_Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it you. John xvi. 23._ Prayer must be based upon promise, but, thank God, His promises are always broader than our prayers! No fear of building inverted pyramids here, for Jesus Christ is the foundation.--_Frances Ridley Havergal._ =October 29th.= _He riseth from supper, and laid aside His garments; and took a towel, and girded Himself. After that He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded. John xiii. 4, 5._ Acts are common and mean because they are ordinarily expressive of the common and mean thoughts of men. Let us not accuse the acts that make up our daily life of meanness, but our ignoble souls that reveal themselves so unworthily through those acts. The same act may successively mount up through every intermediate stage from the depth of unworthiness to a transcendent height of excellence, according to the soul that is manifested by it. One of the glorious ends of our Lord's incarnation was that He might propitiate us with the details of life, so that we should not disdain these as insignificant, but rather disdain ourselves for our inability to make these details interpreters of a noble nature. Oh, let us then look with affectionateness and gratitude upon the daily details of life, seeing the sanctifying imprint of the hand of Jesus upon them all!--_George Bowen._ =October 30th.= _He placed . . . cherubims, and a flaming sword . . . to keep the way of the tree of life. Gen. iii. 24._ _Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life. Rev. xxii. 14._ How remarkable and how beautiful it is that the last page of the Revelation should come bending round to touch the first page of Genesis. The history of man began with angels with frowning faces and flaming swords barring the way to the Tree of Life. It ends with the guard of cherubim withdrawn; or rather, perhaps, sheathing their swords and becoming guides to the no longer forbidden fruit, instead of being its guards. That is the Bible's grand symbolical way of saying that all between--the sin, the misery, the death--is a parenthesis. God's purpose is not going to be thwarted. The end of His majestic march through history is to be men's access to the Tree of Life, from which, for the dreary ages--that are but as a moment in the great eternities--they were barred out by their sin,--_Alex. McLaren._ =October 31st.= _That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him: the eyes of your understanding being enlightened. Eph. i. 17, 18._