The controlling principle of His life was to please His Father. The pervading purpose and passion was to win men out and up. The characteristics of His life were purity, unselfishness, sympathy, and simplicity. We are to be as He. He was the Father to all the race of men. Each of us is to be Jesus to his circle. Please notice I'm not talking about lips just now but about lives. The life is the indorsement of the lips. It makes the words of the lips more than they sound or seem. Or, it makes them less, sometimes pitiably less, little more than a discount clerk ever busily at work. The words ever go to the level of the life, up or down. Water seeks its level persistently. So do one's words, and they find it more quickly than the water, for they go _through_ all obstructions. And the life is the leveler of the words, up or down. So far as this second life is concerned a man's lips might be sealed, and his tongue dumb, but his life in its purity and simplicity, its unselfishness and sympathetic warmness will ever be spelling out Jesus. And He will be spelled out so big and plain that the man hurriedly running, or lazily creeping, or half blind in a cloud of dust, will be stopping and reading. If there were but more re-incarnations of Jesus how folks would be coming a-running to Him. Do you remember that prayer in blank verse of the old Scottish preacher and poet and saint, Horatius Bonar? He said: "Oh, turn me, mould me, mellow me for use. Pervade my being with Thy vital force, That this else inexpressive life of mine May become eloquent and full of power, Impregnated with life and strength divine. Put the bright torch of heaven into my hand, That I may carry it aloft And win the eye of weary wanderers here below To guide their feet into the paths of peace. I cannot raise the dead, Nor from this soil pluck precious dust, Nor bid the sleeper wake, Nor still the storm, nor bend the lightning back, Nor muffle up the thunder, Nor bid the chains fall from off creation's long enfettered limbs. _But_ I can live a life that tells on other lives, And makes this world less full of anguish and of pain; A life that like the pebble dropped upon the sea Sends its wide circles to a hundred shores. May such a life be mine. Creator of true life, Thyself the life Thou givest, Give Thyself, that Thou mayst dwell in me, and I in Thee." An Active Life of Service.