confidence and serene hope. Beyond is the infinite, and out into that infinite the soul shall sail to see again the abiding values and splendors of the heart, to note on the tides that draw it onward the welcome of the eternal love and the gracious light that cannot fail.

XX

THE MORAL IDEAL IN CHRIST

"We make it our aim, whether at home or absent, to be well-pleasing unto him."

2 Cor. v, 9.

"To endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life," is said by John Stuart Mill to be about the best that men can do. It would not be easy even for an unbeliever to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, continues Mill, than "to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life." These words occur in Mill's famous remarks about Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth. It is strangely impressive to find this noble, but essentially skeptical, British thinker in the nineteenth century in complete agreement with the apostle to the nations in the first century. The British philosopher says that about the best we can do is to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life, and the apostle says we make it our aim to be found well-pleasing unto him. Two things here call for attention: the end and the aim of the Christian life.

1. There is the end. All endeavor at the reasonable control of life implies an end. There are

some forms of life without conscious end that are nevertheless good. Some people pursue goodness as naturally as a star shines, as a bird sings, as a flower blooms. There are people with music in their nature and it breaks out like mirth, like sunshine through the cloud. There are people so radiantly endowed that to them goodness is play, perpetual delight; as Wordsworth says,—

"Glad hearts, without reproach or blot,
Who do thy will and know it not.”

Nevertheless even here there is an end; not, indeed, in the conscious will, but in the instincts. The lapwing that spends the severe winter months by the Nile, that, when spring comes, flies northward to the British Isles, may not fly in the conscious light of a goal, but the goal is in every beat of its wings, in every pulse of its heart; and so those spirits that are moving from one moral climate to another, from one moral condition to a higher, even if they do not move in the conscious light of an end are yet guided by an end in the moral instincts of their being.

The reasonable control of life;-that is the greatest task to which a human being is called, and it implies an end. Every locomotive that leaves the city has a terminal in view; every ship that clears our harbor has a port in sight; all target practice, whether by land or sea, by army

or by navy, implies a target, and whoever endeavors to control his existence in this world endeavors in the light of an end.

Further, the end is a vast revisional power. The artist's end, the beauty that he beholds revises every piece of work that he does, it revises his nature as an artist; the end which the scientist serves revises his work, it revises his method and his intelligence as a scientist; the end pursued by the business man calls for revision, it calls for the elimination of poor plans, of mistaken notions, of short-sightedness, it calls for perpetual revision. When we come to Christian character, the end here exalts the intellect, purifies and ennobles the heart, greatens in volume and in power the moral will. A people without ends would be a people without standards. What do you desire this country to become? What do you think should be the result of a liberal education? What is your conception of mature human beings? What do you mean by citizenship? What pleasures should be avoided, what pursued? What are the legitimate sources of enjoyment and the illegitimate? We cannot answer these questions unless we have ends, because all our convictions come out of ends. There are no standards when we have no ultimate governing ends; we are blind to the great interests of our people unless we can read their meaning in the light of

great ends. Anything will go as art, anything will go as good citizenship, as good business, as good thinking, as good religion, as good science if we are unable to bring it into the presence of an end and search it and examine it there. A nation without ends is a dismal mob of half-sayage human beings; a civilized people is a people with great ends in the light of which they judge their character and their achievement, in the light of which they are full of vigor and hope.

The Christian end is not an abstract end; it is personal. The end is not properly described as truth; it is truth in life, truth in a personal soul. The end is not goodness, but goodness in a rational being; not beauty, but the harmony of the world singing itself in a conscious, living, loving human spirit. The personality of the end or ideal means an immense gain. Look at a mother, a high-minded, broad-minded, noblesouled mother; think of her among her children and the moralization which they receive from her unconsciously. In the first place she is to them moral illumination; then the path of virtue is a path of delight; the whole influence of the end through her is to engage and to fill the soul with a sense of the beauty of the world, the beauty of the world as the beauty of the Lord our God. Take a great teacher and his influence; take, for example, Luther; look at his fun, his power to