Standing at the threshold of an opening year, we know not what it holds for us, what duties it will bring, what temptations, what trials, what changes, what sorrows. We cannot forecast the experiences which await us, and we can safely go forward to meet them only by having Christ with us all the way. He does not show us all our future path at the beginning, nor, indeed, any of it, save the one step that we are to take next. This, however, He will always do if we walk with Him. We shall never be unprepared for any sudden emergency if our life be in His keeping. When it grows dark, the lamps of promise will shine out. When the battle grows too hard for our frail strength, He will fight for us. In weakness He will prove our strength, in perplexity our light, in need our sufficient supply. It matters not what the year may bring if we walk through it with Christ. We can say to it : "Friend, come Thou like a friend, And whether bright Thy face, Or dim with clouds we cannot comprehend, We'll hold out patient hands each in his place, And trust Thee to the end, Knowing Thou leadest onwards to those spheres Where there are neither days, nor months, nor years." Then, if we would make our new year a happy one, we must also live well. Sometimes ministers preach sermons from the text, "This year thou shalt die," but a more appropriate new year's thought is, "This year thou shalt live." Of course, we may die before the year ends, but if that experience awaits us, the best way to be ready for it is to live well until it comes. If our life is so soon to end, we should get all the more into it while it lasts. "Better, nobler living," should be written down among the purposes of the new year. The years should be like the steps of a golden stairway, each one lifting us a little higher. We should never be content to make any year just as beautiful as the last. Growth is the law of all life; when growth ceases death begins. There are always better things possible of attainment than any we have yet attained. The limits of progress in true living are really never reached. We never gain a height beyond which there is not one higher still. Each new year, therefore, should be a new beginning. The past should be left behind and forgotten, as the child leaves behind its childish things and goes on to manhood; only the lessons from its experiences should we keep and carry forward. We should waste no time in grieving over old failures. Regret never builds up anything; the best we can do with it is to make it a motive to wiser living in the future. Everybody makes mistakes, but the wise man is he who seizes the new knowledge which his errors have taught him and carries it forward, applying it to the life of the future. "The oyster mends its shell with a pearl;" so even the wounds which last year's follies and sins made in us may, through the healing grace of God, become pearls in our character in the after days. Tennyson sings: "Men may rise on stepping stones, Of their dead selves to higher things." Our lives should be like rivers, broadening and deepening as they move on towards the great ocean. If we are learning nothing, if we are growing no wiser, no richer in thought and feeling, no lovelier in character, no more useful and helpful to others, we have not yet learned how to live. New beauties of character should blossom out in each new year. When Raphael was asked how he painted such marvellous pictures, he replied, "I dream dreams and I see visi ons, and then I paint my dreams and my visions." Every earnest Christian who reads the Scriptures, and looks lovingly at Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel, dreams dreams and sees visions, dreams and visions of wondrous beauty, fragments of the loveliness of Christ-glimpses of what he himself may become; and the whole aim and aspiration and struggle of his life should be to paint those dreams and visions upon his own soul, to reproduce those lovely features of Christ in his own life. Raphael said also, "It often seems to me, while I paint, as if the spirit of my mother were hovering over me." While we strive to realise in ourselves the heavenly visions that the Scriptures bring before our eyes, the Spirit of Christ will ever hover over us, helping us. No one under heaven's arch of love ever strives unaided after holy attainments. God helps those who yearn and strive after the Divine likeness. Next to the presence of Christ Himself with us, there is nothing that will do so much toward giving us a happy new year as the spirit of unselfish service. Selfishness never yields the fruit of joy. "It is more blessed to give than to receive." "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister," is the highest aim in living, and that which gives the sweetest returns of happiness. One who lives to bless others is preparing for himself the richest blessings. A year of self-forgetting ministry in Christ's name, of thought and service for others, cannot but be a happy year. A good new year's resolution is the determination to make every day a happy one to at least one fellow-creature. It is not hard to do this: a word, a simple act of kindness, a sentence in a letter, the remembrance of one in sorrow or in need, an encouraging expression to one discouraged these are merest trifles, and yet someone is made stronger or happier, perhaps rescued from despair or from defeat by them. The value of a whole year of such daily ministry, both to him