Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating; cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other worlds. THE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand. We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has been waiting close by our door all the time. He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart, he falls by the way. The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even now attainable. Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have. He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this day, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees all the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most High only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future. No man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of his next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting food. The soul of man never can find its fullness through either history or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this living, pulsating, matter-of-fact present. This world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are content with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and fail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day. The better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he can and securing all the good he can for his own day.