golden candlestick to the Holy Sepulchre-a shrine of silver to our Lady of Engaddi-a pall, worth one hundred bezants to Saint Thomas of Orthez," cries the Queen in extremity.-" Up, up, madam," says Edith; "call on the saints an you list, but be your own best saint." In "Ivanhoe," again, when the Grand Master forbodes the contingent extinction of his order (the Templars), "Now may God avert such a calamity!" says the Preceptor. "Amen!" rejoins the Grand Master, with solemnity, "but we must deserve His aid."

It is all in keeping with the practical character of the man, the prayer which on one critical occasion Benvenuto Cellini records his offering: "Almighty God, favour my cause, for Thou knowest it is a just one, and that I am not on my part wanting in my utmost efforts to make it succeed." On another he tells us how he "told Lionardo, who was incessantly crying out, Jesus, Jesus!' that Jesus would assist him, if he strove to help himself." Elsewhere again Cellini emphatically asserts his systematic habit of "always exerting his utmost efforts to extricate" himself from difficulty, as well as of devoutly recommending himself to God, by whom alone those efforts could achieve success, and who so often had delivered him when the best of these had clearly and entirely failed.

Saintly as well as Saint Francis of Sales bids his brethren, "En toutes vos affaires, appuyez-vous totalement sur la providence de Dieu, par laquelle seule tous vos desseins doivent réussir; travaillez néanmoins de votre côté tout doucement pour co-opérer avec icelle." The counsel is at one, au fond, with that of the heathen stoic in the old play ::

"I am plain, fathers. Here you look about
One at another, doubting what to do,

With faces, as you trusted to the gods,

That still have saved you; and they can do it: but
They are not wishings, or base womanish prayers,
Can draw their aids; but vigilance, counsel, action;
Which they will be ashamed to forsake.
'Tis sloth they hate, and cowardice."

CO-OPERANT UNITS.

EPHESIANS iv. 16.

HE universal Church is designated by the apostle a

THE

body, which whole body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part. And every part in its measure, and according to its imparted power. Very little are some of the joints and fibres; but every little helps. Who shall despise the whole of small things? But for the accumulated atoms, the aggregated littles, where were the body?

"Let me not deem that I was made in vain,

Or that my Being was an accident,
Which Fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain
Hath its own mission, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent
'Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.
The very shadow of an insect's wing,

For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,
Proved that the sun was shining by its shade:
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,

Shadow of living lights, in vain be made ?”*

As the author of "Felix Holt" says, we see human heroism broken into units, and are apt to imagine, this unit did little— might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. "Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death—a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on

barrenness." Suppose but a solution of that continuity; the sequel is, darkness that may be felt.

There is a latter-day apologue of a gimlet that grew exceedingly discontented with its vocation, envying all the other tools in the carpenter's basket, and thinking scorn of its own mean duty of perpetually boring and picking holes everywhere. "The saw and the axe had grand work to do; and the plane got praise always; so did the chisel for its carving; and the happy hammer was always ringing merrily upon the clenching nail." But for it, a wretched, poking, paltry, gimlet, its work was hidden away, and very little seemed its recognised use. But the gimlet is assured, on the best authority, that nothing could compensate for its absence, and is therefore bidden be content, nay happy; for though its work seems mean and secret, it is indispensable. To its good offices, the workman is said to look chiefly for coherence without splitting; and to its quiet influences, the neatness, the solidity, the comfort of his structure may greatly be ascribed. The apologue has, of course, its practical application. "Are there not many pining gimlets in society, ambitious of the honour given to the greater-seeming tools of our Architect, but unconscious that in His hands they are quite as useful? The loving little child, the gentle woman, the patience of many a moral martyr, the diligence of many a duteous drudge, though their works may be unseen and their virtues operate in obscurity, yet are these main helpers to the very joints and bands of our body corporate, the quiet home influences whereby the great edifice, Society, is so nicely wainscoted and floored without splitboards."

To recognise one's being entrusted with but one talent, after all, and not with five or with ten, as one's vanity had previously taken for granted, has even been hailed as, in some sort, a soothing sensation. When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery, says Dr. Holmes, to think himself or herself possessed of talent, arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter

The

a mortal's mind: "All our failures, our short-comings, our
strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts, are lifted
from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian's pack, at
the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the
pleasant gifts of high intelligence,—with which one look may
overflow us in some wider sphere of being." That the one
talent be employed, is the one thing needful. So feels the girl
in one of Charlotte Brontè's tales, whose exclamation is,
"Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come
home some day, and will demand from all an account.
tea-pot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern
tureen, will yield up their barren deposit in many a house:
suffer your daughters, at least, to put their money to the
exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master's coming
to pay His own with usury." A man is accepted according to
that he hath, not condemned in respect of what he never had.
Whatsoever his hand findeth to do, that is what a man is to do
with his might, to do with a will,-be it to govern a nation,
or to dust a warehouse. To apply a passage in Ben Jonson's
"Catiline,"

“They are no less part of the commonwealth
That do obey, than those that do command."

John Newton said that if two angels came down from heaven to execute a Divine command, and one was appointed to conduct an empire, and the other to sweep a street in it, they would feel no inclination to change employments. So again, the same robust divine affirmed that a Christian should never plead spirituality for being a sloven; "if he be but a shoecleaner, he should be the best in the parish." As the old servant tells Ruth, in Mrs. Gaskell's story, "There's a right and a wrong way of setting about everything-and to my thinking, the right way is to take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed. Why, dear ah me! making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else what's to come of such as me in heaven, who 've had little enough time on earth for clapping ourselves down on our knees for set

prayers?" This quaint speaker had laid to heart the lesson once for all enforced upon her, to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her; her station was that of a servant, and, looked at aright, as honourable as a king's she was to help and serve others in one way, just as a king is in another. Her parting counsel to Ruth runs thus : "Just try for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and truly in God's sight, not just slurred over any how, and you'll go through them twice as cheerfully," besides doing them more efficiently. John Brown, of Haddington, being waited on by a lad of excitable temperament, who informed him of his desire to become a preacher, and whom the shrewd pastor saw to be as weak in intellect as he was strong in conceit, advised him to continue in his present vocation. The young man said, "But I wish to preach and glorify God." The old commentator replied, "My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms; stick to your trade, and glorify God by your life and conversation." As it was said of Bossuet, in the seventeeth century, that he could not walk, or sit down, or even pluck a currant, without your recognising in him the great bishop (so asserts a modern French divine, not of Bossuet's church), just so the workman and the domestic servant who are animated by their Master's spirit, distinguish themselves among their fellows by a certain air of nobility; under their blouse or their livery may be seen to shine the signal light of their aristocratie spirituelle, the image of the Most High Himself. However mean their employment, they go about it with neither disgust nor indifference; but with an intelligent interest, because, in the sight of God, and indeed in their own eyes, their occupation is on a level with that of king or emperor. What constitutes the difference between man and man, is not, urges M. Colani, the wielding a sceptre or plying a needle, but the being loyal to the trust, be it great or small, committed to us. This, he contends, is the only true point of view from which men and women should regard their occupations,-they should consider themselves as collaborateurs du Tout-Puissant. If their work seem the re