his table a well bound copy of the Bible. He is not asked any questions about what he believes, or if he believes anything, but the tone and atmosphere of the place tell him very forcibly that if he wishes to remain he must conduct himself like a gentleman. If there is the least sign of indulgence in intoxicating liquor he is told that he has not money enough to rent a room in the Cliff House and continue that habit. A large well-lighted reading room is provided and furnished with good wholesome literature, the local newspapers donating their exchanges, and thus providing papers from all over the United States and Canada. In the House there are daily prayers and weekly services, through both of which many men are blessed. The direct aim, however, of the House, is to furnish clean environments, where the men may be subject to less temptations than formerly. This, as has been said, is for the winter. During the summer, a wagon with complete outfit visits the mining stations round about. The expenses of the summer work are largely defrayed by the balance from receipts of the Cliff House, so that the work is almost self-supporting, enough in itself to commend it. It is repeatedly claimed that, for the amount invested, few other agencies give such great returns of good. TAKE COURAGE. Pastor W. Discouragement is the besetting sin of the age. Our intense, unnatural, and artificial life tends to cause this. The child in school gets restless, falls behind, begs to be put to work, has his way, and weakness is begotten where strength might have been gained. The workman slights his work, fails to take hold of it with a master's hand, and soon finds himself without a regular position, discouragement seizes upon him, his wife helps it along, drink is resorted to, his children are neglected, and are soon numbered among the criminal classes, his family disintegrates, and a once happy home is ruined. The business man shrinks from his difficulties, trembles before competitors, becomes faint-hearted, and loses the grip of a master, and goes down in needless failure. The physically weak gives up in hopeless despair, endures prolonged agony, and dies an untimely death. The pastor weakens when trouble arises, gets nervous, and sleepless, and sick, looks for a more inviting field, and leaves the difficulty unmastered, the challenging foe unconquered, and the citadel of Satan uncaptured. He goes to his next field a weaker man and easy prey to the devil of discouragement. Soon he concludes that he has missed his calling and withdraws to some easier work, to end the rest of his days a moral stripling. There is no child of God who does not have his troubles, and his temptations to be overcome by them. These troubles and J. Mosier. He temptations are as varied as humanity itself. But the object of God is the same in every case, and also that of the devil. God intends His people to be strengthened by mastering trouble, and the devil intends them to be weakened. Every trial is the theatre for the display of God's infinite grace and power, and may always issue in increased strength to His people. On the other hand, it may be a theatre of shameful defeat. Everything depends upon the actor. may be the conqueror, or the conquered. Who has ever met with more trial than the apostle Paul? And yet, what an example of continued conquest! Study his life with this in view, and it will be hard to find a single shadow of discouragement or defeat from the time of his conversion until his martyrdom. He belittles his trials and calls them "light afflictions," and boldly exclaims, "Thanks be unto God Who always causeth us to triumph in Christ." "We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us;" and remember, Paul was a man of like passions with us, and with no more grace than we may have. When physical trouble comes we should pray it through and get the mastery. By faith, and by observing all of God's sacred laws of health, and by patient care, we will doubtless be brought back into the glow of perfect health. When home difficulties come we should lean hard on God, keep steady and quiet, and expect order from confusion, peace from disturbance, and power from weakness. When business troubles come we should grapple them with earnest heart-searching prayer and determined effort, and not only conquer the present troubles, but gain strength for future ones. When difficulties arise in the church through neglect, indifference, harmful talk, difficulties through sickness, poverty, death, and removal, difficulties through Providential testings or Satanic devices, the one thing is, to get still before God, wait on Him much in prayer, take hold of the matter lovingly, and vigorously, and hopefully, and go forward with greater zeal, and determination, and joy, and confidence, than ever before, and soon the lofty mountains will vanish, and the deep valleys fill up, and the ominous clouds will withdraw, and the awful thunder peals die away, and the full orbed splendor of the midday sun will shine in all its vernal beauty upon a field well cleared, well arranged, and well tilled-a veritable garden of the Lord, throbbing with omnipotent life, and blessed with continual, and abundant, and lasting fruitage. "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him, Who is the health of my countenance and my God." Brooklyn, N. Y. A PRAYER AND A PLEA FOR PROSPERITY. Robert L. Duston. Prosperity is something to be desired. It signifies advance