preeminence by becoming in his preeminence the servant of all who needed his service. This is a beautiful part of Joseph's story. He toiled during those seven years of plenty, stored Egypt with corn that the populations on the Nile might survive and that the adjacent countries, suffering from the famine when it should come, might live and not die. When a man determines, as Abraham Lincoln did, "If I ever get into power, I will hit that institution of slavery hard," he combines in one a dream of personal exaltation and social service.

There is nothing that wise men like to see better than boys in their homes, young men in the secondary schools, and in college dreaming of the future, dreaming that they are to be orators, preachers, educators, physicians, poets, musicians, journalists, any one of a hundred other things, and sure that they are to be princes in their calling. Nothing is more wholesome than this dream if these dreamers are willing to work for it, if they mean by it power to serve the world. Such dreams will bring God into their lives; such dreams will keep them pure and noble till they attain. We may well thank God for the dreams of youth, for the young men that see visions; they may swell with egoism now and then, but if they put good service and high selfsacrifice into their dreams, God is there. Burns

sings for the million in the lines in which he re

veals his young soul,

"E'en then, a wish (I mind its pow'r),

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast,
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least."

He toiled, he suffered, that he might sing; finally he did sing more than one song, a group of songs that are like the music of the spheres. His dream, his forecast of his own future in the light of what he did, and the way in which he did it, is noble and beautiful.

Sometimes the dream of an individual is the dream for his race; it cannot be wholly fulfilled in him; it takes all time in which to realize that dream. Such a dream the father of Joseph had, when he went out a wanderer, and was overtaken by night in a solitary place, and lay down there to sleep with a stone for his pillow. The dream was of a ladder running from earth to heaven and complete exchange of being between man's life and God's. That dream is one great forecast and prophecy of the religious life of mankind. A greater member of that race, the greatest, the divinest, representing mankind at its best, stood in Nazareth and said that He was that ladder, the realization of that ancient dream. Since

then men have gone on repeating this dream, toiling, suffering, praying, living and dying, that the world of God and the world of man might blend in one eternal song.

"We are the music-makers

And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

"With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

"We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."

XI

THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL

"God called to him out of the midst of the bush."

Ex. III, 4.

THERE is usually a key to the life of the great man, some experience that lets one into the secret of his career, some principle from which that career flows like the stream from its source. If one would understand the career of Martin Luther, one must hear him singing on the Santa Scala, "The just shall live by faith." In the way of promise the whole career of Martin Luther is there. If one would understand the career of the great Stoic, Epictetus, one must hear him ask, "Who made thee a slave, Cæsar or thyself?" There is the prophetic beginning of that glorious struggle in physical bondage for spiritual freedom.

By British and American scholars fifty years ago the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was regarded as an enigma, as nearly an incomprehensible mystery. Kant is still difficult, winding, and intricate, hard to comprehend; but there are two keys to him that make his career fundamentally clear and immensely interesting, intellectual, the other moral. He had been read

one

ing the writings of the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who said that the senses are the sources of all our knowledge. Here Kant asks his first great question, how this sensuous experience comes to be the ordered mind of a rational being. That question is the key to Kant on the intellectual side. On the moral side this philosopher said there were two things that impressed him with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the starry heavens above and the moral law within ; the one taught him his insignificance as an atom in an infinite material universe, the other taught him his transcendence as a morally accountable being. Here is the key to Kant, the moralist and the man.

The story of the burning bush contains the key to the career of Moses. That career is long, difficult, obscure, uncertain at many points; scholars disagree about it; perhaps it will always remain impossible to get at the truth of it as a whole; it was lived so long ago and the record of it is somewhat confused. Yet the great experience embodied in the vision of the bush that burned and was not consumed lets one into the secret of the significance to all after ages of this monumental man. Till this vision came to him Moses was a local character; till then he counted for little in the history of his people, and for nothing in the history of the world.