wisdom; teaching and admonishing _one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing_ with grace _in your hearts unto God_" (Col. iii. 16). Have we then, unhappily, through disobedience or neglect, lost the blessing which once we possessed? Is there one saying, "Oh that I were as in the months of old!"? (Job xxix. 2.) It may be "all joy" with you again, for if you have lost the blessing, just go back and search for it, and you will find it where you lost it! Just there and nowhere else. Have you found the spot where your obedience failed? Yield and obey just there, pick up your obedience where you dropped it, and there you may obtain the blessing, again as you obtained it at the first; but _just there and nowhere else_. An illustration of this is found in 2 Kings vi. The Divinity Students of those days were going down to build a new Divinity Hall on the banks of the Jordan, and they asked Elisha, the man of God, to go with them. The story tells us that as one of the students "was felling a beam, the axe-head fell into the water; and he cried and said, Alas, my master! for it was borrowed. And the man of God said, Where fell it? And he shewed him the place. And he cut down a stick, and cast it in thither; and the iron did swim. And he said, Take it up to thee. So he put out his hand and took it," and having re-fixed the axe-head on the handle, he went on again with his felling (verses 5-7). Where was it that the student got his lost axe-head? Where he lost it! in the very spot where it fell into the Jordan's waters--it was just _there_ that he found it. So if you lose the blessing, the only spot on earth where you need look for it, if you wish to take it up to thee again, is _the very spot where you lost it_. Let us all learn by root of heart what the student did _not_ do. After the axe-head flew from the handle, he did not continue at work chopping with an axe-handle. No; but as soon as he lost his axe-head, he _stopped till he got it on again_. Oh that many a Christian worker would read, mark, learn; and inwardly digest! Then some Sabbaths there might be many a pulpit without a preacher, and many a Sabbath School class without a teacher, and many a sphere of Christian labor without its worker. Why? where are they? Away looking for their axe-heads! Away to the banks of that river of disobedience, in whose sluggish waters they lost them! Alas! that there should be so many to-day with an axe-handle, trying in this way to fell beams for the house of our God! working with the blessing lost! Hard labor this, and very little to show for it--except earnestness! "And isn't it a fine thing to be in earnest?" Yes, but it is a finer to have a little of that uncommon thing--homely common sense, at the back of the earnestness, and the man who is hewing with an axe-handle doesn't impress one as being overburdened that way! If we have enjoyed and have lost the Fullness of the Spirit, let us confess, betake us to