It seems to me that we may all learn a good lesson from this short passage. We are so apt to lay our shortcomings to the account of circumstances, which is, in fact, laying them at the door of Providence. "If I were not so much engrossed in business," says John. "If I had not so many family cares," says Jane, "I might do some Church work." "There is no pleasure in going to church and Bible class here," says another. "If I only lived in the city! We cannot expect to do much in a place like this," I heard a Christian man say. "If we had a first-class preacher and a good quartette choir we might do something." As if the gift of the Holy Spirit depended on a fine preacher and a fine choir! But we do more than this: we lay upon circumstances the blame of our own heart sins. We should not be irritable and fretful, only that there is so much to annoy us. We should not make unkind remarks and tell scandalous stories about our neighbors, only that every one does so; and so on to the end of the chapter. No Christian will deny, if asked the question out and out, that his Father in Heaven has ordered, or at the least permitted, the circumstances of his life. Say that we are placed in a country parish, where there is little or no enthusiasm for any good cause, and where most of the parishioners think they have done their duty nobly when they have helped to keep their pastor on the outside verge of starvation, instead of the inside. Well, He places us there because He has work for us there—some work which no one could do so well as you or I. Let us try to find out what that work is, and to do it faithfully. We shall grow in grace ourselves, and no one can do that without benefiting others. Or He has put one of His chosen ones in a place where he has no Christian sympathy—perhaps among unbelievers and scoffers. Take courage. Bad as they may be, they are probably saints themselves, compared to the men and women with whom they of Cæsar's household were brought in daily contact. You may have good work to do among them. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. When the Rev. Mr. Lowder entered the district of St. Peter's, in the east of London, there were not a dozen Christian men in the parish. He was hooted and pelted in the street, and on one occasion a ring of his friends had to fight for his life against a howling mob of ruffians. Every other house was a house of ill-fame; when he died, after twenty-three years' service, there was not one such to be found in the parish; and by the streets where he had been stoned and all but murdered, he was carried to his burial through throngs of weeping men and women, hundreds of whom walked miles to see him laid in the grave.