bars of evening comes the flush of a transcendent consummation. Paul saw Stephen die, and he was never the same man after that experience. He met the great light on his way to Damascus and it changed him forever. He retraced as a preacher all the lines along which he had gone as persecutor, and through each new baptism of suffering and achievement he came forth a larger and richer man. He faced in the Temple itself as a Christian the old sect of the Pharisees to which he once gave his utmost devotion; he stood before Cæsar as the apostle of Christ, and on his way thither he endured the severest trials. His career was full of great events, and through each as it came a new and larger word from God was spoken to his heart. And when he went out beyond the city walls to surrender life itself for his Master, he went with the voice of God ringing through his soul as it had never done in preceding days. Great words from God led on to greater, a lengthened chain of climaxes, like some mountain range culminated in the supreme consummation.

We go over the same path, we meet with the same sort of trials, we are guided and inspired by the same Ineffable Speaker. The beginning of the Christian life is great, but it is only the beginning. Some new word waits for us in all the experiences that make up life. The serious student comes again and yet again upon some

book that creates an epoch in his intellectual life. It should be the same with the spirit. The temptation of to-day, the duty of to-day, the opportunity of to-day, the sorrow of to-day, the joy of to-day should be met with the expectation that it will leave us other than it found us-nobler, simpler, stronger, nearer the heart of God. This expectation, this experience, makes the circle of happenings amid which we go a spiral leading to new insight and assured advance. It is the St. Gotthard Tunnel; we seem to come out of the same mountain and at the very place where we went in. And in a sense we do, but each time the emergence is at a higher point, and thus the circles that seem a play in the dark lead at last to the light on the supreme heights. This is the spiral of life. We go in at the old temptation, the old duty, the old monotonous task, and we come out to look upon the same things. But each circle is upon higher levels; we go the old round at a new elevation, and we are brought at length to the summit of manhood, and the full day of the divine revelation.

It is meet and right to give thanks over the silent God who works everywhere in the unconscious life of immaturity. It is our privilege to rejoice in the speaking God who stands and repeats Himself, over all the mistake and rush and fury of youth. We shall take home the comfort

of the thought that it is the speaking God that makes man's mistake so sad; that it is the speaking God who is still in all the misguided stir, in all the misdirected activity, in all the fruitless conclusions of young souls. Behind the awakening, back of the storm of thought and passion is the patient God repeating the divine call. Yet more shall we praise God when He brings the soul to recognize his presence, to hear Him speaking in the conscience and in the entire solemn order of existence, making the moral nature flame again with the sense of his law and dating the advent of the fall of man. But above all shall we give thanks that God's work goes on forever, that it takes us out of our sins, out of our weakness, out of our hidden selfishness, out of our half-consecrations, and exalts us in the passion of a new vision, a new surrender, and a new love. The dove that Noah sent out of the ark found an inhospitable world and soon came back. Sent forth again, it returned again, but this time with the evidence of change and the token of hope. Sent forth yet once more, it went on its new way in the new world forever. That unreturning dove is the symbol of that to which God will bring us at last. How we return again and again when God sends us forth to our old luxuries, our old indulgences, our old narrownesses, our old sins. How we return to our

meagre thoughts about God, our mean plans for his kingdom, our poor outlooks, and our barren rest. How full of these dreadful retrogrades our lives are. How few of our sins, our follies, our weaknesses, we have ever finally abandoned. We are like the poor vagrant who after serving each new sentence turns up in court to be sentenced again for the same old crime. Shall these miserable, heartbreaking retrogrades into our past and worst selves never cease? Yes. God brings his faithful messenger to the eventful morning and forth he flies, leaving forever behind him the dead and bad past. The epoch in which these dismal retrogrades come to an end, in which the soul escapes from itself, in which it makes a new and momentous beginning, in which it dates a forth-going, unreturning flight over God's world and in God's might, is the epoch that awaits the steadfast will.

XIII

THE IDEALIST FALLEN

"And it was so that when he had turned his back to go from Samuel, God gave him another heart."

1 Sam. x, 9.

On the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the little village is pointed out where tradition says that Saul was born, and where he grew to manhood. Three thousand years have come and gone since Saul wandered over those Judæan hills. All trace of his existence has vanished. The places that knew him, know him no more forever. But the same sun that Saul beheld still travels daily over those hills and looks benignly down upon them. The solemn moon and the sweet stars that Saul saw still shine upon those hills, and they seem to wear in their bright faces some image of the first king of the people, deeper in the imagination and closer to the heart of mankind than any other people in all history. Saul, therefore, comes out of the earth beneath and from the high places above us, as we travel through that wondrous land.

1. The first point of universal interest in the career of Saul is the light which his life throws upon the character of the community in which he