With regard to those interruptions from idle people of which I have spoken, we may be able to turn even them to account. We may try to give the conversation a serious and profitable turn. We may have a chance of defending the absent or the calumniated, or of recommending some good work. At worst we can let patience have her perfect work, and thus grow more like that Master whom it is at once our most important work and our dearest wish to imitate. Ex. xvii. St. John vi. 1-21. _FOURTH MONDAY IN LENT._ _REFRESHMENT SUNDAY—Continued._ ALL day long our Lord was engaged in teaching the people, and in healing their sick. The fact that he did so teach this great multitude of common people, and that they heard Him gladly, as we know they did (St. Mark xii. 37), is surely a sufficient answer to those who talk about the danger of giving the Scriptures to the unlearned. Meantime the disciples no doubt were reposing as they shared in their Lord's instructions, and witnessed His miracles. But as the afternoon of that long spring day drew on to its close they began to be uneasy. They looked abroad over the vast multitude thronging the plain, and wondered how they were to be fed and lodged, "for divers of them came from afar," and there were women and children among them, some of whom, no doubt, had just been cured of severe illness. We can see them consulting together with anxious faces, and many a troubled glance at the Master, and at last they venture to remind Him of the lateness of the hour, and the loneliness of the place where they were. "This is a desert place and the time is far spent; send them away, that they may buy food." (St. Mark vi. 36.) But the Lord had his own purposes to fulfill, and he answered them tranquilly, "They need not depart; give ye them to eat;" and then, as if their astonishment were not enough at such a proposition under such circumstances, He turns to Philip with the question, "Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?" Philip must have been indeed amazed at the question. Buy bread for that great crowd of people! True, there was a market not so very far away, in the little city of Bethsaida Julius, but it might be doubtful whether so small a place could furnish the requisite quantity of bread, even if they had the means to pay for it. "Two hundred pennyworth is not sufficient for them, that every one of them might take a little;" and one of the number asks, "Shall we go and buy bread?"