SUNSHINE—A Boston daily spoke one day, thus: "The day opened cloudy and cheerless, but about noon Phillips Brooks came down town and then everything brightened up.” Many Christians are just like Phillips Brooks in this respect, and one such Christian is the author of "In the Service of the King." Always he radiated joy and gladness. Early in the first chapter he told how he deliberately made up his mind to do this. One day he was reading Gulliver's tale of the great inventor who had hit upon a device for extracting from cucumbers sunshine which he then "stored away in bottles to be used in the home on dark days to light the house.” As he thought on this story "the deacon's mission became clear: he would be the agent of the great inventor, a dispenser of bottled sunshine." So he set out to make his people laugh. "Counting the cost, he deliberately donned the motley ...With a persistency that even now he feels a pride in, he determined never to desist till he could say that he had had a laugh from every one of his people ...Whatever else he may have left undone, the deacon knows that in those first days he taught to many a sad heart the long-forgotten trick of laughter... Experience gives him courage to insist that when the sunshine is unbottled in the home of desolation, it discovers a heart of gold that was near to perishing in the shadow.” But this dispenser of sunshine was too wise to insist on laughter under all circumstances. He realized that sometimes when pain and loss give staggering blows the best way to help the sufferers is by weeping with them that weep. He learned this lesson on a disastrous Sunday, when the farmers in his parish rose to the sight of tobacco fields blasted, blackened, desolated. Only the day before there had been promise of the best crop in years. To some of these the desolation meant foreclosed mortgages; to others it foretold disaster yet harder to bear. When the deacon entered the pulpit he looked on listless, hopeless women and cowed men. He began his carefully prepared sermon before he realized that he was offering them stones for bread. Then he flung his text away, and blurted out, “I can’t do it, there is but one theme for today. I am going to preach to you about frostbitten tobacco” and he did…. Before he finished his sermon, the parson and his people were weeping together. And as together they sobbed out their pain before God, there came to them the strength they needed to bear their pain like men, so that soon they were able to smile in loving trust in Him of whom Job said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” —John T. Faris.