whole thing is so squalid, so wretched, so irrational, so degrading to a king. He staggers out of the witch's home to the field of battle in the morning. The sole redeeming feature of the last sad scene is the way in which Saul died: he died with his harness on his back; he died like a man, fighting for the liberty and stability of his country; he died with his beloved son, Jonathan. And there they lay dead together; the glorious idealist, broken, in defeat and his death a symbol of the degeneration of his life. Shakespeare tells the tragic tale in his great words: —

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gliding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,

And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.”

This is the way that Saul went, "Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace."

How can we avert this contempt of the beauty of life and the living God? By fundamental seriousness of character, by loving devotion to our cause, by fidelity to every duty, great and small; by continually renewing our strength out of the great ideals in the community. You do not need to go to church, says your friend. If you have a vision, if you have a love for it, if you have

a consecrated manhood to maintain in this awful world, you need to go to church, you need to read your Bible, you need to pray, you need to seek God. If you are wise you will be ready for every word of power that comes to you from every point of the compass, from every lofty human soul! You and I are unsafe unless we are hungry for help every day; help from the hills; help from the Highest; help from our brothers at our side; help from history; help from the kingdom of love. The greatest assurance of all is every day to wrestle with the Highest and to cry out with one of old, "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me!" When our arms are round the God of love, and we are girded by his, when our nature is gathering protection out of the Eternal, we may be sure that we shall not fail; that while our lives may fall under other forms of tragedy, they will embody the denial of the ideal never.

XIV

THE IDEALIST AS TEACHER

"In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

"Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.

"And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

"And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.

"Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

Is. vi, 1-5.

THERE are two ways in which we may read the recorded thought of the great minds of the past. We may read the entire record, linger upon it in detail, go over it many times, brood it patiently and lovingly, until the whole body of thought enshrined in that record rises before us as our precious possession forever. When time and strength allow, that is the ideal way to read the record of monumental minds. And I must here add that if one would secure for himself the highest kind of intellectual training, he must select one such mind and read it as I have said it should be read, until the reader becomes possessor of his master. Time and strength, however, do not allow this in many cases; therefore, we have

another way of reading the great minds, and that is by selection of their representative utterances, selection of that part of the record which contains in a summary way the total thought for which they stood. As great minds are forever increasing in number, even for scholars, for men whose whole time is devoted to this vocation, it becomes necessary to work upon this principle of wise selection. If you cannot read the whole of Tennyson, read some representative part,-"In Memoriam," for example, and the profound and tender experience out of which the poem came; then you will know, if not the whole of Tennyson, yet the stronger and the deeper side of the great poet. If you can read but little of Carlyle, read the three great chapters in "Sartor Resartus," "The Everlasting No," "The Point of Indifference," and "The Everlasting Yea." These three chapters contain the whole of Carlyle's message to the world, his gospel of work and his vision of the meaning of the universe. Few to-day care to read all the writings of Augustine; let one read the opening pages of "The City of God"; the vision there is very great, greater than anything else in the book; there is, too, "The Confessions of Augustine," one of the most precious documents in the world, bringing down from that fifth century of our era the best in one of the greatest souls that ever lived. If you cannot read

all that Paul the Apostle wrote, go with him on his journey to Damascus; stand by him as he receives his vision of the risen Lord; watch the transformation which that vision wrought in his character and career; read those great things in his writings that bear upon this experience. Read all Isaiah if you can, the thirty-nine chapters, which, with a few exceptions, modern scholars attribute to him; read them all if you can ; you will find them all characterized by Robert Burns in his great line, "rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire." If you cannot read all that this prophet has written, take this sixth chapter containing his vision of God. In compressed form you will find there his total philosophy of human life, the outline of his view of man and man's universe. It is to this vision and its relation to all time, especially to our time, that I invite your attention. There are four questions concerning this vision which I will state and try to

answer.

1. Where was Isaiah when this vision came to him? He was in the Temple; as we should say, in church, in the institution of religion. Here we make a great discovery. All places on this earth have not the same value for the human soul. Some places have immense power to provoke certain trains of thought; certain trains of thought return upon certain places to glorify