Our Noblest Birthright.

REV. JAMES. W. COLE, B.D.

ORK is the birthright of the human race. It is not a curse,

but a benediction. It is not a mark of degradation, or of servitude, but an insignia of royalty. To work is godlike. "My Father worketh hitherto," said Christ; and all the universe bears witness to the fact. Intense, ceaseless activity is the law of life throughout all its physical and moral realms. He who would live must work. There can be no growth, or development, of body or of mind without it. When you cease to work you cease to live. Idleness breeds stagnation, whose only issue is corruption, decay, and death.

The progenitor of the human race, while yet sinless, had Heaven's sign manual, work, given him to do. Paradise was his, "to dress it and keep it." His subsequent sin and expulsion from Eden made no change in this fundamental law of his life. Thereafter, to him and his, work was different and harder and more profitless, but it was not a new thing to him; much less was it, as so often supposed, the result of sin.

All worlds are workshops. This of ours is no exception. Heaven is to garner at last the best productions of earth for its great universal exposition. "They shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it." But it is only "the glory and the honor" work that goes on exhibit there.

Are you and I now doing anything that "they" will think worthy of preservation? It is terrible to do nothing worthy; to live for nothing worthy; to be nothing worthy.

Endowed as we are with such godlike powers in embryo, and placed in a world that is fitted to develop the best that is in us