The religious aspect of education appears in the relation of faith to a sufficient motive to seek the highest culture. Belief in God and immortality gives lofty and enduring motive; selfimprovement becomes a sacred duty in the light of our divine relations and destiny. That is not a true interpretation of Christianity which makes it obstructive of the largest self-culture. Jesus Christ is the powerful ally of every youth who aspires to rise toward the full measure of his intellectual possibility. The love of God, instead of being a deterrent, is a stimulant to culture. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind" is not less obligatory than "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul." An intelligent and loyal devotion to Christ is a constant source of impulse toward the only complete education, that education the result of which appears in a fully developed, spiritual manhood and womanhood. Under the strong and gentle Mastership of Christ you will find yourselves drawn into a fruitful cultivation and a tonic discipline of all your powers. His thoughts will enrich and broaden your minds; his love will enlarge and purify your hearts, making them the homes of all generous sympathies, all noble affections, and all sweet charities; and his authority will UorM train your wills in virtuous choices that will surely develop into righteous habits, and ripen at last into permanent characters in every lineament of which will shine "the beauty of holiness." SAVING TIME. TIME is the chrysalis of eternity. — RICHTER. - Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good act to all eternity. - LAVATER. Short as life is we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time. VICTOR HUGO. I wasted time, and now time doth waste me. SHAKES PEARE. Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. HORACE MANN. If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough. FRANKLIN. See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. — SAINT PAUL. IT T was an old custom to place in the hand of a corpse an hour-glass in which all the sands had run down. It were wiser to put an hour-glass in the hand of the living that there might be before the mind, in the sinking sand, a vivid symbol of time's unceasing lapse. Many are saving of money, saving of labor, saving of health, and prodigal of time. The little appreciation of time of which a large part of society is guilty has coined itself into the phrase "killing time." What a murder is that! It is strange that, when every moment of time gives space for some high thought, some noble deed, some gain in knowledge and goodness, time should be so lightly esteemed and even scorned. They who set no value on time, who talk of killing time because, forsooth, their own abuse of it brings to them weariness and disgust, are like the drowsing princess who saw not that her necklace of pearls lay broken on the boat's verge, and at every oscillation of the idly rocking boat a precious pearl slipped from the severed string into the deep. Why should we save time? Because time is opportunity for life, and time lost cannot be recovered, it is lost forever. Each moment comes to us rich in possibilities, bringing to us duty, privilege, the space and the call for achievement, and, even as we contemplate it, becomes "Portion and parcel of the dreadful past." All life is condensed into the moment that we call "now," and the wasting of a moment is, for that moment, the wasting of a life. is made of." "Dost thou love life?" said Poor Richard, "then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life "Look here," said De Quincy. Roman clepsydra one hundred let these run out as the sands in every drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of an hour. Now count the drops as they race along; and, when the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not, because already they have perished; and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see, therefore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on the wing." An officer apologized to General O. M. Mitchell, the astronomer, for a brief delay, saying he was only a few moments late. Only a few moments late!" exclaimed the general; "I have been in the habit of calculating the value of the thousandth part of a second." An apparently trifling waste of time has lost a great battle, and changed the political destiny of a continent. An hour or two saved by Napoleon might have made Waterloo as proud a remembrance for France as it is now for England. |