Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/151

Rh Our unity and progress are proverbial, and this church's gifts to me are beyond comparison — they have become a wonder! To me, however, love is the greater marvel, so I must continue to prize love even more than the gifts which would express it. The great guerdon of divine Love, which moves the hearts of men to goodness and greatness, will reward these givers, and this encourages me to continue to urge the perfect model for your acceptance as the ultimate of Christian Science.

To-day in Concord, N. H., we have a modest hall in one of the finest localities in the city, — a reading-room and nine other rooms in the same building. “Tell it not in Gath”! I had the property bought by the courtesy of another person to be rid of the care and responsibility of purchasing it, and furnished him the money to pay for it. The original cost of the estate was fourteen thousand dollars. With the repairs and other necessary expenses the amount is now about twenty thousand dollars. Ere long I will see you in this hall, Deo volente; but my outdoor accommodations at Pleasant View are bigger than the indoor. My little hall, which holds a trifle over two hundred people, is less sufficient to receive a church of ten thousand members than were the “five loaves and two fishes” to feed the multitude; but the true Christian Scientist is not frightened at miracles, and ofttimes small beginnings have large endings.

Seeing that we have to attain to the ministry of right- eousness in all things, we must not overlook small things in goodness or in badness, for “trifles make perfection,” and “the little foxes. . . spoil the vines.”

As a peculiar people whose God is All-in-all, let us say with St. Paul: “We faint not; but have renounced the