Exodus 13:10

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"Thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in his season front year to year" Exodus 13:10 .

Memory needs to be vivified. We pursue this kind of practice in our own household life. The recurring birthday is a recurring joy. Every child in the family has its own method of celebrating its nativity. Great mercies should create their own anniversaries. It is well to sanctify our time by religious recollections and consecrations. There is no need to fall into superstition in this matter. We may be but sparing ourselves when we relax our religious discipline on the ground that religious observances may become superstitions. Every act of life is capable of debasement; but it does not therefore follow that life should be without action, and particularity of observance and ceremonial. The Church is a help to remembrance, so is the ordinance of the Lord's Supper. We ourselves are at liberty to set up milestones by the road, and to set aside special days for the remembrance of particular acts of providential revelation and care. Every line in the diary should have in it something of God. There is a deep spiritual sense in which every day is a birthday, and every morning a new year. They use time well who find in it many new points of newness that is, chances of being better and opportunities of rendering wider service. By indicating a special day, God lays down a law rather than fixes a technical statute: the law being that days may be marked according to their position in what may be termed the religious calendar the diary of the soul.