When barely out of my teens, I had a desire to serve my Lord and Saviour. Having acquired the printer's trade, though other lines of business were also open to me, a morbid sentiment seemed to press upon me to abandon my means of livelihood to serve the Lord by printing tracts and give them out freely, trusting to the Lord for support. After forty years I look back with thankfulness to the Lord for preserving me from following the mere feelings of my heart to engage in a course for which I was so unfit, and which would only have involved stumbling and confusion for myself and others. That the Lord regarded the love which had given rise to the thought, I doubt not, but that He preserved me from committing myself to this course, I now count as His mercy.

Romans 12 :3, "Not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think," is a word that should be heeded by such as would go forth in the Lord's service to the Church at large, counting upon the Lord, through His people, to care for their temporal needs and of those dependent upon them. If 1 Tim. 5 :4-10 is so specific as to relieving the saints at large of business that belongs to other shoulders, surely none should lightly take a position claiming sustenance by the Lord's people.

Moses, in great zeal, was only too ready to begin the deliverance of his brethren, but after forty years in the Lord's school at the back of the desert (earning his own living, evidently), became conscious of his unfitness; it was then the Lord constrained him to His service.

Various measures of gift are to be found in members of the assemblies who go on in " honest trades for necessary uses"(Titus 3:14, margin), yet obeying 2 Tim.2:4, "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please Him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." "As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God" (1 Pet. 4 :10), but let us not divert from the real " gifts " which the Lord has given to the Church that sustenance which is their rightful due. Faithful stewards are to be wise in withholding as well as giving. J. E. H. Stimson.