"We have sometimes known some men or women, helpless so that their lives seemed to be all dependent, who yet, through their sickness, had so mounted to a higher life and so identified themselves with Christ that those on whom they rested found the Christ in them and rested upon it. Their sick-rooms became churches. Their weak voices spoke gospels. The hands they seemed to clasp were really clasping theirs. They were depended on while they seemed to be most dependent. And when they died, when the faint flicker of their life went out, strong men whose light seemed radiant found themselves walking in the darkness; and stout hearts, on which theirs used to lean, trembled as if the staff and substance of their strength was gone." PHILLIPS BROOKS. "Pain is no evil unless it conquers us." GEORGE ELIOT. Invalids MARCH 29 "It may be that God used to give you plentiful chances to work for Him. Your days went singing by, each winged with some enthusiastic duty for the Master whom you loved.... You can be idle for Him, if so He wills, with the same joy with which you once laboured for Him. The sick-bed or the prison is as welcome as the harvest-field or the battle-field, when once your soul has come to value as the end of life the privilege of seeking and of finding Him." PHILLIPS BROOKS. "To be well enough to work is the wish of my natural heart; but if that may not be, I know that 'they also serve who only stand and wait.' God will not require healthy men's labour from you or me; and if we are poor in power and opportunity to serve Him, our widow's mite will weigh against the gold ingots of His chosen apostles." _Memoir of George Wilson._ "The widow's mite? Well, when they laughed at S. Theresa because she wanted to build a great orphanage and had only three ducats to begin with, she answered, 'With three ducats Theresa can do nothing, but with God and her three ducats there is nothing which Theresa cannot do.'" F. W. FARRAR. Lessons of Suffering MARCH 30 "To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. You have learnt to understand all, and to make yourself intelligible to all." "We have all met some great sufferers, whose cheerfulness and good-humour are not only a lesson to us who enjoy good health, but who seem to be, as it were, raised and consecrated by a life of suffering." Lord AVEBURY. "What man goes worthily through sorrow and does not come out hating shams and pretences, hungering for truth; and also full of sympathy for his fellow-man whose capacity for suffering has been revealed to him by his own?" PHILLIPS BROOKS. Hypochondriacs