one by one.’  This exhortation to attempt the impossible is perhaps more worthy of being heeded than the form in which it is presented to us might lead some to suppose.  There is no getting away from the simple fact that a man’s thankfulness has a real and proportionate relationship to the things for which he has cause to be thankful.  If in our daily life the phrase ‘the goodness of God’ is to have a deepening and cumulative significance, it must be informed and vitalized continually by an alert and responsive recognition of the forms in which that goodness is ever freshly manifested to us.  Whilst the roots of the tree of praise lie deep beneath the surface, and wind their thousand ways into dim places where memory itself cannot follow them, yet surely the leaves of the tree are fresher and greener for rain that even now has left its reviving touch upon them, and for the sunshine that is even now stirring the life in all their veins.  The figure is imperfect.  We are not trees.  We do not respond automatically to all the gracious and cheering ministries of the Eternal Goodness in our lives.  We may easily overlook many a good gift of our God.  And though in our forgetfulness and unthankfulness we profit by the sunlight and the dew and by each tender thought of God for His creatures, yet the full and perpetual profit of all good things is for each of us bound up with the power to see them, the wisdom to appraise them, the mindfulness that holds them fast, and the heart that sings out its thanksgiving for them.  ’O sing unto the Lord a new song.’  Bring this day’s life into the song.  Bring the gift that has come to thee this very hour into the song.  Look about thee.  See if there be but one more flower springing at the path-side.  See if the bud of yesterday has but unfolded another leaf.  Behold the loaf on thy table, feel the warmth of thy hearth, yea, feel the very life within thee that woke again and stirred itself with the morning light, and say these gifts are like unto the gifts of yesterday, but they are not yesterday’s gifts.  Yesterday’s bread is broken, and yesterday’s fire is dead, and yesterday’s strength is spent.  O God, Thy mercies are new every morning!  So shall a new song break from the heart.

It is quite possible, in taking what we believe to be a broad view of life, to overlook many of the things that go to make life.  Too much generalizing makes for a barren heart.  The specific has a vital place in the ministry of praise.  It is true that the highest flights of praise always carry the soul beyond any conscious reckoning with the details of its experience.  Tabulation is not the keystone of the arch of thanksgiving.  But to behold the specific goodness of God in each day’s life, to review the hours and to say to one’s own soul, Thus and thus hath my God been mindful of me, is perhaps the surest and the simplest way to deepen and vitalize the habit of praise in our life, and to set the new notes ringing in our psalm of thanksgiving.