on the grass and eat them while their neighbors went home hungry, but to give them out to others. Our ability for service, our spiritual and temporal possessions, are as evidently given for purposes of ministry as were ever the possessions of the apostles. God intends us to use them. Their best significance lies in that intention. True, they are but meagre. We hesitate to go with them to our brethren, because we see the enormous difference between their needs and our own scant supply. We can say so little, and that but stammeringly; we can do so little; we can give so little. But that we must simply leave to God as the apostles did. He knows how to feed a multitude with a loaf or two of bread and a few small fishes; and he will take that which we have, scanty as it seems, and work wonders with it. There is no end to the transformation that would be effected in this hungry world if all the people who can do only a little would simply do that little.

Much or little, whatever we have belongs to God for the betterment of our brethren, and we are personally responsible for it. What are you doing with it? he asks with the time and strength that I

have given you,

with your means, with your privileges, with your opportunities for doing good? And we will do well to remember that that searching question was put not to the rich only, not only to the man who had five talents, but to the man who had but two, to the man who had but one.

The doors of the parish house stand open every day. Within are the few workers; without are the many who might work, but who, for one insufficient reason or another, do not come to help. These are the doors of opportunity, and the doors of opportunity are the gates of judgment.

To every one of us, whether we are busy in the Master's work or not, comes the personal call of Jesus Christ. If we are standing idle, he summons us into his service; if we are already occupied with tasks, active and interested, he quickens and inspires us by his own example.

God comes among us to teach us how to live. And the essential characteristic of that life is unselfishness. Jesus Christ comes not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Yes, to give even his life to save our lives. What a distance between him and even the best of

us! He goes about doing good; he has compassion upon the sick, the ignorant, the poor, even the sinful, and consults not his own comfort in serving them. Hostility, misunderstanding, ingratitude, he faces every day. The work is not a pleasant work, and the rewards are small enough, weighed in our common scales; but his deep and blessed love urges, inspires, and strengthens him. Thus he goes on even to the cross.

Here is the ideal life- the life of unceasing and unselfish fraternal service. No other life will find acceptance in the sight of God. He who lived it for our sake speaks in the opportunities of parish work as surely as he ever spoke to any passer-by in the streets of the Syrian cities. When the notice of the missionary society is given out on Sunday, Jesus Christ calls the women of the parish as truly as he ever called the names of Mary or of Martha; and they who answer minister to him as really as did ever any holy woman of old time in the town of Galilee.

ELEVEN LAYMEN.

"Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alpheus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas the brother of James."- - ACTS i. 13.

THESE men looked one day out of the windows of an upper room, and behold, in the street below there passed a funeral procession, the funeral procession of religion. Faith was dead. And Roman, Greek, and Jew walked together in the place of the mourners.

For the Romans and the Greeks the ancient creeds had long since lost their charm. The Gentiles believed nothing but the absurd, the grotesque, and the incredible. Worship had turned to witchcraft. The old divinities had at least been stately and dignified and beautiful. They had symbolized great truths. They had met in some measure that deep longing in the heart of man to draw near to God, and to have God draw near to him, which is satisfied for us in Jesus Christ. But now they were all dead. Great Pan was dead; and all the household of

the Pantheon lay cold beside him. A plague of doubt had slain the gods.

There was some faith, indeed, among the Jews; but even here the air was pestilential. Of the two classes of men who led the religious thought of Judea, one of them - the Sadducees

had lost faith in the supernatural; while the Pharisees, their neighbors and opponents, were given over almost altogether to the study of dress and posture; of mint, anise, and cummin; of the petty, the inconsequential, and the impertinent. When Jesus came, looking for religion, he was rarely able to find any except among the irreligious. He had some hope of publicans and sinners; but there seemed to be nothing whatever in common between the Son of God and the representatives of devotion and of orthodoxy in the day and land in which he came. He said distinctly that they were the children of the devil.

The disciples looked down from the windows of the upper room, and the streets were full of mourners. Some of them were sad enough; others were foolish and indifferent and frivolous like the people in the carriages at any funeral. But on they went with empty hearts. For faith was dead.