Even when you are most miserably defeated in striving to be good, most ashamed of failure, even when (to return to our starting-point) you declare that you cannot do the thing that you would, even then you do not entirely believe yourself; the conviction of lofty possibilities will not quite begone; righteousness, and peace, and joy, still haunt your imaginings and disturb your guilty pleasures; you feel, you know, that these things are your heritage, and without them you can never be content. What does this strange, illogical, incessant experience mean? There is a beautiful old legend of a Christian girl, betrayed to martyrdom by her pagan lover in the bitterness of his rejection, who promised as she went to die to send him, if it were allowed to her, some proof of her religion. On that same wintry night, as he sat and mourned, the legend says that a fair boy left at his door a basket filled with flowers of such bloom and fragrance as never grew in earthly gardens. Whereupon he arose and confessed Christ, and passed through the same dusky gates of martyrdom to rejoin her in the paradise of God. Like those flowers of unearthly growth, proclaiming the reality of the unseen, so do our unworldly longings, our immortal spiritual aspirings, our feeling after a Divine Deliverer, if haply we may find Him, prove that the kingdom of God is at hand. Every thought of God comes from God, and is already the operation of His Spirit. Every desire for Christ is Christ's forerunner in the soul, and bids us welcome Christ. "Repent ye, and believe the gospel." HOMES OF NOBLE POVERTY =By the Author of "England's Youth at Worship."= To be miserably poor throughout life is a burden sufficiently hard; to sink from riches to poverty is a tragedy. Yet it is a tragedy that we see constantly occurring around us. To struggle with despairing pride to preserve that outward show which is falsely termed respectability; to see fair-weather friends slink one by one away; to surrender the little luxuries, innocent enough in themselves, that have grown to become a part of life itself--that is what it means to slip down the hill of fortune. "Give me neither poverty nor riches," says the Book of Proverbs, the embodiment of wisdom for all time. [Illustration: (_Photo: J. G. Williams, East Molesey_.) NOBLE POVERTY AT HAMPTON COURT.] In poverty, as in all things else, there are degrees. What may be wealth to one may be destitution to another. It depends upon what the previous habits of life have been. Take, for instance, the gentlemen and ladies, many of them bearing the noblest English names, to whom the Queen grants apartments in the old Palace of Hampton Court. They are not without small incomes themselves, and the rates and taxes they have to pay amount to no inconsiderable sum. Yet to live rent free is a boon that enables them to live comfortably.