Where the highest thoughts are in the air, where the holiest persons gather, where the loftiest influences of God's Holy Spirit breathe, there we do well to go. There we do well to stay. Any voice that calls us nearer God should be followed, any motion of our heart toward duty should be obeyed. God is sure to send us, one and all, special hours in which His wishes are clear to our understandings and His promises are reassuring to our wills. Those are the golden hours of existence. Even God can provide no better. If we use these best hours aright, our whole moral nature is changed, and the weakest of us becomes a mighty "prince of God." GIVING OUR BEST TO GOD. CHAPTER IX. GIVING OUR BEST TO GOD. God asks every man to give to Him his best. It is God's way, God's undeviating way with each individual to say to him, "Whatever in yourself or in your possessions is best, that I ask you to devote to Me." Students of God, in all ages, have recognized this fact. They have understood that a human life cannot wholly follow God unless all the holdings of that life are consecrated to God. They have also understood that a man's "all" includes his best, and that unless that best is God's, the man's real heart and the man's strongest purposes are not God's. Abraham realized these truths. Accordingly, when Abraham, pondering his personal relation to God, asked himself whether he was a perfectly devoted man, the thought of his son Isaac crept into his mind. Isaac was his only real son. He dearly loved him. He was the supreme treasure of his heart. Abraham's hopes centered in Isaac. His ambitions and his joys were bound up in that son and in that son's life. Was Abraham willing to give to God his best treasure, his Isaac? That was the question Abraham found himself called upon to face. In facing it he was affected by the theories of consecration that prevailed among the surrounding nations. Those theories asserted that consecration meant sacrifice--that to consecrate a lamb to a god meant to slay the lamb upon the altar of that god, and that to consecrate a child to Jehovah would mean to slay the child upon the altar of Jehovah. As he thought on these things and knew God wished him to give to Him his best, there came to him a conviction that spoke to his heart with all the authority of the voice of God. "Abraham, if you are ready to give Me your best, you will take Isaac, your son, your only son, whom you love, and in Moriah offer him there for a burnt-offering." That was the most searching command that could have entered his soul. It asked of him the sacrifice of the dearest object of his life.