and girls all have to be taught to work? Do all
people who are busy accomplish something worthy of
their effort? What should we live for?

[Illustration]

BALANCES.

HOW GOD WEIGHS PEOPLE.

SUGGESTION:--Objects: A pair of ordinary balances.
A very good pair for illustration can easily be
made from a piece of wood, a few strings and a
couple of little paper boxes.

[Illustration: Balances.]

DEAR BOYS AND GIRLS: I suppose you have all stood on the scales and been
weighed. I have here a pair of balances. This was doubtless one of the
earliest kind of instruments with which people weighed different things,
and it is the kind of scales which are still used when the greatest
accuracy is desired. These are called a balance, because when I hold
them by this string you will see that this end of the arm and that end
of the arm are equal in length and equal in weight and they exactly
balance each other. Now when I place anything in the pan on this end of
the arm, and place a small weight in the pan on the opposite arm, and
then lift the balance up, you will see how I can readily tell how much
the piece of metal, or piece of wood, or whatever I have placed in the
balances, weighs. In the drug stores they use this kind of scales to
weigh medicines, and they can tell accurately the weight of a very small
quantity. In the laboratory, or the place where medicines are made, they
have this kind of scales that will weigh the smallest particle of dust;
even a small piece of a hair laid on the scales can be weighed
accurately.

In the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel we read about a king whose
name was Belshazzar, who lived in the great city of Babylon, surrounded
by a great wall three hundred feet high and eighty feet broad, and with
a hundred gates of brass, twenty-five gates on each side of the city,
and a street running from each of the gates upon the one side, straight
across the city to each of the corresponding gates upon the opposite
side, a distance of some twelve or fifteen miles; and then other streets
crossing these first twenty-five streets, running between the gates
which were upon the other two sides of the city. God had blessed this
king of Babylon and given him great wealth and great power; but he
became proud and defied God. One night he made a great feast and invited
a thousand of his lords and the generals of his army, and sent f