summit of human strength. For a little while it is true, even in the
life of nature, that our power grows with our days. But we soon reach
the watershed, and then the opposite comes to be true. Down, steadily
down, we go. With diminishing power, with diminishing vitality, with a
dimmer eye, with an obtuser ear, with a slower-beating heart, with a
feebler frame, we march on and on to our grave. 'As thy days, so shall
thy weakness be,' is the law for all of us mature men and women in
regard to our outward life.

But, dear brethren, we may be emancipated from that dreary law in
regard to the true life of our spirits, and instead of growing weaker
as we grow older, we may and we should grow stronger. We may be and we
should be moving on a course that has no limit to its advance. We may
be travelling on a shining path through the heavens, that has no noon-
tide height from which it must slowly and sadly decline, but tends
steadily and for ever upwards, nearer and nearer to the very fountain
itself of heavenly radiance. 'The path of the just is as the shining
light, which shineth more and more till the noon-tide of the day.' But
the reality surpasses even that grand thought, for it discloses to us
an endless approximation to an infinite beauty, and an ever-growing
possession of never exhausted fulness, as the law for the progress of
all Christ's servants. The life of each of us may and should be
continual accession and increase of power through all the days here,
through all the ages beyond. Why? Because 'the life which I live, I
live by the faith of the Son of God.' Christ liveth in me. It is not my
strength that grows, so much as God's strength in me which is given
more abundantly as the days roll. It is so given on one condition. If
my faith has laid hold of the infinite, the exhaustless, the immortal
energy of God, unless there is something fearfully wrong about me, I
shall be becoming purer, nobler, wiser, more observant of His will,