who performs it and to those who receive it, no one can estimate. To make our new year happy, we need not trouble ourselves with planning for the whole of it at the beginning. Years are made up of days, and come to us one day at a time. All we need to think about is just one little day, till that is done, and then another and another. In the mint the bright coins pass under the die, and are stamped one by one. So the days come to us, not a whole year of them at once, but one by one, and all that we have to do at any time is to make the one day beautiful as it passes, stamping upon it some mark of value, some record of duty. It ought not to be hard to live well just one day. Anyone should be able to carry his burden or fight his battle, or endure his sorrow, or stand faithful at his post, or do his work, however hard, for just one day. Anyone should be able to remember God and keep his heart open toward heaven, and remember his fellows in need and suffering, and keep his hand stretched out in helpfulness, for just one day. Yet that is all there is to do. We never have more than one day to live. We have no to-morrows. God never gives us years, nor even weeks; he gives us only days. If we fill the little days with faithfulness, the great years will pile up monuments of praise and blessing.-Exchange. THE TIME IS SHORT. I SOMETIMES feel the thread of life is slender, A shepherd's tent of reeds and flowers decaying, Up, up, my soul, the long-spent time redeeming ; MISSIONARY MOTTO FOR THE NEW YEAR. A Box in Every Home. Ir is well known that our Missionary department is crippled for want of money. Without an immediate increase of income we must retrench at home and abroad. We cannot afford to Starve our Missionaries. There is no need for this. We have only to adopt the principle of what Dr. Chalmers called the "the power of littles," and we should have money enough to carry on our operations, and even to extend them. The plan is a simple one. We have in our community considerably over 2,000 Families, into which there might, without the slightest delay or injury to any connexional or circuit interest, be introduced a missionary box, and into which there might be put One Penny a Week! It would never be missed in any home, except the very poorest. In hundreds of cases very much more could be given, and the result would be £500 a year increase in our funds, and probably much more than that. The sight of the box, with its motto, "A Penny a Week," would awaken interest and excite enthusiasm, and by this simple plan Every Penny of Debt would be extinguished in Six Years! MINISTERS! SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHERS! MISSION SECRETARIES! SUPERINTENDENTS! Come to the help of our noble Missionary Society, and send up your orders for boxes at once. Let our motto be "A Missionary Box in Every Family." THE MASTER'S REWARD OF FAITHFUL SERVICE. A PLAIN PAPER FOR CHRISTIAN WORKERS. 1.-THE one quality about our service which the Master rewards is faithfulness. We reward other qualities about each other's work, e.g., its brilliance, or its cleverness, or its success. That last quality particularly evokes our plaudits. The successful man is the man whom we specially delight to honour. Let it but be known of a man that, say ten years ago, he was poor, but has to-day a fair balance at his bankers; or that his Sunday-school class which last year had five scholars in it has now ten; or that the Church over which he has had oversight has doubled or trebled its membership and much increased its income; straightway we stamp our feet, and clap our hands, and awake the echoes with our applause, meanwhile not forgetting to make mental note of the successful man's name, "for future use." Now, not one word has the writer to say against the desire for success, especially when the desire is for success in spiritual work. It is very natural and very praiseworthy that, having sown, a man should desire to reap. Moreover, if his desire to reap lead him to do all he can to make the desire realisable, its effect is very beneficial. Nor a word has the writer to say against rewarding successful service, provided it be remembered that success is not the only quality about service which deserves rewarding, and that the reward we give to successful service does not always belong to one man. "One soweth and another reapeth." "Other men laboured, and ye do enter into their labours." If he that soweth and he that reapeth should rejoice together (John iv. 36), they ought also to share the honours of success together. At the same time, it needs to be distinctly pointed out that what our Master will reward about our service is its faithfulness, not its success. Indeed, in view of the teaching of Scripture about success, it is difficult to see how the Master could reward it. It is not something we bring to our service. Nor does its presence betoken that, necessarily, we are more faithful or more diligent than our less successful fellow-servants. It is something our Master gives, when He will, to whom He will, and as He will. Specially notable, as pointing out this, is that utterance of St. Paul: "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase" (1 Cor. iii. 6 7). In the bringing about of that success, "neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase." According to these words, success is not, properly speaking, a result of our labours at all, but a result of God's use of those |