that God has made us for ends greater than we know. "My soul is athirst for God, the living God"; there is one note of man's greatness. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be "; there is the other. The heavenly vision is at once the rapture and the despair of the soul; it sees and pursues but cannot overtake the awful gladness. So we pursue the horizon line; we never can touch it, because as we move it moves; but our pursuit is not therefore in vain, for in this way we are led home.

Home to God Paul's vision brought him, home through a world of care, trial, suffering, and service, home to the fulfillment of life's highest hope. Home to God our vision of Christ will bring us, home through the wild and stormy years, home after the toil and the fever of life in time, home when our day's work is done. We have seen his star in the east. We cannot approach and seize that heavenly splendor; but we may follow its light and be led by that light to the Infinite Tenderness and Peace.

XXII

THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT

"But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all." Gal. IV, 26.

PAUL sees before him two Jerusalems, one that is above and one that is under; one that is free and one that is in bondage; one that is bound to pass utterly away and one that has the certain assurance of permanence. Best of all, he sees that the Jerusalem that is above, that is free, that is everlasting, is the mother of us all. Nothing could better voice the sentiments of all true Americans to-day than these words of the great-hearted Jew who became a Christian. There are before us to-day two nations: one that is from above and one that is from beneath; one that is free and one that is in the servitude of wickedness; one that we believe is under sentence of doom and one that has the promise of permanence and final ascendancy. But best of all, the nation that is from above, that is free and prophetically victorious, is the mother of us all. We come, then, to the great message of the text, feeling that it is pertinent to the needs of this hour.

1. The first thing in the apostle's words is the vision of an ideal Jerusalem. He was fond of history; no one in that age had anything like so profound a sense of it. He loved to go back to the migration of the first Hebrew ; to repeat the history of Israel under Moses; to dwell upon the great work that God had done for his people in the past; to mark off the history of his nation as in a profound and peculiar sense the history of the revelation of God to man. He knew the annals of Jerusalem by heart. No Jew of his time had read with a deeper thrill of joy of David's capture of the city, of his transformation of it; no one had surveyed with more patriotic satisfaction what had been glorious in the reigns of subsequent kings, whatever had been mighty in the utterances of the great succession of prophets. The heroic associations and immortal memories that gathered about the actual Jerusalem had more power over his heart than they possessed for any other.

Still, he felt that the history had been poor. There was an aboriginal promise behind it all, within sight of which, in the actual development of the nation, it had never come. There were impulses in the national heart deeper and diviner than any historic expression that they had yet received; there was a vision in the mind of the great prophetic leaders of Israel that had never

attained anything like embodiment in the life of the people. Therefore, in the interest of what was deepest in history he turned away from it; in behalf of what was noblest in the actual he turned toward the ideal. So far the entire record of his nation had been a failure—a failure to utter in its life the revelation of truth and brotherhood made to it.

This seems to me the inevitable position for the Christian patriot in America to-day. He is more impressed than other men by the actual achievements upon these shores; by the landing of the Pilgrims, by the advance of colonial life; by the Declaration of Independence, the battle for inalienable rights to a victorious issue and the organization of the government; by the swift and wonderful development of the country's resources, the successful struggle to maintain the unity and integrity of the nation, and the settlement of the gigantic moral question of slavery; by the concurrent growth of schools, colleges, and universities; by the deepening and spreading power of Christianity as expressed in a thousand different agencies; and by the great intellects, the great characters, the great servants that have been our guides. The Christian patriot can see a light in the silver stars of the old flag and a depth in its crimson bars visible to no other eyes. He better than all others can estimate

the inspiration that has worked in the consciousness of our people, the moral energy needed to bring us where we are, the suffering involved, and the magnificent careers that, through this tremendous discipline, have been given to the country and the world. There is not a single noble tradition in Old Virginia or in Old Massachusetts that he does not cherish, no great name from Washington to Lincoln that he does not venerate, no battle for righteousness in the whole history that does not set his heart on fire. The Christian patriot sees more to honor and admire in our history than any other man; the whole past is to him deeper, richer, more august, more divinely tender than to any other.

Nevertheless, he is profoundly dissatisfied with what it has been, with what it is to-day. The dream of the Pilgrim burns like an immortal daybreak in the beginning of our history, and the full day has not yet come. The vision embodied in the Declaration of Independence is still an ideal unrealized. The profound and noble ideas that lie at the basis of our political institutions have so far received no such expression as they must have. The deepest and divinest forces in the consciousness of our people have had, as yet, no utterance worthy of them. And, therefore, we turn away from what has been to what shall be; from the actual to the ideal