POWER OF A CHRISTIAN LIFE.
There is one department of Christian evidence to which no skill or industry of the champion of revealed truth can do justice—one also with which the skeptic is little disposed to meddle. It is that which is spread before us in the noiseless lives of thousands of the faithful followers of Christ. Ambitious of no distinction; intent only on the Master's service; pursuing the even tenor of their way in the discharge of common duties, their lives are ennobled, and sometimes become heroic, through the lofty purity of their aims, and the singleness of their devotion to life's great end. No theory of infidel philosophy can account for them. The attempt to explain them by means of enthusiasm or fanaticism is an insult to common-sense. Cowper has graphically portrayed the lot of one who may be taken as the representative of the class of which we speak: “Perhaps the self-approving, haughty world,
That, as she sweeps him with her whistling silks,
Scarce deigns to notice him, or, if she sees,
Deems him a cypher in the works of God,
Receives advantage from his noiseless hours
Of which she little dreams. Perhaps she owes
Her sunshine and her rain, her blooming spring
And plenteous harvest to the prayers he makes,
When Isaac-like, the solitary saint
Walks forth to meditate at eventide,
And thinks on her that thinks not on herself.”
—Boston Recorder.