"No more do I!" responded Ian. "We may be sure God will either let you have them, or show you reason to content you for not having them. No love of any thing is to be put in the same thought-pocket with love for the poorest creature that has life. But I am sometimes not a little afraid lest your love for the soil get right in to your soul. We are here but pilgrims and strangers. God did not make the world to be dwelt in, but to be journeyed through. We must not love it as he did not mean we should. If we do, he may have great trouble and we much hurt ere we are set free from that love. Alister, would you willingly walk out of the house to follow him up and down for ever?" "I don't know about willingly," replied Alister, "but if I were sure it was he calling me, I am sure I would walk out and follow him." "What if your love of house and lands prevented you from being sure, when he called you, that it was he?" "That would be terrible! But he would not leave me so. He would not forsake me in my ignorance!" "No. Having to take you from everything, he would take everything from you!" Alister went into the house. He did not know how much of the worldly mingled with the true in him. He loved his people, and was unselfishly intent on helping them to the utmost; but the thought that he was their chief was no small satisfaction to him; and if the relation between them was a grand one, self had there the more soil wherein to spread its creeping choke-grass roots. In like manner, his love of nature nourished the parasite possession. He had but those bare hill-sides, and those few rich acres, yet when, from his eyry on the hill-top, he looked down among the valleys, his heart would murmur within him, "From my feet the brook flows gurgling to water my fields! The wild moors around me feed my sheep! Yon glen is full of my people!" Even with the pure smell of the earth, mingled the sense of its possession. When, stepping from his cave-house, he saw the sun rise on the outstretched grandeur of the mountain-world, and felt the earth a new creation as truly as when Adam first opened his eyes on its glory, his heart would give one little heave more at the thought that a portion of it was his own. But all is man's only because it is God's. The true possession of anything is to see and feel in it what God made it for; and the uplifting of the soul by that knowledge, is the joy of true having. The Lord had no land of his own. He did not care to have it, any more than the twelve legions of angels he would not pray for: his pupils must not care for things he did not care for. He had no place to lay his head in-had not even a grave of his own. For want of a boat he had once to walk the rough Galilean sea. True, he might have gone with the rest, but he had to stop behind to pray: he could not do without that. Once he sent a fish to fetch him money, but only to pay a tax. He had even to borrow the few loaves and little fishes from a boy, to feed his five thousand