in anything good or desirable, success, thrift, progress. It is to be desired in the individual, community, or national life, in the way of industrial, commercial, or agricultural lines. Seasons of prosperity are, or ought to be, seasons of rejoicing. If this is so true in the affairs that pertain altogether to temporal things, how much more to be desired, and how earnest ought our prayer to be for spiritual prosperity, or the prosperity that is presented in the Biblical idea of that term. The psalmist prayed for this in the words, "Save now, I beseech thee, O Lord: 0 Lord, I beseech thee, send now prosperity." There are some who cannot truly offer this prayer because they have fully made up their minds that there will be no prosperity, and if, in spite of their dark prognostications in dismal unbelief, prosperity should come, they would be disappointed in themselves, and proven false prophets before others. Others would pray for prosperity if it would only come in the line that they mark out. A third class pray sincerely, "Send now prosperity." By whom thou wilt send; in any way that is right and best. And the question naturally arises, "In what does real prosperity consist?" Considered negatively we say that it does not consist primarily or necessarily in the crowd, or large numbers in religious services. This is desirable, but we are to remember that a crowd may be attracted by means of certain methods other than spiritual, or other than along pure gospel lines, which merely entertain people, without making any spiritual impression upon them. It does not consist in wealth or outward adorning in church work. Money is not to be despised, nor outward adorning to be ignored. A church building speaks of the character of the body of believers worshiping there, and in turn has an influence upon them who worship. A building may be elaborately elegant, yet stiff, dark, uninviting; as cold and gloomy as a sepulchre which is kept as a receptacle for dead bodies. Or a church may be unkept, dusty, dirty, and dilapidated. With a general appearance of untidiness, be sure no prosperity is found there. Wealth consecrated to God is a power towards securing prosperity, but wealth depended upon in itself is an occasion of hindering prosperity. It was a wealthy church in Laodicea to whom the words were written: "Because thou sayest I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." And they were earnestly exhorted to buy the tried gold, and the white raiment, and the necessary eye salve, that true prosperity might be theirs. Up to a certain point a church in its life is in common with other organizations. But unless it goes beyond the life of a social club, a bureau of charities, a society for ethical culture, or an academy of philosophy, it is not a church at all. True prosperity consists in getting hold of people, and lifting them to God. It consists in the church being a saving agency. It must be this in its own community. And more than this, it must recognize its responsibility in helping to carry the gospel to every creature. And the saying will prove true that "the more religion we export, the more we will have at home." True prosperity comes from God Himself. He is the great Source of all prosperity. What He is able to do, can be proved by what He has done, and by what He has promised to do. For this He is to be besought earnestly. One psalmist uses the term "I beseech thee" twice. A lack in earnestness denotes a lack in desire, and lack in desire denotes the failure to receive. God is to be besought urgently. The psalmist prays for prosperity. "Now." How often we say, "Yet four months and then cometh harvest," when by a look upon the fields we see that they are white now already for harvest. .. 'Now is the accepted time.” Four months from now we may be gone, or those whom we ought to reach, and want to reach, may be beyond our reach. Let us not ask for the future alone, but pray, "Send now prosperity." This prosperity is to be sought for our own sake. Dr. Cuyler well says that "a declension in spiritual life is an individual sin." A church member will often say, "My church is cold," when he would hit the nail on the head by confessing honestly, "My own heart is cold, and my own spiritual life is becoming barren. It is I that needs a revival." Let every reader put up this prayer to the throne of grace as an earnest plea to the Almighty, "I beseech thee, send now prosperity." Portsmouth, N. H. THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF THE UNIVERSITY.* Francis Landey Patton, D. D., LL. D., There cannot be any possible way of overstating the importance of religion in universities. You cannot have an institution more capable of good or evil than a great university. The potentialities of university life with reference to its political influence, I mean in shaping the large policy of the country for good or for evil, are simply enormous, and if they are not for good they are correspor dingly for evil. I think there scarcely could be a much worse instrument in the world than a community of highly educated men wholly given up to the devil; because the more educated they are when they do go wrong, the greater instrumentality they are for evil. Therefore I do not hesitate to say that far beyond the question as to whether a university shall have any new buildings or large endowments, far *From the November Intercollegian. Used by special permission. beyond the question as to whether it