must_ in
the Bible, but I do find, 'We _must_ all stand before the judgment-seat
of Christ.' And if you have any sort of belief in that, how can you care
to use those lips of yours, which might be a fountain of life to the
dying souls before you, merely to 'entertain' them at your penny reading
or other entertainment? As you sow, so you reap. The amusing paper is
read, or the lively ballad recited, or the popular song sung, and you
reap your harvest of laughter or applause, and of complacence at your
success in 'entertaining' the people. And there it ends, when you might
have sown words from which you and they should reap fruit unto life
eternal. Is this worthy work for one who has been bought with such a
price that he must say,

'Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all'?

So far from yielding 'all' to that rightful demand of amazing love, he
does not even yield the fruit of his lips to it, much less the lips
themselves. I cannot refrain from adding, that even this lower aim of
'entertaining' is by no means so appreciated as is supposed. As a
cottager of no more than average sense and intelligence remarked, 'It was
all so _trifling_ at the reading; I wish gentlefolks would believe that
poor people like something better than what's just to make them laugh.'
After all, nothing really pays like direct, straightforward,
uncompromising words about God and His works and word. Nothing else ever
made a man say, as a poor Irishman did when he heard the Good News for
the first time, 'Thank ye, sir; you've taken the hunger off us to-day!'

Jephthah uttered all his words before the Lord; what about ours? Well,
they _are_ all uttered before the Lord in one sense, whether we will or
no; for there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, Thou, O Lord, knowest
it altogether! How solemn is this thought, but how sweet does it become
when our words are uttered consciously before the Lord as we walk in the
light of His perpetual presence! Oh that we may so walk, that we may so
speak, with kept feet and kept lips, trustfully praying, 'Let the
meditation of my heart and the words of my mouth be alway acceptable