Do Your Duty Where You Are and With What Your Have

October 26.


Turn you to the strong hold,
ye prisoners of hope.

ZECHARIAH 9, verse 12.


O power to do; O baffled will!
O prayer and action! ye are one.
Who may not strive, may yet fulfil
The harder task of standing still,
And good but wished with God is done.

J. G. WHITTIER.


That God has circumscribed our life
may add a peculiar element of trial,
but often it defines our way and cuts off
many tempting possibilities
that perplex the free and the strong;
whilst it leaves intact the whole body of
spiritual reality, with the Beatitude thereon,
"that if we know these things, happy
are we if we do them." We know that God
orders the lot; and to meet it with the energies
it requires and permits, neither more nor
less,--to fill it at every available point with the
light and action of an earnest and spiritually
inventive mind, though its scene be no wider
than a sick chamber, and its action
narrowed to patient suffering, and gentle,
cheerful words, and all the light it can emit
the thankful quiet of a trustful eye,--without
chafing as though God had misjudged our
sphere, and placed us wrong, and did not know
where we could best serve Him, --this is
what, in that condition, we have to do.

J. H. THOM.