’Cover my defenceless head
      With the shadow of Thy wing,’

I said, ‘Boys, put down your rifles, we will go home.’  I couldn’t kill you after that.”

God was working in each of them, in His own way carrying out His will.  God keeps his people and guides them and without Him life is but a living death.

III.

The third element in life about which I wish to speak is love.

In this picture we notice the delicate sense of companionship, brought out by the young man and the young woman.  It matters not whether they are brother and sister, or lover and loved; there you have the idea of friendship, the final ingredient in our life, after the two I have named.  If the man or the woman had been standing in that field alone it would have been incomplete.

Love is the divine element in life, because “God is love.”  “He that loveth is born of God,” therefore, as some one has said, let us “keep our friendships in repair.”  Let us cultivate the spirit of friendship, and let the love of Christ develop it into a great love, not only for our friends, but for all humanity.  Wherever you go and whatever you do, your work will be a failure unless you have this element in your life.

These three things go far toward forming a well-rounded life.  Some of us may not have these ingredients in their right proportion, but if you are lacking in one or the other of them, then pray for it and work for it that your life may be rounded and complete as God intended it should be.

PAX VOBISCUM. (Copyright, James Pott & Co.  Used by permission.)

I once heard a sermon by a distinguished preacher upon “Rest.”  It was full of beautiful thoughts; but when I came to ask myself, “How does he say I can get Rest?” there was no answer.  The sermon was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experience that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice that I could grasp—­any advice, that is to say, which could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the world.

Yet this omission of what is, after all, the only important problem, was not the fault of the preacher.  The whole popular religion is in the twilight here.  And when pressed for really working specifics for the experiences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose itself in mist.

The want of connection between the great words of religion and every-day life has bewildered and discouraged all of us.  Christianity possesses the noblest words in the language; its literature overflows with terms expressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can fill the soul of man.  Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light—­these words occur with such persistency in hymns and prayers that an observer might think they formed the staple of Christian experience.  But on coming to close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely would he be disenchanted.  I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our religious life is