Home-Mercies.
When we realize that all our daily mercies come to us as the gifts of our Father in heaven, it makes them doubly precious to us. There is nothing which tastes as sweet to the school-boy as that which comes from home. So with the Christian. All his mercies are sweeter because they are home-mercies—they come "from above;" the land in which he lives is not like the land of Egypt, fed by a river; but it "drinketh water of the rain or heaven." Happy the lot of that man who thus receives everything as coming from God, and thanks his Father for it all! It makes anything sweet, when he knows it comes from heaven. This thought, also, has a tendency to keep us from an overweening love of the world. The spies went to Eshcol, and fetched thence an immense cluster of the grapes which grew there; but you do not find that the people said, "The fruits we have received from the land of promise, make us contented to stay in the wilderness." No; they saw that the grapes came from Canaan, and thereupon they said, "Let us go on and possess the land." And so, when we get rich mercies, if we think they come from the natural soil of this earth alone, we might well feel a wish to stay here. But if we know that they come from a foreign clime, we are naturally anxious to go
"Where our dear Lord His vineyard keeps,
And all the clusters grow."
Christian, rejoice then in the thought that all thou hast cometh from above; thy daily bread cometh not so much from thine industry as from thy heavenly Father's care; thou seest stamped upon every mercy heaven's own inscription, and every blessing comes down to thee perfumed with the ointment, and the spikenard, and the myrrh of the ivory palaces, whence God dispenses His bounties.