Life has a tendency to become far too "strenuous" with the best one can do, even; and the need is not for greater pressure of intensity, but for greater receptivity of intellectual and spiritual refreshment; for a calmer trust and a loftier faith. The joy of faith in its inspiration and emotion is wonderfully renewed from the Divine Word. "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." The gospels are full of these positive and radiant assurances that invest faith with the most absolute joy of confidence and positiveness of trust. These assurances meet the eye and enter the heart with the certainty of a personal message, directly given from God. And it is in this realm of the higher thought, of that culture of the soul which is the true object and aim of the temporary life on earth, that the relief from the too strenuous pressure of affairs must be found. The human soul is so constituted that it cannot live unless it breathes its native air of inspiration and joy and divineness. It is stifled in the "strenuous" lower life, its energies are paralyzed unless it seek renewal at the divine springs. It is this strenuousness of latter-day life, unrelieved by love and by prayer; unrelieved by the spiritual luxury of loving service and outgoing thought; this strenuous attitude, intent on getting and greed and gain and personal advantage, that, at last, ends in the discords and the crimes, the despair and the suicides, whose records fill the daily press. The cure for all these ills is to be found only in the higher life of conduct and of beauty. "Thou shalt show me the way of life: Thou shalt make me full of joy with Thy countenance." Here, and here alone, is the cure, the relief, the leading into peace and serenity and exaltation. It is not that the "fierce energy" of life is in excess, but that its application is in wrong and unmeaning directions. Let the soul find its true refreshment and infinitely sustaining tide of energy in God, and immediately "old things have passed away," and "all have become new," and life is full of exhilaration and joy. "Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught." Every day is a new and definite re-entrance upon life. Nor is it worth while to linger too much on the mistakes, the errors of yesterday. True, the consequences of errors and mistakes linger in life until they are worked out; but the working out is, after all, only a question of time and of unfaltering persistence in the upward way, and thus a new foundation of life is laid: "old things have passed away and all things have become new." It is in the serene and joyous exaltation of life alone that one truly lives; in that sweetness of mutual trust and generous aims and over-flowing love that radiates its joy and beauty to all with whom it comes in contact, and which is