t throwing themselves into one magnificent common
cause. Why, nothing could stand before the Christian Church if it were
like that. Can we not in this coming reign, and the century just
begun, try and plant in the heart of every Christian worker truth in
the inward parts?

How are we, then--that comes to be the last question--how are we to
attain this wonderful gift, the secret of a strong character?

And, first of all, let us be perfectly clear as to the first essential.
The first essential is _detachment of mind_. Oh! what cowards we are
with regard to the opinion of others! You will find time after time
men and women, who think themselves free, living under the most
degrading tyranny of fear as to what will be thought of them by others.
Not to care at all what anybody thinks is inhuman, but to be bound by a
kind of trembling terror as to what people will say or think, is a
degrading slavery. Bit by bit it creates in the character a habit of
insincerity; little by little the question is in the heart and in the
mind, "Will this be popular or not? Shall I be liked for this?" We
speak or do something according to the reflection it will make in the
thoughts of others. There may be some here who know that that is their
temptation, who know that they are not true, that they are never
themselves, they are always somebody else, or the reflection of the
mind of somebody else. Let the example of our truthful Queen speak
like a trumpet note the old words of the New Testament, "Stand upright
on thy feet," and be a man.

And, if the first secret is detachment of mind, putting aside
self-consciousness, which is very often other-people-consciousness, the
second secret is _an increasing consciousness of God_. Is it not an
extraordinary thing that when we are only here for a few fleeting
years, and everybody around us is hurrying to his grave as fast as he
can, and when the only person whose opinion matters the least is the
eternal God, Who goes on generation after generation, and before Whom
everyone must appear at the last--is it not an extraordinary thing how
little we think of Him at all? How often during the past week have you
thought of God? To actually acquire a continual sense of His presence,
to be conscious that His eyes, the eyes of Him Who is from everlasting
to everlasting, are always fixed upon us, to rise in the morning with
the feeling, "One more day's work for God," and to go to bed in the
evening with