of all our life on earth, were the consciousness ever glowing in our hearts that we too came from God and are going back to God! XVI. _A HYMN OF HEART'S EASE._ SUNDAY READINGS FOR THE MONTH. "Lord, my heart is not haughty, Nor mine eyes lofty: Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, Or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved And quieted myself; As a child that is weaned of its mother, My soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the Lord From henceforth and for ever."—Ps. cxxxi. I. Read Job xxvi., and 1 Cor. xiii. THE SOURCE OF UNREST. "Things too high for me." We are apt to think and speak as if difficulty of faith were an experience peculiar to our age. It is indeed true that at particular periods speculative uncertainty has been more widely diffused than at others, and our own age may be one of them. But the real causes of perplexity in things religious are permanent and unchanging, having their roots deep-seated in the essential nature of man's relation to the world and to God. There has never been a time when men have not had to fight hard battles for their faith against the dark mysteries and terrors of existence, that pressed in upon their souls and threatened to enslave them. What is this brief Psalm, echoing like a sea-shell in its tiny circle the heart-beat of a vanished world, but the pathetic record of a soul's dread struggle with doubt and darkness, telling in its simple rhythm and quiet cadences the story how through the breakers of unbelief it fought its way to the firm shores of faith, and peace, and hope? It reads like a tale of yesterday. It is just what we are seeking, suffering, achieving. Yet more than two thousand years have come and gone since the brain that thought and the hand that wrote have mouldered into dust.