Our glorious Master, Christ, is our end; our aim is to be found, whether present or absent, whether in time or eternity, well-pleasing unto Him! We aim at becoming like Him, so exalted in intellect, so purified in heart, made so great, true, and tender in spirit that when we come into the presence of his soul we shall be found agreeable to his will. That is Christianity.

May that ultimate end of our existence loom in our vision to-day with something of its native and ineffable splendor. May it initiate, develop, direct, and consummate the spiritual energies of our soul! May it through our vision support in steadiness, in unbroken continuity, in deathless extension and growth an aim correspondent with its own beauty and benignity. If we could bring this human world to look at the Lord as those astronomers did at the sun, and aim at Him as they aimed at their object, we should speedily have a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, and the roar and the tumult of brothers in conflict, in the bitterness of deadly feud from end to end of our divided and afflicted world, would forever die away.

XXI

THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL

"Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly

vision."

Acts xxvi, 19.

THE ends for which all men live are visions. Wherever the satisfaction sought is not immediate, wherever the goal is distant, its image at once takes possession of the imagination and there generates the impulse that sustains the achieving activity. When we say that one man works for wealth, another for station, another for learning, another for righteousness, and still another for baseness, we are not clear and we are not thorough in our description. The simple truth is that they all are striving for ends or goals, and these ends or goals are visions. Croesus of old and his type in our own time pursue a vision; the vision is of wealth; still it is a vision. Scaliger, Bentley, Sir William Hamilton seek knowledge; it is the vision of learning, rich, wide, deep, exact, and vast in which they toil. Webster and Clay and Calhoun, so distinguished in public service, so justly famous for achievement, were caught by the vision of station. Cæsar, Cromwell, and Napoleon sought power; they lived and fought in

the vision of empire. So far all men are alike; action is everywhere the issue of vision; Judas and John, in utter contrast as they are in character, are at one here. Both visualize the ends they seek; both live in vision.

Paul stands preeminent among men of vision, because his vision was heavenly and because of his unswerving and passionate pursuit of it to the last breath of life. The character of his vision sets him apart and makes him worthy of consideration; the strength, the continuity, and the poetic passion of his devotion to his ideal lend high distinction to his career. We wish to know about his vision and its value for men to-day.

As we consider this vision of Paul, we shall find in it, I think, a present power, a backward reference, a forward significance; as we look into it, we shall see an immediate experience, a historic reality, a future and universal ideal. Jesus speaks from the unseen; the unseen Jesus who speaks to Saul of Tarsus calls into the vividness of lightning his own life on earth; the unseen Jesus who commissions this new apostle is to be the ideal for him and all men forever.

1. The heavenly vision is first of all a present power, an immediate experience. From the unseen Jesus searched Paul's conscience, sounded the depths of his heart, appealed to his will with reasonable but sovereign power. From the un

seen Paul was arrested; in the presence of the living spirit of Jesus a tempest rose in his life. There his past stood forth branded with shame; there his soul renounced it; there he received new light upon the character and mission of the Lord; there he received power to become a new man, to rise up in the fullness of a new, a tremendous and at the same time a joyous experience. Paul's heavenly vision was the vision of the soul of Jesus living in the unseen and mighty; and it meant an immediate release from error and wickedness, an immediate introduction to right-mindedness, humane feeling, moral power and hope. Paul has made two great discoveries; he has seen the living soul of the Lord and he has seen as never before his own soul.

Here is the vital point in Christianity. It is not first a historic tradition or a vista of the future on earth and in the eternal. It is first of all an appeal to the conscience. It is nothing till it has begun a revolution in the soul to whom it comes. The past is dead, the future is a vain dream till the spirit in man is spoken to by the Spirit of the Lord. When the captain is far out on the high seas, when he has been driven by long, dark, and terrible days under stress of weather, and all at once the clouds lift and the sun breaks forth at noon, the first thing that the captain does is to find at what point in his

voyage he has arrived. Till that point is determined he can say nothing about the port from which he sailed or the harbor whither he is bound. He must have an immediate location of his ship, an immediate experience of light and certainty. Till the soul is arrested in its error, brought to a pause in its selfishness and indifference; till its unworthy character is defined and branded before its eyes, and the sense of the majesty of right, the beauty of holiness, the glory of humane service for ideal ends take possession of the heart; till the appeal from the living Lord in the unseen moves the foundations of being, brings about the great renunciation of all wrong and inhumanity, and the new consecration to the advance of the kingdom of man, the history of Jesus is but a dream and the future reference of his career only poetic fiction. There is no reality in the study of Jesus till He speaks in the present tense, till He is discovered as the moral regenerator and Sovereign of the soul. The zenith is over your head where you stand or sit; the nadir is under your feet. The supreme question is your present relation to the Lord; the eternal height is over you now, the eternal depth is under you.

The study of the Lord is not an academic question; it is not a merely literary or historical study; it is supremely a concern of life. Nothing