Let such take heart, and toil on in faith at the duty which lies nearest to them. Five hundred years have passed since Tauler and his fellows did their simple work, and looked for no fruit from it, but the saving of one here and there from the nether pit. That was enough for which to labor; but without knowing it, they did more than that. Their work lives, and will live forever, though in forms from which they would have perhaps shrunk had they foreseen them. Let all such therefore take heart. They may know their own weakness; but they know not the power of God in them. They may think sadly that they are only palliating the outward symptoms of social and moral disease; but God may be striking, by some unconscious chance blow of theirs, at a sort of evil which they never suspected. They may mourn over the failure of some seemingly useful plan of their own; but God may be, by their influence, sowing the seed of some plan of his own, of which they little dream. For every good deed comes from God. His is the idea, his the inspiration, and his its fulfillment in time; and therefore no good deed but lives and grows with the everlasting life of God himself. And as the acorn, because God has given it “a forming form,” and life after its kind, bears within it not only the builder oak, but shade for many a herd; food for countless animals, and last, the gallant ship itself, and the materials of every use to which nature or art can put it and its descendants after it throughout all time; so does every good deed contain within itself endless and unexpected possibilities of other good, which may and will grow and multiply forever, in the genial light of him whose eternal mind conceived it, and whose eternal spirit will forever quicken it, with that life of which he is the giver and the Lord.—_From Rev. Charles Kingsley, in “Preface to Tauler’s Sermons.”_ [_July 20._] It astonishes all thought to observe the minuteness of God’s government, and of the natural and common processes which he carries on from day to day. His dominions are spread out, system above system, filling all height and latitude, but he is never lost in the magnificent. He descends to an infinite detail, and builds a little universe in the smallest things. He carries on a process of growth in every tree and flower and living thing; accomplishes in each an internal organization, and works the functions of an internal laboratory, too delicate all for eye or instrument to trace. He articulates the members and impels the instincts of every living mote that shines in the sunbeam. As when we ascend toward the distant and the vast, so when we descend toward the minute, we see his attention acuminated and his skill concentrated on his object; and the last discernible particle dies out of our sight with the same divine glory on it, as on the last orb that glimmers in the skirt of the universe. * * * * *