John Newton said that if two angels came down from heaven to execute a Divine command, and one was appointed to conduct an empire, and the other to sweep a street in it, they would feel no inclination to change employments. So again, the same robust divine affirmed that a Christian should never plead spirituality for being a sloven; “if he be but a shoe-cleaner, he should be the best in the parish.” As the old servant tells Ruth, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, “There’s a right and a wrong way of setting about everything—and to my thinking, the right way is to take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed. Why, dear ah me! making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else what’s to come of such as me in heaven, who’ve had little enough time on earth for clapping ourselves down on our knees for set prayers?” This quaint speaker had laid to heart the lesson once for all enforced upon her, to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her; her station was that of a servant, and, looked at aright, as honourable as a king’s: she was to help and serve others in one way, just as a king is in another. Her parting counsel to Ruth runs thus: “Just try for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and truly in God’s sight, not just slurred over any how, and you’ll go through them twice as cheerfully,” besides doing them more efficiently. John Brown, of Haddington, being waited on by a lad of excitable temperament, who informed him of his desire to become a preacher, and whom the shrewd pastor saw to be as weak in intellect as he was strong in conceit, advised him to continue in his present vocation. The young man said, “But I wish to preach and glorify God.” The old commentator replied, “My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms; stick to your trade, and glorify God by your life and conversation.” As it was said of Bossuet, in the seventeenth century, that he could not walk, or sit down, or even pluck a currant, without your recognising in him the great bishop (so asserts a modern French divine, not of Bossuet’s church), just so the workman and the domestic servant who are animated by their Master’s spirit, distinguish themselves among their fellows by a certain air of nobility; under their blouse or their livery may be seen to shine the signal light of their _aristocratie spirituelle_, the image of the Most High Himself. However mean their employment, they go about it with neither disgust nor indifference; but with an intelligent interest, because, in the sight of God, and indeed in their own eyes, their occupation is on a level with that of king or emperor. What constitutes the difference between man and man, is not, urges M. Colani, the wielding a sceptre or plying a needle, but the being loyal to the trust, be it great or small, committed to us. This, he contends, is the only true point of view from which men and women should regard