Carry religion into common life, and your life will be rendered useful as well as noble. There are many men who listen incredulously to the high-toned exhortations of the pulpit; the religious life there depicted is much too seraphic, they think, for this plain and prosaic world of ours. Show these men that the picture is not a fancy one. Make it a reality. Bring religion down from the clouds. Apply to it the infallible test of experiment, and, by diffusing your daily actions with holy principles, prove that love to God, superiority to worldly pleasure, spirituality, holiness, heavenly-mindedness, are something more than the stock ideas of sermons. The world’s scenes of business may fade on our sight, the noise of its restless pursuits may fall no more upon our ear, when we pass to meet our God; but not one unselfish thought, not one kind and gentle word, not one act of self-sacrificing love done for Jesus’ sake, in the midst of our common work, but will have left an indelible impress on the soul, which will go out with it to its eternal destiny. So live, then, that this may be the result of your labors; so live that your work, whether in the Church or in the world, may become a discipline for that glorious state of being in which the Church and the world shall become one; where work shall be worship, and labor shall be rest; where the worker shall never quit the temple, nor the worshipper the place of work, because “there is no temple therein, but the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof.” [_June 24._] THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT—MANNERS. By ABEL STEVENS, LL.D. With most of us manners are a chief ministry of life. If love is the very element, the essence of holiness, then holiness should produce sweetness of both mind and manners. Amiability means, etymologically, loveliness, loveableness. But is it not too often the misfortune of piety, especially in its more earnest forms, to be accompanied by unamiable severity, not to say sourness—by introspective moodiness; unnecessary rigor in petty or indifferent things; uncharitable crimination of those whose opinions of spiritual experience do not conform to our own, habitual obtrusion of our own opinions—not only repelling individual brethren, but sometimes annoying and agitating whole churches? “Be courteous:” The sentence, though brief, is full of significance, and is divinely authoritative. It is a commandment.