only masticates her baby's food but swallows it besides, the infant dies. And given a heart once cold or dead, all attempts at prayer are as a sounding* brass or a tinkling cymbal. But a tongue, a mind, and heart delicately attuned to prayer lift like sweet music their happy possessor heavenward. Like a man on a lofty tower, we begin to appreciate the littleness of earthly things. Our judgments are comparative, and so accustomed becomes the prayerful man to the contemplation of God's greatness, that he learns soon to despise this little world, to bear misfortune with equanimity and prosperity with indifference. In the words of the Psalmist: "He hath made the Most High his refuge, and no evil can come to him."
Watch and pray and visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation. Brethren, practical benevolence is the third round in the ladder of perfection, the final requisite in a religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father. The truly religious are essentially altruistic. In playing the good Samaritan or humanity's Simon of Cyrene, they forget their own and lighten their neighbor's burdens. " Man born of woman, liveth a short time and is filled with many miseries." Such is humanity's biography. Torture at birth, misery through life, at death agony. In driving our first parents from paradise God said: " Cursed be the earth, thorns and thistles shall it bear you," and that curse has echoed down the ages in one unbroken series of human woes. Divine and human wisdom agree that the yoke is
