Gratitude consists in a watchful, minute attention to the particulars of our state, and to the multitude of God's gifts, taken one by one. It fills us with a consciousness that God loves and cares for us, even to the least event and smallest need of life. It is a blessed thought, that from our childhood God has been laying His fatherly hands upon us, and always in benediction; that even the strokes of His hands are blessings, and among the chiefest we have ever received. When this feeling is awakened, the heart beats with a pulse of thankfulness. Every gift has its return of praise. It awakens an unceasing daily converse with our Father,--He speaking to us by the descent of blessings, we to Him by the ascent of thanksgiving. And all our whole life is thereby drawn under the light of His countenance, and is filled with a gladness, serenity, and peace which only thankful hearts can know. H. E. MANNING. January 19 _Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord_.--PS. cv. 3. _The joy of the Lord is your strength_.--NEH. viii. 10. Be Thou my Sun, my selfishness destroy, Thy atmosphere of Love be all my joy; Thy Presence be my sunshine ever bright, My soul the little mote that lives but in Thy light. GERHARD TERSTEEGEN. I do not know when I have had happier times in my soul, than when I have been sitting at work, with nothing before me but a candle and a white cloth, and hearing no sound but that of my own breath, with God in my soul and heaven in my eye... I rejoice in being exactly what I am,--a creature capable of loving God, and who, as long as God lives, must be happy. I get up and look for a while out of the window, and gaze at the moon and stars, the work of an Almighty hand. I think of the grandeur of the universe, and then sit down, and think myself one of the happiest beings in it. A POOR METHODIST WOMAN, 18TH CENTURY. January 20 _The Lord taketh pleasure In His people: He will beautify the meek with salvation_.--PS. cxlix. 4. Long listening to Thy words, My voice shall catch Thy tone, And, locked in Thine, my hand shall grow All loving like Thy own. B. T. It is not in words explicable, with what divine lines and lights the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon the features; neither on them only, but on the whole body the moral and intellectual faculties have operation, for all the movements and gestures, however slight, are different in their modes according to the mind that governs them--and on the gentleness and decision of right feeling follows grace of actions, and, through continuance of this, grace of form. J. RUSKIN. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. R. W. EMERSON. January 21