Live in the present that you may be ready for the future. _MS._ Duty and Sentiment. January 5. God demands not _sentiment_ but _justice_. The Bible knows nothing of "the religious sentiments and emotions" whereof we hear so much talk nowadays. It speaks of _Duty_. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we _ought_ to love one another." _National Sermons_. 1851. The Everlasting Harmony. January 6. If thou art living a righteous and useful life, doing thy duty orderly and cheerfully where God has put thee, then thou in thy humble place art humbly copying the everlasting harmony and melody which is in heaven; the everlasting harmony and melody by which God made the world and all that therein is--and behold it was very good--in the day when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy over the new- created earth, which God had made to be a pattern of His own perfection. _Good News of God Sermons_. 1859. The Keys of Death and Hell. January 7. Fear not. Christ has the keys of death and hell. He has been through them and is alive for evermore. Christ is the _first_, and was loving and just and glorious and almighty before there was any death or hell. And Christ is the _last_, and will be loving and just and glorious and almighty as ever, in that great day when all enemies shall be under His feet, and death shall be destroyed, and death and hell shall be cast into the lake of fire. _MS. Sermon_. 1857. A Living God. January 8. Here and there, among rich and poor, there are those whose heart and flesh, whose conscience and whose intellect, cry out for the _Living_ God, and will know no peace till they have found Him. For till then they can find no explanation of the three great human questions--Where am I? Whither am I going? What must I do? _Sermons on the Pentateuch_. 1862. The Fairy Gardens. January 9. Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of Nature's ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the "Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day." _Glaucus_. 1855. Love. January 10.