bodily or mental, requires preparation and care. Address yourselves
to that one thing; at any cost have this transcendent character
exchanged for yours.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that
stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments
when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans
the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life,
there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled
to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too
trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your
eternal life. I have seen almost all he beautiful things God has
made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has planned for
man; and yet as I look back I see standing out above all the life
that has gone four or five short experiences, when the love of God
reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love
of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one's
life abide. Everything else in all our lives is transitory. Every
other good is visionary. But the acts of love which no man knows
about, or can ever know about--they never fail.

In the book of Matthew, where the Judgement Day is depicted for us
in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep
from the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?"
but "How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of
religion, is not religiousness, but Love. I say the final test
of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but Love; not
what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved,
but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of
commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By