that shall eternally lash the howling millions of the damned," he sets the Christian soul within a security that becomes a prison, that becomes an inferno. Love may be defeated; that is conceivable. That it should rest from its labors, sit serenely in the seats of the just, congratulate itself on its own security in God and its immunity from further sacrifice, while other human beings live a life loveless and full of woe, is absolutely inconceivable. We have come a great way from many of the views of the fathers; we have come this distance under the guidance of God's Holy Spirit; we have come to see that the Christian lover of men must be the ceaseless servant of men; that Christianity means love, that love means power, that noble power by its very nature stands in perpetual surrender to the appeal of sin and shame. When this mood deepens and widens in any community, there we find the true apocalypse of God. This is his nature. He is forever bowing the heavens to enter anew the life of man in his distress. Our God, the God and Father of Jesus Christ, is in eternal surrender to the sorrow and hope of our human world.

5. Here, too, in our story we find the defensive principle in this highest conception of God. Man's need has power over the infinitely rich and tender God. Man's prayer finds this affluent and mighty Presence in gracious surrender. But

the prayer must be not only through thought and feeling; it must be also and always through action. It must be a prayer expressed finally in the struggle of the will in the strenuous endeavor of life. This prevailing prayer must be a moral wrestle with God. God has ordained that the supreme good of man, a just and kind soul, shall be an achievement. A muscular body is never an endowment, it is always an achievement. The capacity is bestowed, the actual athletic condition is attained. Knowledge can never be a gift; it must always be an acquisition; a trained intellect cannot be imparted; it must be won. By the same law character is governed. We bring from God the capacity for it; we live in a world where the highest offers itself to us, where the lowest makes its seductive appeal. We must choose between good essential and good apparent; we must first see good essential as an ideal and then we must struggle to give it complete dominion over life.

The supreme good, a just and kind soul, for most men is only a bare and blazing ideal. It is a bare, unattained ideal because men wait for it to impart itself, to remake them out of its distant heaven, to relieve them of all struggle, and to take them into its own perfect worth and peace. The ideal will do no such thing. It will guide, but we must follow; it will show the way, but

we must walk in that way. It is the divine image sent to awaken the intellect, win the heart, and move the will to action. It is the divine image, but it can become the divine fact only by steadfast and unconquerable endeavor. While we wait, it hangs high in the air; while we delay, it comes no nearer to our weakness and discontent; while we fail to work out our own salvation, it remains afar. To-day it is afar because we have made vision and feeling do the work of will, because we have expected to receive when it was our duty to achieve, because we have thought that God would impart salvation when we should have believed that He would enable us to attain it. As well believe that by a dream we may circumnavigate the globe as that by a vision or a sentiment we may compass the supreme good. Not to dreams does the soil yield her fruits or the earth her riches, but to the wise will in the strong hand; not to dreams do the wonders of science come or the beautiful worlds of art, but to the illuminated will working by intellect and patient toil; not by the path of dreams does ideal justice and kindness enter the personal soul, but by the path of strong crying and tears; not to the dreamer of God's word, but to the doer thereof does the wilderness of human society blossom as the rose. Inaction is poverty, ignorance, moral woe, hopeless despair.

We must figure the universe always as the Divine Presence. We must resolve all but personal souls like ourselves into the Infinite Soul. We must think of God as inconceivably rich in his bounty and as with us in our night and distress, that He may bless us. We must think of trial, disappointment, discontent, pain -all the things that threaten to baffle and overwhelm us as the girding arms of the Eternal Love; we must accept these as a challenge to the great contest with God; we must hold Him fast and wrestle with Him till the day break and the shadows flee away; we must appeal to Him by the whole moving might of our need. We must utter our prayer through wills in action, through the tension and struggle of our entire being ; then we shall receive in the solemn fiery dawn of some great calm morning the surrender of the Eternal Wrestler: Thou hast prevailed with God; take thy new name; live forever in the blessedness of thy triumphant wrestle with the Infinite Love.

X

THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER

"And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brethren: and they hated him yet the more."

Gen. xxxvII, 5.

THE story of Joseph is one of the richest, one of the tenderest, one of the most beautiful in the literature of the world. It cannot be retold; one must read it for one's self. It is recorded, as you are aware, in the last part of the Book of Genesis, beginning with the thirty-seventh chapter. Familiar with it since boyhood, I have read it recently again and again, and I have been impressed as never before with its inimitable human quality, its fidelity to life, its insight into the governing passions in the heart of man, its recognition of the evil and the good in existence, and its issue in a noble reconciliation and peace. Here is the confused drama of human life, with its conflict of ends and interests; its pride, jealousy, cruelty, and restraining fear; its reverses whereby power passes from the tyrant to the victim; its discipline of pain; its magnanimity, forgiveness, and victorious love. May such be the issue of all the discord of our poor world, such its final triumph over evil.