tinuous leisure. There are still great
friendships among boys at school and young men in college, for they
have a large amount of steady leisure; and this is necessary to signal
friendship. When we have more time, we shall have more and stronger
friendships.

The vanity of life, the deceitfulness of women, the falseness of love,
the impossibility of happiness, the passing away of all that is lovely
and of good report, are old, old, old texts of complaint. Men and
women talk about them until they feel ever so much better than the
rest of the world; and such talk enables them to look down with proper
contempt upon the hypocrisies of society,--that is, of their next-door
neighbors and near acquaintances,--and fosters a comfortable, but
dangerous self-esteem. The world, upon the whole, is a good world to
those who try to be good and to do good, and every year it is growing
better. During the last fifty years how much it has grown! How
sympathetic, how charitable, how evangelizing it has become! Yes,
indeed, if we choose to do so, we shall meet with far more good hearts
than bad ones, and the topmost grapes are not sour.

Burdens

There are two kinds of burdens--those that God lays on us, and those
which we lay on ourselves. When God lays the burden on the back, he
gives us strength to carry it. There never was a Christian who, in
his weariest and dreariest hours, could not say, "His grace is
sufficient." If God smiles on him, he can smile under any burden that
he may have to carry. He can go up the "hill of difficulty"
singing, and walk confidently into the very land of the shadow of
death. For God's burdens are easy to bear; because he walks with us,
and when the journey is too great, and the burden too heavy, and
our hearts begin to fail and faint, he is sure to whisper, "Cast thy
burden upon me, and I will sustain thee."

The burdens that are hard to bear are those we lay upon ourselves.
What a burden to themselves, and to every one around them, are the
lazy and the unemployed! If it is a man, prayers should be offered up
for his family and his dependents,--for who is so morbid and
melancholy, so pettish and fretful, so devoured by spleen and ennui,
as the man with nothing to do? There is a lion in every way to him. He
is out of God's order of creation; the busy world has no sympathy with
him; society has no use for him; no one is the better for his life,
and no one is sorry for his death. He is simply the f