our life we may purchase a happy eternity. The opportunity of enriching or amusing ourselves, we never miss; but the means of salvation appear to us indifferent.
3. The day which is best employed is not always the one that has most forwarded our temporal affairs, but that which has added most to our merits, and which God has been best pleased with. Let us always so regulate our time, that God and our salvation may be our constant object.
[Renew the resolution you have taken to serve God faithfully; and be firmly persuaded that the time which is not employed for God, is no more than so much time lost for ever.]
“ God hath given to no person time for sinning." — Eccles. xx.
“ You have leisure to become a philosopher; you have none to become a Christian.” — St. Paulinus.
EIGHTEENTH DAY. — USE OF THE SACRAMENTS.
1. The Sacraments are the channels of divine grace: through them the merits of Christ abundantly flow into our souls. We must, therefore, take care to approach them worthily; for otherwise his merits will not avail us, nor will our salvation, of course, be possible.
2. The abuse of the Sacraments is an evil of the first magnitude. They were instituted as the means of eternal life; but, when perverted, they lead to eternal death. There is no medium: they must be either our food or our poison. How dreadful, then, must it be to reflect, that after so many confessions we should be so little improved — that after repeated communions we should still follow the same sinful course.
3. The unworthy communicant receives his own condemnation, and becomes, as it were, incorporated with his own ruin. What answer can he give, when called to account for his baseness? How shall he