shall keep pace with the advancements of the times in an ever advancing science and philosophy-immensely beyond these things is the question whether the undergraduates who assemble year after year shall come under right religious influences, such as will make for righteousness, for morality, for the perpetuity of the Christian faith. I do not regard Christianity as one of the accidents of a college; I do not regard religion as one of the things you have to tolerate because men bring it along with them here. I look upon it as the prime necessity of university life. It is very gratifying that in the universities of the country generally there is such a very large element that is actively, as well as professedly, Christian. At the same time I am quite conscious that there are adverse influences at work. I thoroughly under stand, I think, how easy it is for the young man who has grown up in his home surrounded by a set of religious associations that took him to the church to which he has been accustomed to go from his childhood, and which took him there regularly, how when he breaks off these early associations, goes to school, has his home life severed by four years of school life, and then comes to the university, finds that his natural indifference is fortified and strengthened by the gregarious instinct that leads him to do as others do; how easy it is for a man, even though he do not part with any of his faith, to become indifferent to the actual practice of his religious life. I quite well understand, too, that when a man has passed through his sophomore year and comes into the region of philosophies, he finds that every subject that he touches in the most secular outlying districts of thought somehow bears upon his religious life and his religious faith. He is put in possession of a lot of generalizations which, if accepted without qualification, seem to tell upon his religious convictions, so that he tends gradually to slip down the inclined plane of skepticism, and bit by bit to relinquish his early faith. Therefore, I feel that these two tendencies of indifference on the one hand and of actual skepticism on the other are really positive tendencies that ought to be reckoned with and that a young man ought to fight; that is to say, he ought to know his enemy and be ready to fight for his faith. Under circumstances such as I have noted, there is nothing that gives better promise of the result that we wish to aim at than the Student Young Men's Christian Association. I feel that if the philosopher in the class room lecturing on psychology and ethics and metaphysics and the history of philosophy has the key to a system of theoretical religion, this organization, meeting week by week for actual worship in prayer and praise and reading of the Scriptures and exhortation, has also the key to the system of practical religion. I feel strongly that the future of the ministry, the future of the church, the future of aggressive Christianity, the future of fundamental morals, the future of journalism, the future of politics, the future of jurisprudence, the future of everything that is rooted in sound morals, is very largely in the hands of the men who teach and the men who learn in the universities; and that if there are influences that work against vital piety and that are adverse to a robust Christian faith, as I have no doubt there are in all universities, there is the more reason on that account that this organization should be active and well sustained, its meetings interesting and well attended, and men secured as speakers who have convictions themselves, who do not have any hesitation about expressing them, and who will express them in a way that will arouse conviction and command respect. The need of this organization is growing more every year. There was a time when the universities were colleges, and colleges were small, and when there were very few students who attended, and these needed very few professors, and those professors were men who, whether they knew Greek, or Latin, or English literature, or philosoophy, or not, and sometimes they did not, at least were religious men, and most of them were ordained ministers of the gospel. Now, probably to the advantage of the university, a man is not put into a professorship because he is a minister, but because he knows his subjects; and that is a good thing. But what I mean is that you cannot rely upon the faculty alone to furnish the religious teaching, or religious life, or religious example. I am very glad when I go about to find that distinguished men, men who hold high positions in teaching, in medicine, and in other departments purely secular, speak of the Student Movement as the most interesting and hopeful thing in connection with university life. An eminent professor told me in Edinburgh, only a few weeks ago, that he regarded the Student Movement throughout the world, and as it comes under his own eye in the University of Edinburgh, as the most hopeful thing in connection with the whole kingdom of God. Therefore, let us feel that we are not alone; let us understand that there are bodies of men similar to our own association interested, as we are, in religious life and religious work, and that we are working with them, and they are co-workers with us, and let us remember that this is one gymnasium where we have the fullest opportunity to exercise outselves unto godliness; this is the field where we have an opportunity to bind sheaves for Jesus Christ; this is the place where we can carry into practical operation the great law of Christian service which voices itself in the idea that we are not to think of ourselves, but live for others; this is the atmosphere within which our own religious life will be nourished, and through whose stimulating agency it will be kept from the death that may overtake it, if it is not protected against the irreligious influences to which it may be exposed. