"Remove from us the protection, the encompassing safeguards and shelters we enjoy; withdraw the influences for good that are daily and weekly dropped on us like gentle dew from heaven, and have dropped ever since we had any being; deprive us of the comforts and interests, the innocent substitutes for forbidden pleasures; expose us to the loneliness, the vacancy, the dreary monotony, the hopeless struggle, the despair in which the majority of the men and women who fall find themselves immersed; and bring before us, thus exposed and bereft, what temptation you will--uncleanness, intemperance, theft, lying, blasphemy--and not one in ten of ordinary Christian people, I believe, would stand before it." R. W. BARBOUR. "Looking within myself, I note how thin A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate, Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;-- In my own heart I find the worst man's mate, And see not dimly the smooth-hingëd gate That opes to those abysses Where ye grope darkly,--ye who never knew On your young hearts love's consecrating dew Or felt a mother's kisses, Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled; Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world, The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!" JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Conscience MAY 30 "Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety, Nor needs to question Rumour if we fall Below the perfect model of our thought." GEORGE ELIOT. "If a man has nothing to reproach himself with, he can bear anything." PHILLIPS BROOKS. "Character is the ground of trust and the guarantee for good living, and that character only is sound which rests upon a good conscience and a clean heart and a strong will." Dr. JOHN WATSON. Repentance MAY 31 "What is true contrition? Sorrow for sin in itself, not for sin's consequences." _The Guided Life_, Canon BODY. "Remorse and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal mortification of despair." Dean FARRAR. "Penitence is like the dawn.... It is the breaking of the light in the soul,--dark enough sometimes no doubt, but a darkness giving place steadily to the growing light." Bishop WALSHAM HOW. Heredity JUNE 1