makes diligent servants. How schoolboys bend themselves over their
slates and quicken their effort when the teacher is walking behind the
benches! And how a gang of idle labourers will buckle to the spade and
tax their muscles in an altogether different fashion when the overseer
appears upon the field! If we realised, as we should do, the presence
in all our little daily life of that great, sovereign Lord, there
would be less skulking, less superficially performed tasks, less jerry
work put into our building; more of our strength cast into all our
work, and less of ourselves in any of it.

Remember, too, how connected with this is another piece of effort
needful in the religious life, and suggested by the last words of this
text, 'Before the Lord _his_ God.' Cultivate the habit of
narrowing down the general truths of religion to their relation to
yourselves. Do not be content with 'the Lord _our_ God,' or 'the
Lord the God of the whole earth,' but put a 'my' in, and realise not
only the presence of a divine Inspector, but the closeness of the
personal bond that unites to Him; and the individual responsibility,
in all its width and depth and unshiftableness--if I may use such a
word--which results therefrom. You cannot shake off or step out of the
tasks that 'the Lord _your_ God' lays upon you. You and He are as
if alone in the world. Make Him your God by choice, by your own
personal acceptance of His authority and dependence upon His power,
and try to translate into daily life the great truth, 'Thou God seest
_me_,' and bring it to bear upon the veriest trifles and smallest
details.

Now the text follows the order of observation, so to speak, and
mentions the outward facts of Jotham's success before it goes deeper
and accounts for them. We have reversed the process and dealt first