June 26

What doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul. —DEUT. x, 12.

What asks our Father of His children save

Justice and mercy and humility,

A reasonable service of good deeds,

Pure living, tenderness to human needs,

Reverence and trust and prayer for light to see

The Master's footprints in our daily ways?

No knotted scourge, nor sacrificial knife,

But the calm beauty of an ordered life

Whose every breathing is unworded praise.

J. G. WHITTIER.

To wish to serve Him in one place rather than in another, by such and such a way, and not by the opposite one, is to wish to serve Him in our own way and not in His. But to be equally ready for all things, to accept everything and reject nothing, to leave one's self like a toy in the hands of Providence—this is serving Him by renouncing self, this is treating Him truly as God, and ourselves as creatures made only for Him.

FÉNELON.

The will is the seat of responsibility. At the side of the will, which is free, God hath placed in the soul a law which is fixed. The morally good consists in the conformity of the free will to the fixed law. Sin, on the other hand, consists essentially in the will refusing to submit itself to the moral law of God.

JAMES McCOSH.