common men. Here we think of men of action, men whose vision has become an achieving force in social and national life. Many races have had such men, and these peoples have found in them permanent and indeed inexhaustible satisfaction. Think what Pericles was to the Athenians; he was their pride, their Olympian man, their crown! Think what Charles the Great was to the Franks; there was another mighty name shining upon the centuries of human struggle and hope! Think what William the Silent was to the Dutch,— their great man, their joy, the source of their national strength in time of peril, their chief glory. At length, Englishmen, in spite of their blindness, in spite of their conventionality, are coming to rejoice in their greatest man, Oliver Cromwell; during the next thousand years they will grow more and more into the comfort and renown of that imperial spirit. We have our Washington. Every time that I pass his superb statue in the Boston Public Garden, and look upon that splendid horse and that majestic figure, that finely poised head, and those great pure eyes looking out into the west in the glow of evening, I think not only of Washington's happiness, elected as he is to a service immeasureable; I think also of the joy and the strength, the honor and the inspiration of all Americans in the possession of this leader and commander of the people.

Such a leader and commander was Moses to the people of Israel through thirteen hundred years of life; he was to them the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; he was a mind that lifted them from earth to heaven, a great, patient, serene spirit enduring in the wilderness of time, as seeing Him who is invisible, and at the end walking to his death in fellowship with the God who appeared to him in the burning bush, whom he had served and with whom he passed into the eternal silence and rest.

XII

THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS

And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel said, Speak, for thy servant heareth."

1 Sam. III, 10.

FOUR distinct epochs in the life of Samuel are implied in these words. There was the time when his heart was untroubled by any appreciable call, the time when the call that came was mistaken, the time when it was understood, and the time in which it repeated itself, in the clear consciousness of the servant of God, as the burden and song of his soul. The call unheard, the call heard but mistaken, the call heard and understood, the call received in one continuous and increasing voice; these are the four great epochs in this man's life. They constitute the four great divisions and surprises of every truly religious soul. There is in every life the period of silence. There are no convictions, there are no responses, for the reason that there is no speaking universe for that life. Then follows the period in which voices ring out in the twilight and the awakened spirit rushes on into mistaken interpretations. But for the true man the process does not stop here. The great hour comes in which the voice of God is

heard in an understanding heart. And in the case of the normal Christian life, to this succeeds the continuous and ever-increasing revelation.

1. There is first of all the period of silence. God is doubtless in the silent life, but before his voice is heard, man is not man. Life does not really count for human until we know that God is speaking to us. There may be growth in it, there may be many good things in it, there may be a great preparatory movement of soul, but it is a sort of prenatal existence.

This is the period when there is no open vision, when other men do our thinking for us, when we have no convictions of our own, when we are still in our spiritual minority, subject to tutors and guardians, in bondage to an authority whose reasonableness we do not see. This is the period in which the disciples follow Christ and yet have no vision of his Gospel, no insight into his purpose, no clear consciousness of their relation to Him. He speaks, but they do not hear; He unfolds his wonderful teaching in sermon and in parable, but they do not understand; He works his divine acts of healing and deliverance, but the significance of these they do not take in. This is the period when Moses is a solitary shepherd in the Midian wilderness, when Isaiah is an unawakened worshiper in the Temple, when Jeremiah has not yet felt God's call tremble through his frail being,

when Saul of Tarsus is still a Pharisee, when Luther is a faithful monk. It is the time when whatever religion there may be in the nature is wholly inherited, traditional, circumstantial. You see the keeper take from the cage a lion's cub. He fondles it as he would some domestic pet. You cannot think, as you look upon the harmless and helpless creature, of the terrible nature latent in it. It is almost impossible to imagine, as it clings to you and seeks shelter and comfort by pressing closer to you, that a lion's heart is beating within. The truth is it is not yet a lion; its whole great nature is unborn; it is simply the possible monarch of the forest and king of beasts. There is a corresponding stage in every human life. The boy is not the man, the youth is not the man. The religious nature, fed from without, cared for by others, having its thinking done for it, its creed framed, its convictions moulded, its purpose determined, its activity directed by a happy environment, has not yet come to its humanity. It is the lion's cub; it is not the lion.

This period is inevitable and therefore can be no disgrace. It is simply immaturity. "When I was a child," so the apostle says, "I thought as a child, I felt as a child, I understood as a child." He could not help himself; and all the more do we see the importance of the sweet and radiant environment for the immature spirit. Be sure