May 23

"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father."—James 1:27.

RELIGION is Love. It is slow to wrath. It is full of tender mercy. It visits the fatherless and widows in their affliction. It overflows, like the full ear of wheat, like the perfect apple on the bough, with what is wholesome and sweet. My Lord, create and foster in me the "love that, prompting glad obedience, labours most of all."

Religion is Humility. It receives with meekness the engrafted word, even when the word corrects and chastens and abases. My Lord, teach me to be silent and still, that Thou Thyself mayest speak to me—to me, whose ear is open to hear, whose heart is quick to understand.

Religion is Diligence. It is not content with hearing. It does. It acts. It continues patiently fulfilling the perfect law of liberty. My Lord, deliver me from the indolence and pride and cowardice which keep me idle too often. I would hasten from duty to duty, from errand to errand, from one glad ministry to another.

Religion is Holiness. It holds itself unspotted from the world. There is a sweetly stern separateness about it. There is a perfume of the better country, as though one of the roses in God's upper garden were transplanted for a while to the lower. My Lord, may I be a citizen of heaven on the earthward side of it.

Give me this pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father. So I shall dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, here and hereafter, below and above. If I am marching to the sight of Christ's face, I carry with me, the whole way through, the riches of His salvation and the approval of His heart.