Why Christians Fail of Success.
INDIVIDUAL Christians are beginning to work for God, as perhaps they never worked before. They are not content to pray,—"Thy kingdom come;" but they feel constrained to enter the vineyard and toil, and bear the burden in the heat of the day. When there is a will to work, the way will soon be opened. Rev. H. Alton gives some good reasons why a multitude of Christians fail to accomplish much good: Some men fail because they are not willing to do the peculiar work that they are fitted for; they are self-willed and obstinate in choosing their department of work; they do not understand their own qualifications; through vanity or blind preconception, they will either do this particular thing or they will do nothing. Being pigmies, they try to do the work of giants; or, being giants, they are contented to do the work of pigmies. And thus they "labor in vain, and spend for naught the strength" that otherwise would be a blessing to the world and the church. Some men, again, are dreamers, rather than workers; they spend their lives in building castles in the air—sublimely conceiving, it may be, but imperfectly realizing; they are always purposing histories and epics and sermons, and benevolences that shall astonish the world. Now nothing is so wasteful of work as day dreaming. It is better to realize the possible, than to sigh for the ideal; better to do the work of an ordinary man, than to dream the work of a giant. Do all you can in your present sphere. Do not wait until you become a Howard or a Whitefield, a Carey or a Williams. Do all you can now. It is your best preparation for doing more by-and-by. "It is more healthful and nutritive," says Jeremy Taylor, "to dig the earth and to eat of her fruit, than to stare upon the greatest glories of the heavens, and to live upon the beams of the sun; so unsatisfying a thing is rapture and transportation to the soul; it often distracts the faculties, but seldom does advantage to piety, and is full of danger in the greatest of its lusters." Other men fail to serve their generation because they work a mere destruction in it; they work hard enough, but it is exclusively at destroying what they deem to be, and what probably are, abuses. Just now, especially, there is a class of men who think this to be their mission; they must destroy all that the world or the church has constructed. "Raze it," is their cry, "even to the ground." Now no man can serve his generation who is merely a destroyer—a Sceva among the gods. He is not the best worker who only pulls down. All truly great men are builders. Such was Moses and Paul and Luther and Bacon. Great, genial, generous-hearted men, men who said very little about the debility and cant and unreality of their age, but whose great and earnest work it was, to build up the truth that135should unconsciously thrust out error, to regenerate humanity just as nature regenerates the face of the earth, forming the buds of the new foliage, before she casts off the old. Others, again, fail in serving their generation, because they are half-hearted in their work. They do not go lovingly to it. They need the coercion of duty. And the reason of this is that we do not look singly enough, and intently enough, upon the end to be realized by our work. We think too much of the process of working and not enough of its consummation. If we would but get our minds and hearts filled with the idea of souls saved from death, and think of this only, how intently should we watch its progress, and survey all existing and possible agencies, solicitous only for the issue. Like soldiers conducting a siege, we should be all earnestness and activity, willing, either to dig in a trench, or to man a gun, or to scale a wall. We should look upon what we did, simply as so much help rendered. Others work in self-dependence. They forget that it is "not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord," that moral results are achieved, that theirs is only "the planting and the watering; and that God must give the increase."—Sel.