cian says to the patient first, "Let me see your tongue." What have his words contributed to the debit or credit of a man with his fellows? It has been estimated that one says in a week what, if printed, would be an octavo volume of three hundred and twenty pages. In thirty years this would amount to an extensive library of one thousand five hundred and sixty volumes. How little of it is available and uplifting material, and how much is silly and corrupting! The great evil in our common conversation is that so large an element of it is idle, extravagant, injurious. How much time is consumed in gossip more or less slanderous! How much vulgarity and worse than vulgarity is vomited forth from some men's mouths! On which side of the account does all this go? "By thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words shalt thou be condemned."

Even more comprehensive and vital is your obligation to society in the matter of influence. It appears not as promissory notes written on paper, but in the human hearts impressed for good or ill by your example. The marks of influence are ineffaceable, and yet its meaning and effect are easily overlooked. Look around you on your associates and ask yourself, "How am I paying the debt I owe them? Does my example point them upward? Do my words call their better natures into action? What kind of a mark does my life leave upon men?" Influence is as subtle as the atmosphere, but just as penetrating and powerful. Here are father and mother. As a great preacher has said, "They have the marking of a child's heart. They are writing that child's history because they are living it. They are branding its life with shame or sealing it with glory." Who can realize the debt of young womanhood in this matter of influence, and how grandly may she redeem all her obligations. Young women, if they would and dared, or desired, could transform the characters and aspirations of the young men of our generation! Are they meeting their obligations? Oh, this influence of ours, how poorly are we redeeming our opportunities and paying the debts which are incurred through its possession!

Is there then no death for a word once spoken?

Was never a deed but left its token?

Do pictures of all the ages live—

On nature's infinite negative?

This is what influence-that potent power of every human life-really means. And the debts incurred through its possession will be known in their entirety only when the secrets of every human heart and the outcome of every human life shall be revealed.

Only a word more about the last and greatest of these ledger accounts,-God. This really sums them all up. If God “is, and is the rewarder of those that diligently seek him," then in him we live and move and have our being. We owe everything to him, and what we have to pay to balance every account, comes at last to him. What then are we doing to help ourselves in squaring our obligation to him? How far short comes the best endeavor! There are some who even overlook or repudiate their debts to him. Even of those who acknowledge his claims, how few do more than give him a beggarly hour or two in the week, and begrudge it if they are called to make sacrifice on his behalf. Ought there not to be a toning up of our sense of obligation in relation to God? Should not our lives show at least some sort of acknowledgment of dependence on him? We cannot hope to pay our debts. God has put us under obligation not only by providing for our wants, surrounding us with comforts and opportunities, but also by helping us in the midst of trials and difficulties into which we have fallen by our own obstinacy and ignorance, and has given us a revelation of himself in the Bible and in his Son, Jesus Christ.

But there is a brighter side. God has given man the privi lege of paying his obligations and satisfying the divine claims by a wonderful method,-agreeing to take man with all his debts All this into the firm, making him a partner in the concern. is on one condition, that you and I will enter the business, and make it our one aim, our chief purpose, to forward the enterprises which God has in hand. These enterprises are the

highest and noblest known to man. They involve the love of God and man, the upbuilding of character and righteousness, the bringing of the divine kingdom of peace and good will toward all. Shall we agree? Then we can close this ledger to-night with good hope. For he who is our principal Creditor cancels the indebtedness and places at our disposal a capital the like of which we never had before.

Shall we refuse? Then I know no way of escape from bankruptcy. False entries cannot deceive the Eye that looks through all deceit. Even other men will find out at last that you are a sham, and your own self will clamor for its due in vain, and you will loathe yourself. And then you will come before the great white throne, and "the books will be opened," where all the great debt is revealed, and you will not find from God above, society about, or self within you wherewith to cancel it. There will be seen as in letters of fire streaming through these accounts the secret cipher of your past and the solved riddle of your future.

This ledger of life is an important volume, the most important you have in your library. It may not be encouraging to turn it over and behold how tremendously the balance inclines to the opposite side. Yet to open the eyes, and fairly to face the problem, is the beginning of its solution. And with God, the principal creditor, as the friend and helper of man, we need not fear. With his aid and in his service, we shall succeed in paying our utmost obligation to self and to society, both in thought, in word, in deed, and in influence. We shall have the honor and satisfaction of laying up treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.

Life's Great Guide Book.

REV. P. 8. HENSON, D.D., Pastor First Baptist Church, Chicago.

HE first recorded word of God is, "Let there be light." He covereth himself with light as with a garment. He "dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto." He is "the Father of lights," and "in him is no darkness at all." Heaven is all ablaze with the light of his countenance. The celestial city "hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God doth lighten it." And that makes heaven.

"In his presence there is fullness of joy." Removal from that presence means utter darkness, and that makes hell.

Earth swings midway between heaven and hell, and hence, though not involved in rayless gloom, it is shrouded in darkness that may be felt; and men grope about upon it very much as did the men of Sodom, when they sought Lot's door on the night of doom.

The light that once bathed it has been eclipsed by the intervention of sin's dark shadow. Some little things that lie very near we may be able to discover, but the great things, far-reaching as eternity, and tremendous as the judgment, we cannot see at all. Upon the most momentous questions that ever engaged a human soul there is absolutely no light shed by earthly philosophy. What am I? and Whence am I? and Whither am I bound? and What is my duty? My danger? My destiny? These are questions before which all the oracles of earth are dumb. In the innermost chamber of the human soul a faint and flickering light is shining, and we call it conscience, but it is like the smoking lamp in a miserable Lapland hut, that only makes the

darkness visible. Some moral sense is left, enough to make us responsible subjects of moral government, but so confused is it in its judgments, and so weakened in its motive power, that if we are left to it alone we shall never clearly know the truth or thoroughly do the right. In the absence of any higher authority man is bound to obey his conscience, even though he have reason to believe that he cannot trust it. And that conscience is anything but infallible is only too palpably proved by the contradictory judgments it has registered in different lands and ages, touching almost every moral question.

One is bound to follow his conscience whether right or wrong, and yet if the conscience be wrong the act is not made right because it was performed conscientiously. Surely this a sad dilemma for a human soul, and one that would seem to make pathetic appeal for the intervention of a God of tender mercy. He has proved himself graciously regardful of all the lower needs of our lives. Surely he will not be utterly indifferent to the highest. Beautiful and beneficent provision in point of fact he has made to guide us in our perplexity, and to rectify the registering of our sinperverted consciences. Conscience is like the pocket watch of the engineer who runs the locomotive of a railway train. He has a time-table and a timekeeper, and by these he must be governed. But in the careless handling of his watch, we will suppose he has let it fall. When he puts it to his ear he finds it ticking still. Possibly it has been damaged, but how much he cannot tell, and he still must be guided by it in his movements on the road. And yet if it be out of order he is in imminent danger of disastrous collision. Now to guard against such perilous possibility the railroad company has hung up at the stations along the line, chronometers that are supposed to keep accurate time, and with these he must compare his watch as he pauses for a moment for the purpose. But these chronometers are regulated from Washington, and the time at Washington is governed by the stars, for nothing below the stars can be relied upon to run exactly right.