take into consideration our opportunities and traditions. We who were born of parents whose ancestors have been Christians for generations! We with the blood of missionaries and Christian heroes in our veins! How pitiful that we with all this Christian heritage, and who have been so well taught in Sunday-school and church, with our

minds illuminated with so much of the gospel truth, should have so little spiritual vitality, so little spiritual fire wherewith to warm the world. All that is necessary is that we should here and now hold ourselves completely surrendered to the free grace of God, that the heavenly fire may ignite and cause to break forth into blaze the gospel truth with which we are already charged. I was living in New York City at the time of the burning of a great hotel. The clerk in the office said he looked to the end of the corridor, seventy-five feet away, and fire was breaking out there. He turned to put his books in the safe, and noticed that in the rear of the building, fifty feet distant, fire appeared also. And there was evidence that on the floor above, at another end of the hotel, flames were bursting out at the same

time. The only plausible explanation was that the installation of the electric wires had given out all over the building; short circuits at many separate points had resulted; an unusual charge of electricity from the power-house had kindled a dozen fires at once. My friends, our whole being in mind and heart is wired for the heavenly electricity. The prayers we learned to say at mother's knee, the Christian hymns we learned to sing before we could talk plainly, the promises of God's Word stored up in our minds in our very babyhood, all the teachings and influence of Sunday-school and church, of sermons and prayers all our lives, have been wiring our whole personality for the conduct of divine influence. All that is wanting is that that inner power of our individuality, our power of response and choice, shall look up to God and cry:

Oh, that in me the sacred fire

Might now begin to glow,

Oh, that it now from heaven might fall,

And all my sins consume!

Come, Holy Ghost, for Thee I call;

Spirit of burning, come!

THE SEA AND ITS SAILORS

"The gathering together of the waters called he seas."-Gen. 1:10.

S

HE who wrote the popular song, "Rocked

in the Cradle of the Deep," wrote with perhaps greater wisdom than she knew, for the sea is God's cradle for humanity. The whole world is rocked in safety and abundance and comfort on the lap of the sea. The sea is the storehouse of the world-a storehouse which is inexhaustible and which no famine or drought can ever strike. Few people appreciate what a vast concourse of life is going on in the sea. It is said that the life in the sea far exceeds all that is outside of it. There are nearly thirty thousand species of living beings in the sea which are known to man. A very large part of the food of the world is taken out of the sea direct. In Norway four hundred million of a single species have been taken in one season; in Sweden, seven hundred millions, and so all around the globe all people go

to the sea for a very large proportion of their food.

The sea is the power-house of the worldfor it is not the rivers which keep the sea going; it is the sea which keeps the rivers going. All the water in our mountain streams, as well as in our great rivers, comes from the sea. They are entirely supplied by the vapor always rising from the ocean, which is carried by the winds over the tops of the mountains, where in God's great condensers it is distilled and falls in snow or rain upon the summits of the high hills. So it is not the rivers that fill the sea, but the sea that fills the rivers. Some inland farmer, two thousand miles from the ocean, relying on his irrigation ditch filled at the mountain stream, may' think that he is independent of the sea; but he is not, for every drop of the precious, lifegiving fluid which gives verdure to his pastures, richness to his meadows, and apples to his orchards, is the gift of the sea, and would be impossible without it. So it is the sea that turns all the mill-wheels, and drives all the looms and locomotives throughout the land.

It is the sea that controls the temperature of the world. It does it just like a modern hot-water plant in one of our great homes or business buildings. It sends the hot water up into the skies, lets it condense and come back again down through the streams, so moderating the temperature of the earth. The sea is the basement of the world, the proper place for a hot-water plant, and its currents in still other ways determine climate. A warm current sweeping through the ocean can change what would otherwise be a frigid zone into temperate or tropical fertility. If it were not for this modifying influence of the sea, human life could never have been maintained on the earth.

The health of the world depends upon the sea. The decay and death which is going on in all parts of the world would make it a pest-house in a very brief time, full of pestilence that would destroy all animal life, if it were not that the sea is ceaselessly at work purifying the atmosphere and sending wholesome breezes across the land. Without the sea there could be no drainage. The ocean receives the sewage of the globe, and extracts its poison, and