At this season, when we are especially called to glorify God in His saints, you cannot afford to be niggardly. Such niggardliness drags you downward, and is never more out of place than when you are attempting to lift up your souls to dwell in the heavenly city where Christ sits enthroned at the right hand of God. Ever, indeed, you need to be reminded of your heavenly citizenship amidst the cares and turmoil of life. It is with you as with the law-giver of old when he descended from the mount. The radiance will vanish from your countenance only too soon as you mingle with the busy crowd below. And you too, like Moses, will need to reappear ever and again at the mountain of God, that, standing face to face with the Eternal Presence, you may gather once more in your city the rays of the invisible glory. AMBITION. "I can do all things through Christ that strengthened me" [+Panta ischuô en tô endunamounti me+, "I have strength for all things in Him that empowereth, enableth me"].--PHIL. iv. 13. Ambition, the love of power, the thirst after influence--its use and its abuse, its true and its false aims--this is no unfit subject for consideration from a University pulpit. Ambition in some form or other is an innate craving of man. All men desire power, they cannot help desiring it. The desire is as natural to them as the desire of health. Power and influence occupy the same place socially that strength and vigour of limb do physically. Other desires, though veiled under various disguises, resolve themselves ultimately into a love of power. Knowledge is power. The cultivated intellect has a command of the resources of the universe. The selfish exaggeration of this feeling is a testimony to the underlying fact. The self-satisfied soul congratulates herself that she is "Lord over nature, Lord of the visible earth, Lord of the senses five." She communes with herself-- "All these are mine, And let the world have peace or wars 'Tis one to me." Again, money is power. A man desires wealth, not for the sake of the stamped metal or the printed paper in themselves. These represent to him a command of resources. The miser, indeed, by base indulgence forgets the end in the means. In his own domain he resembles the spurious mathematician to whom the letters and symbols are all in all, who sees in them so many counters and nothing more, who is blinded to the eternal relations of space and number which they represent. But traced back to its origin, the miser's love of money is a love of power.