upon systems, doubtless, stretch outward through boundless space! Eternity and infinitude give time and room enough for the Great Maker to work in. And what limits can we assign to His work?

And all those worlds-have they their dwellers, too? Doubtless, yes. Do you suppose our little globe, so filled with every form of life, even down to organizations so minute that it takes the strongest microscope to reveal them-do you suppose our little globe is the only abode of organic and of rational life? I do not believe it.

Thus looking and thus thinking, how overwhelming to the imagination becomes the conception of God's all-ordering Providence, embracing all those countless worlds, and all the dwellers in them!

And even when from our little globe we look up to the starry sky, and think only of God's Providence over man, how the words of the poet David spring to our minds, and more impressively to us than they could to him: "When I consider the heavens the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast made, Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him."

Yet Jesus Christ bids us believe in God's fatherly Providence over man. God is love. His Providence over man is a Providence of Love. Love is

the strongest power in the universe, and Jesus Christ Himself, in His own person, is God's heart of Human Love to man. He it is that bids us have faith in God's infinite, fatherly tenderness. He it is that bids us believe that the Father is ever leading us by His own hand through the dark days and bright days, the sorrows and the joys of our earthly pilgrimage, making all things work together for our good.

Let us, then, thankfully believe, firmly trust in, and entirely submit ourselves to the all-ordering Providence of the Living God, the Loving Father of us all.

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF PRAYER.

"AND it came to pass as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray as John also taught his disciples."-LUKE 11: 1.

THERE are a great many things to which men object, as parts of Christianity, which are not peculiarly parts of it at all. It was not necessary that Christianity should teach men to pray. Prayer is a natural instinct. Men have always prayed, and I suppose always will. The question is: How and to whom shall they pray ?

In any danger or distress of body or soul, men have cried to some invisible power stronger than themselves, stronger than any thing they knew in the world, for deliverance. In famine, in plague, on the approach of enemies whom they were powerless to repel, nations have cried to the invisible powers for safety. And men, as individuals, when pressed by sudden calamity, when sudden death has stared them in the face, upon the midnight seas in wreck and storm, underneath any