It is a tomb in which a living man shuts himself. It is the blight of every talent, the paralysis of every power.

(2) Idleness blights a man's happiness. There is joy in work well done. The humblest mechanic who accomplishes a given piece of work experiences a pleasure the idle man never knows. No bread eaten by man is so sweet as that earned by his own labor. No man can be happy who is living a useless life. Everybody despises him, and in his inmost heart he at length comes to despise himself. Self-respect wells up in the heart of a man whose powers are employed for useful ends.

(3) Idleness blights character. "Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do." It was when King David tarried in idle luxury in Jerusalem, instead of taking the field in person and leading his army to battle, that he fell into the double crime that is the only blot on his otherwise fair fame. A man is never so well fortified against evil as when he is busy. The bicycle is kept upright by its own velocity. When it stops it falls. Regular employment is a moral safeguard. "Doing nothing is an apprenticeship to doing wrong." When you find a young man doing nothing, the chances are ten to one that he is drifting to the bad. Satan finds his recruits largely among loafers. Idleness is the mother of crime. Some time ago a young man was sentenced to the state prison of Connecticut for forgery. As he was changing his own for the prison suit, he remarked to the officer, "I never did a day's work in my life." The officer sagely replied, "No wonder, then, you have brought up here." The devil tempts all other men, but an idle man tempts the devil. The idle brain is the devil's workshop.

"One

Dream not, then, young man, of a life of idleness. monster there is in the world," says Carlyle, "the idle man." Honorable toil is the road to health, wealth, and happiness. Idleness will prove a curse to you and an injury to those with whom you come in contact. It will blight your powers of mind and body and at last it will bring you down

"To the vile dust from whence you sprung,

Unwept, unhonored, and unsung."

What Spare Moments Will Accomplish.

M

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

IND rules this world. The day of government by mere brute strength and numbers has departed. Machine guns and needle guns conquer and keep in quiet not merely the savage but the civilized races of men. Mind is rapidly making "grim and horrid war" to be a civilizer and peacemaker by reducing war to mere butchery and so by making it too costly, making it unpopular. Mind is also making the grosser passions of men too dreadful to be tolerated. Even those seemingly omnipotent passions of gain and lust will soon be subdued, either by reason, or by dynamite. Some misguided souls are even now undertaking to do it by the last process.

But, is there not a better way? Mr. Andrew Carnegie, himself many times a millionaire, has well and truthfully said, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced." It will yet be changed to read, "The man who lives rich while any of his fellows shiver and starve, lives disgracefully." It may be too early to preach this, but it will yet be popular; for not only is mind abroad, but hearts are coming.

Mind and heart rule the next life and make it an endless joy to those fitted for it. They should rule this world, and may sometime. When they do, "swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks." When they do, life on earth will not be, as it is now, for the great majority of its inhabitants, a mere pitiful scramble for an existence in which the poor have no leisure and the rich have too much, but earth will have, as heaven has, its days of play and times of jubilee.

Men have to work there as here, but life was never intended to be an everlasting treadmill grinding out food merely to keep the body alive. God is good enough and nature bountiful enough to make this world a paradise. But things are yet much awry. I have my notion as to how, and why it is so, but this is not the place to utter it, and seeing we are yet obliged to be on the go most of the time to keep the wants of the body supplied, I am asked to tell how the mind can manage to get its share of good things. The reply is indicated in the title of this chapter. Spare moments" will do it. They have done it for others, and will do it for you.

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The bulk of mankind get their mental food-what little they have at second-hand shops and are yet in their minority, holding to what their fathers held, and doing what their fathers did. Should an original thinker arise among them they usually label him "heretic " or "fool" and then calmly wait for the next generation to pronounce him philosopher or saint, and deplore their fathers' folly. You should, by God's grace, rule your own kingdom of brain, and "call no man your master.” But you will never do it unless you cultivate that kingdom, and for this you must have time. The choicest ideas, like the choicest fruits, do not grow without culture. But give them culture, and, lo, how by God's grace they flourish and enrich the world! How prolific they sprang, from Moses "skilled in all the learning" of that one university country of his time, Egypt; and from that mighty and grand Paul, "brought up at the feet of Gamaliel," president of the famous school of 1200 students at Jerusalem, longing even in his old age and nigh the gates of paradise for "books and parchments"; and from Augustine blessed with all that the schools of his day could give him; and from that poor German miner's son fresh from the University of Wittenberg, whose brains flashed fire over the dark ages; and from John Milton, the best scholar of his time; and from John Wesley, the Oxford graduate; and from Jonathan Edwards, the Yale collegian, not to mention the hosts on hosts of their fellow men, eminent in religion, in science, in

art, in literature, who, whether they were blest with the schools or without them, fed the brain by knowledge culled in their moments of leisure, and scattered it abroad to elevate and ennoble mankind.

Get but one new thought or idea a day, and you will be rich in fifteen thousand of them in forty years, and be a learned man. Give but an hour a day to careful, thoughtful reading for forty years, and you will have read seven hundred and thirty volumes large duodecimo. How proficient in many a branch of learning you may become with but an hour a day! Robert Bloomfield, a poor boy deprived of schooling, shut up to caring for hogs and sheep, and then to the shoemaker's bench, became, by diligently improving the few leisure moments he could get · while at work, one of the most learned Biblical scholars of his or any other age, and ranked among the best educated men of his time in other branches as well. Elihu Burritt, a poor fatherless boy apprenticed to a blacksmith and toiling twelve hours a day at the forge, studied mathematics, Latin, and Greek at the anvil, and after the day's work was done studied while other boys played or slept, and so became in thirty years, the marvel of his time, and is known in many a country as "the learned blacksmith." Gideon Lee was so poor in his boyhood that he was compelled to go barefoot, even in winter, but, working hard and improving his leisure moments in storing his mind with useful knowledge, he became at length a rich merchant and mayor of New York city. Literally, thousands of men whose names blaze on the world's roll of honor have done the same, and have risen by saving the time which others flung away. If you will, you can do likewise and become rich in stores of wisdom.

False Standards.

HENRY H. BOWMAN, President Springfield National Bank, Springfield, Mass.

OME one has said, "Show me the companions, the habits of life, the present tendencies of a young man, and I will foretell his destiny." The task is not difficult, "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he." There is abundance of sound truth in the language of the old darky, who, to the objection of his grandson that hell could possess no reality because the supply of brimstone would be insufficient, replied, Why, bress you, honey, dey takes deir brimstone wid 'em."

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A noble or an ignoble character are alike results, and the forecast of the end of a present course in human life is not impossible, nor strange, nor difficult. "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" No, never! Yet many young men are careless in the discharge of the duties of their positions, loose in their choice of companions, unwise in their habits, and wonder why they do not get on, why promotion does not come to positions of greater trust, and they comment harshly upon their "hard luck." There is no "luck" about it; it is a result, the cause lies in themselves, and is entirely within their control.

Some years ago a boy entered a store in Chicago as the youngest clerk; he was told to be on hand at eight o'clock each morning, and immediately inquired if there would be objection to his coming at seven, that he might have more time to see that everything was in order. He was ambitious not to discover how little he could do and retain his place, but how much he could do, and he labored early and late to make himself necessary to his employer. He succeeded. Such service is