Allan Gardiner, was dying of slow starvation on the desolate shores of Picton Island, he yet painted on the entrance of the cavern which was his only shelter, a hand pointing downwards to the words, "My soul, wait thou still upon God, for my hope is in Him." Near that mute pathetic symbol of unshaken trust, his skeleton was found. To die of hunger on an Antarctic shore, among savages not one of whom he had succeeded in converting-could anything look like a deadlier failure? And yet from that heroic death of faithful anguish has sprung the great South American mission. If Allan Gardiner's death was a failure, it was one of those failures which are the seed of the most infinite, of the most transcendent successes. In the aureole of such failures surely we

Can see the glory of a seeming shame,

We can feel the fulness of an empty name."

God's arm is not shortened; He has not laid aside His Almighty Power.

"Are there no deep thunders which we cannot hear?

Does the sun cease shining, when it shines not here?"

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE NEED OF HOPE AND OF SELF-RESPECT.

WE cannot rightly carry out any true or noble object in life in a spirit of despondency. However much we may be wearied in the greatness of the way, let us not say, "There is no hope." Let me, then, urge on all my readers this lesson -that there is hope.

In spite of all, in spite of every trial which God's disguised mercy sends you, in spite of every humiliation which man's undisguised malice may inflict on you-respect yourselves; value at its true estimate the soul which God has given to you; believe in the splendour of its possibilities, and the glory of its immortality; read the heraldry which, emblazoned in no doubtful hieroglyphics, reveals that it is made in the image of God, after His likeness. Undepressed by life's necessary, inevitable sorrows, undismayed by men who would drag and would

keep you down; not fatally disheartened even by your own sins, for by God's grace even those sins are not irreparable-facing the uncertain future, letting the dead past bury its dead-Act, act in the living present-unshaken, unseduced, unterrified—still cheerful and serene, still rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, instant in prayer; still keeping your faith in God and your love to your fellow-men.

Man, among all his other weaknesses, is indeed so prone to vanity, conceit, and pride, that in teaching this lesson of self-respect, in pressing the truth that " we are greater than we know," some might fear lest we were but putting one more stumbling-block in the path of that humility which is the rarest as it is the sweetest of Christian virtues. But the self-respect which God would have us feel is the parent of humility and the annihilation of pride. Pride, conceit, vanity, are founded solely on the distinctions which separate man from man-distinctions to the last degree transient and phantasmal. A man will be vain of things inconceivably trivial-of

his dress; of his personal appearance; of a handful of silver; of a ribbon in his coat. There are a thousand things, infinitesimally little, which will suffice to make him look down upon his betters from the whole height of his inferiority. But the self-respect which God would teach us is founded on just those things which all enjoy, which none can monopolise, wherein no man differs from another. It is founded on the possession of that immortal soul, which God has given alike to the prince and to the beggar; on that eternal jewel, which it is in the power of the meanest of us to make so lustrous, that, in the day when God makes up his jewels, it may be counted among the choicest treasures of Eternity. Our great poet complains that

"Not a man for being simply man

Hath any honour, but known for those honours
That are without him; as place, riches, favour,
Prizes of accident, as oft as merit ; "

but that for which we should each value ourselves and one another is not in the least for

these outward accidents, but because God has made us after His likeness; has breathed into our nostrils the breath of life; has made us a little lower than the angels; because Christ has died for us, and redeemed us, and is gone to prepare a place for us; and because He thought the soul of each one of us worth such an infinitude of ransom, that for its sake He took our nature upon Him and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. There is no room for pride here; it expires in awe and gratitude. But there is room to believe in our lives; to honour and respect ourselves; not to be wearied, and not to say there is no hope. There is room to be confident that we were not made in vain; that a man is more precious than fine gold, yea, a man that the golden wedge of Ophir. "He," says Milton, "who holds himself in reverence and due esteem, both for the dignity of God's image upon him, and for the price of his redemption, which he thinks is to be visibly marked upon his forehead, accounts himself a fit person to do the noblest and godliest deeds,