sure it is summer; a dove cooing, very low; and absolutely nothing else to be heard, I find, after listening with great care. And I feel entirely at home, because the room—except in the one point of being extremely dirty—is just the kind of thing I used to see in my aunt’s bakehouse; and the country and the sweet valley outside still rest in peace, such as used to be on the Surrey hills in the olden days. And now I am really going to begin my steady explanation of what the St. George’s Company have to do. 1. You are to do good work, whether you live or die. ‘What is good work?’ you ask. Well you may! For your wise pastors and teachers, though they have been very careful to assure you that good works are the fruits of faith, and follow after justification, have been so certain of that fact that they never have been the least solicitous to explain to you, and still less to discover for themselves, what good works were; content if they perceived a general impression on the minds of their congregations that good works meant going to church and admiring the sermon on Sundays, and making as much money as possible in the rest of the week. It is true, one used to hear almsgiving and prayer sometimes recommended by old-fashioned country ministers. But “the poor are now to be raised without gifts,” says my very hard-and-well-working friend Miss Octavia Hill; and prayer is entirely inconsistent with the laws of hydro (and other) statics, says the Duke of Argyll. It may be so, for aught I care, just now. Largesse and supplication may or may not be still necessary in the world’s economy. They are not, and never were, part of the world’s work. For no man can give till he has been paid his own wages; and still less can he ask his Father for the said wages till he has done his day’s duty for them. Neither almsgiving nor praying, therefore, nor psalm-singing, nor even—as poor Livingstone thought, to his own death, and our bitter loss—discovering the mountains of the Moon, have anything to do with “good work,” or God’s work. But it is not so very difficult to discover what that work is. You keep the Sabbath, in imitation of God’s rest. Do, by all manner of means, if you like; and keep also the rest of the week in imitation of God’s work.