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER AS A SOUL WINNER. Marion Lawrence. The government has two ways of saving life on the ocean. They take a number of men and plant them in this place and say, "You are to conduct a life saving station," and they have all their apparatus for that sort of work, but they must wait until the ships are on the rocks, until the men are struggling in the water for their lives before they can send men out to help them. Then the government has another way, the lighthouse. They plant this house and say, "You live in this house, and before the ships get on the rocks you warn them off, and show them from the place of danger into a place of safety." The rescue mission work that some of our brothers are giving their lives for is the life-saving service, but the Sunday school is trying to save life by the lighthouse plan rather than the lifeboat plan. We are trying to keep boys and girls off the rocks. It would be a great thing, if one could do it, to stand at Niagara Falls and rescue men from going over the brink. It would be a better thing to go up stream and keep the men and the women from entering the river in the first place. It is a great thing to rescue men and women gone into sin, but a greater thing to save them from going into sin. I was in a Pacific Garden mission not long ago and saw a blear-eyed, drunken man come staggering in, and I knew that that man had once been an innocent little boy. In our own city mission where I spent an evening a little while ago, I saw a woman in the same condition. I knew she had once been an innocent little girl. Our work is for the boys and girls, and your hearts are all interested in these. I was sitting one day with Mr. Wannamaker and he said, "We have the best end of it; when you save a man or woman you save a unit, but when you save a boy or girl you save a whole multiplication table." It is a great thing to save a soul at any age, but it is the greatest thing to save a soul plus a life. The child is the centre of the world. The little child that Jesus put in the midst has been in the midst ever since, and the world revolves around it. The little child is king and queen. We are glad to do the bidding of the baby. I have known of people walking the floor all night because the baby wanted it that way. Some time ago there was a little child lost in New York City in Central Park, and the papers were full of it. A short time after that the child was found, and the papers came out in great headlines announcing the finding. In a few months there was a great battle, the battle of Santiago, where many precious lives were lost, and the papers again came out in great headlines announcing that, but there were more newspapers sold in New York because they announced the finding of that child_than there were at the battle of Santiago. Every one is not interested in war, but every one is interested in a little child. There are twenty-five million in the Sunday-school army, and it is a wonderful power. Out of all the people that join our churches by conversion eighty three per cent come out of the Sunday school. John Watson was being dined in this country once, and was asked, "What is it, in your judgment as a foreigner, that does so much to make America great among the nations of the earth?" He said, It is the Sunday school." ་ I am to talk to you about the teacher. I know that you are all either teachers or interested in Sunday-school work. I want to talk practically along the line of the teacher's work. The office of teacher is a divine office. Jesus chose to be a teacher because he thought it the most important business in the world. His last command was a command to you and me to go and teach, and that command is on every man and woman, every one that has the ability to teach and the opportunity to teach. I believe, as a superintendent, that the teacher is the most important factor in any Sunday school. A superintendent outranks the teacher only as an officer. The teachers really do the work for which the Sunday school is held. I know of no place on the footstool so fraught with opportunity and responsibility as to stand with the open Bible before a class of children and try to bring them to the Saviour. In Daniel we read, "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament: and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." If you will take a reference Bible you will see that the word translated "wise" may with equal correctness be translated teachers." In Proverbs we read, "The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life: and he that winneth souls is wise." Knowledge is how much we know; wisdom is the use we make of it. The purpose of all teaching is primarily instruction; in Christian work it is primarily for edification and salvation. I want to speak very briefly of the use of the Bible. This is a very much neglected part of our work. We try to teach too much without the Word of God. The Word of God has its mission and place and |