the use of any one of your limbs it you had lost it! How much more grateful, then, ought you to be to God for having given them to you whole and entire! Take care that you do not abuse any of them to the displeasure and dishonor of their Creator, "by yielding them to serve uncleanness and iniquity unto iniquity, but yield them to serve justice unto sanctification." (Rom. vi. 19.)
III. How just it is that he who created you entirely should likewise entirely possess you. For "Who," asks the Apostle, "planteth a vineyard and eateth not of the fruit thereof?" (1 Cor. ix. 7.) God has planted you as a choice vine in his vineyard; yield Him, therefore, the fruits of piety, charity, patience, and every Christian virtue. "All that you possess," writes St. Bernard, "you owe to Him from whom you have received it."
WEDNESDAY.
The Benefit of Preservation. — I.
I. By creation God gave you yourself but once; but by preservation He does the same every moment of your life. Unless He preserved you, you would immediately fall into your original non-existence. The noon-beam has not so strict a dependence on the sun as you have on God. The man who is held by another from a high tower over a deep precipice, every moment in danger of falling, would not be so daringly mad as to revile and insult the man who held him. So ought you not to dare to insult God, who holds your thread of mortal existence in His hand.
II. As you cannot live without God, so you cannot exercise any action of life without His immediate concurrence. Without this you cannot even move your hand, open your eyes, or utter a word; "for in him," ex-
