any of those blessings which, though they come from Thee, yet are not Thyself;-for Thee, Thee only do I hunger and thirst. Do with me as Thou wilt, I care not, since I love Thee."

EVENING.

me the spirit of evil

"O Lord! watch over my spirit while I wake, and my body while I sleep, that I may sleep in peace and awake in Jesus. Pity my weakness. Send Thy holy angels, spirits of light, that they may keep far from that is ever around me. Grant that I may resist it with the courage of faith. Give penitence to sinners, perseverance to the just, and peace to the dead. Let my evening prayer rise to Thee, O Lord; and let thy blessing descend upon me."

FENELON'S SUPREME DESIRE.

"Living or dying, Lord, I would be Thine. O what is life?

A toil, a strife,

Were it not lighted by thy love divine.
I ask not wealth,

I crave not health.

Living or dying, Lord, I would be Thine."

MASSILLON.

Jean Baptiste Massillon, master of French oratory, was born 1663. The descriptive powers and the impressiveness of his sermons made him a rival of Bourdaloue. After an advent sermon at Versailles, Louis XIV. once said to him:

"I have heard many great orators and have been satisfied with them; but when you spoke I was much dissatisfied with myself."

A sermon of his on the small number of the elect at St. Eustache had so great an effect that the audience rose during the peroration," as if looking for the trump of the archangel to sound.”

He preached the funeral oration of the Prince of Conti, of the Dauphin, and of Louis XIV.

His power of describing the evanescence of worldly glory seems to have been wonderful. At the funeral sermon of the king, who was styled Louis the Great, his first words amid all the pomp that surrounded the dead king, were "My brothers, God alone is great."

A PRAYER OF MASSILLON.

What is

"Great God! what then is man, thus to wrestle during his whole life, against himself, to wish to be happy without Thee, in spite of Thee, in declaring himself against Thee? To feel his wretchedness and yet to love it, to know his true happiness, and yet to fly from it? man, O my God, and who shall fathom his ways and the eternal contradiction of his errors? Delivered up to his own understanding, he is continually deceived, and nothing appears to his eyes but under fictitious colors; he but imperfectly knows Thee; he hardly knows himself; he comprehends nothing in all that surrounds him; he takes darkness for light; he wanders from error to error; he quits not his errors when he returns to himself. The lights alone of thy faith can direct his judgments, open the eyes of his soul, become the reason of his heart, teach him to know himself, lay open the folds of self-love, expose all the artifices of the passions, and exalt him to the spiritual man, who conceives and judges of all.

"O my God! I know only too well that the world and its pleasures make none happy!

Come, then, and resume Thine influence over a heart which in vain endeavors to fly from Thee; and which its own disgusts recall to Thee in spite of itself; come to be its Redeemer, its Peace, its Light, and pay more regard to its wretchedness than to its crimes. Amen."

XIV.

MARTIN LUTHER.

MARTIN LUTHER'S PRAYER AT THE DIET

OF

WORMS, AND PRAYER FOR THE LIFE OF MELANCTHON. 1483-1546.

"We have overcome! we have overcome ! exclaimed Luther, coming out of a retired room where he had been engaged in prayer, and standing with shining face and eyes lifted heavenward, in the presence of his family.

It was the darkest period of the Reformation. But immediately came the welcome tidings that the Emperor Charles V. had issued a proclamation of religious toleration in Germany. This unknown triumph of the cause seemed to have been communicated to Luther in prayer.