our bone, in our tissue; it is moving within us, a spirit of life; yet it is an infinite reserve. The respiratory organs of the whole race could never exhaust this infinite benignity that is roundabout us, this excess, this reserve of life. That is God. God in the soul of the world, all eye, all ear, all judicial integrity, Infallible Watcher and Rewarder of men. Beyond that there is the infinite excess of deity, the boundless moral reserve, the eternal transcendent God. This is the message of Isaiah in its completeness. Do you wonder that his race called him great, that all men in all generations have called him great? He is great who first saw God filling the vast concave of human life, who saw beyond the power of humanity to contain God, the eternal excess of integrity and benignity. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, made one of the profoundest remarks in all history upon this double aspect of the divine being; in dwelling upon it we are dwelling upon the central thought of the last hundred years of the deepest minds in Europe and in America. This Greek philosopher says that God is in the world as a general is in his army, through the discipline which he has put into his army; again He is apart from the world as the general is apart from the army. You here see immanence and transcendence each completing the other; the two great ideas of God belong together; God is

in the world and He is an infinite excess beyond the world; God is near to us; "Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet"; the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul, the life of our life, with whom we are in dialogue every day; God is the Transcendent, the Eternal, the Ineffable. How near, and how far! His hand is in our hand, his face is turned toward our face; yet his glory is beyond finite thought.

4. Our fourth question is, For what end was this vision given? Perhaps we may recall the course of thought through the simplicity of these four questions. Where? How? What? For what? The last question is, as I have said, for what? For the renewal of personal and national character; that was the end of the vision. This end had two immediate results upon the prophet and upon his people. The first was despair; utter prostration and woe in the presence of the glorious ideal hung up before him in his vision of God. "Woe is me," he said, "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." Here is one of the greater experiences of the sublime souls of our race. The first vision of the ideal brings despair; the vision is crushing, it is an avalanche of woe. Paul cries, "O wretched man that I am"; the publican in the Temple

whispers, "God be merciful to me a sinner"; Peter cannot bear the sense of the sinless One,

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Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." The initial experiences of every deephearted Christian are far from unmixed joy; they are clouded, they are touched with bitter grief; his heart is often filled with woe. That Eternal Ideal seems such an impossible Master; we can never be what that glory exacts and commands us to be. Think of the number of our fellow-men who go down here, who are morally broken-hearted; they lost all confidence, they could no longer look up. Look at them as they go through the world, each one sighing, "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 Eternal Ideal."

There is another aspect to the mystery; the end for which the vision came has a further influence upon the prophet beautifully told in his own great words. One of the seraphim heard this wail of woe from the prophet's heart, this cry of despair as he fell in the presence of the Eternal Ideal; as the minister and servant of the Ideal, this seraph took a coal from off the altar and touched the prophet's lips. The touch of fire is the symbol of the touch of the Ideal; as fire purifies, so the simple vision of the Ideal

brings at last purity and hope. An apostle in Patmos had a vision of an angel standing in the sun, a moral being in the heart of moral fire, a man perpetuated and purified by the ideal in which he stood.

The experience of despair is deep and true, but it is not the entire history of the prophetic soul. Keep your eyes aloft; keep your mind open. Dare to look upon the Eternal Ideal; through despairing love, devotion, penitence, tears, it will sweep its holy fire in upon you and surround you till at last you shall be that spiritual splendor in the heart of infinite spiritual splendor. Christ in you the hope of glory; God over all blessed forever; the pledge of humanity's redemption, the eternal call of the Highest; this is our faith.

XV

THE IDEALIST REJECTED

"Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people."

JER. IX, 1.

JEREMIAH is the most pathetic and the most beautiful figure in the entire company of the Hebrew prophets. His fundamental character seems to have been an extreme and exquisite sensitiveness combined with the utmost conscientiousness issuing in the sternest fidelity to duty. Four great feelings appear to have coursed through his life from the beginning to the end. The first was his feeling of the unapproachable glory, the transcendent loveliness and impossibility of the moral ideal. He seemed in its presence a child called to do the work of a man. The ideal was beautiful, it was adorable, but it seemed to him impossible. His second feeling was of the enormous and unspeakable iniquity of his time. His people were drunk with iniquity. They were devoted to wrongdoing. They ran toward an evil goal like flooded water-courses. His third feeling was the sense that he was foreordained to failure as a prophet of the Lord. The prophets who would speak pleasant words to a people devoted