quarters of a mile or thereabouts--'do not press close upon the heels
of the bearers, for you will not be able to see where they are going if
you crowd on them. Be patient. Let the course of the ark disclose
itself before you try to follow it, that ye may know the way by which
ye must go, for ye have not passed this way heretofore.'

I. Note the untrodden path.

I suppose that most of us have to travel a very well-worn road, and
that our course, in the cases of all except those in early life, is
liker that of a millhorse than an untrodden path. Most of us are
continually treading again in the prints of our own footsteps. A long,
weary stretch of monotonous duties, and the repetition of the same
things to-day that we did yesterday is the destiny of most of us.

Some of us, perhaps, may be standing upon the verge of some new scenes
in our lives. Some of you young people may have come up to a great city
for the first time to carve out a position for yourselves, and are for
the first time encompassed by the temptations of being unknown in a
crowd. Some of you may be in new domestic circumstances, some with new
sorrows, or tasks, or difficulties pressing upon you, calling for
wisdom and patience. It is quite likely that there may be some who, in
the most prosaic and literal sense of the words, are entering on a path
altogether new and untrodden. But they will be in the minority, and for
the most of us the days that were full of new possibilities are at an
end, and we have to expect little more than the monotonous repetition
of the habitual, humdrum duties of mature life. We have climbed the
winding paths up the hill, and most of us are upon the long plateau
that stretches unvaried, until it begins to dip at the further edge.
And some of us are going down that other side of the hill.