two thousand miles of the Mediterranean were breaking in tremendous billows upon the beach. Next morning when I arose the sea was still. As I walked along the shore I noticed the sand white and fine, the pebbles smooth and beautiful. The sand and the pebbles had won their character not alone from that storm, but from countless other storms. Then I understood what the psalmist meant when he cried, "All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me." Perhaps he had listened to the mighty forerunners of the storm to which I had listened; perhaps in the sand and the stones, refined and polished under the pounding and grinding of the terrible sea, he beheld an image of the wild tragic tides of the world and their power to create values for eternity even when they seem to overwhelm and crush the souls of men.

This world is not an organism for torture, but for the manufacture of character; for the production of the instincts, capacities, and longings out of which great character comes. The agony is there; it is there in contradiction, heartbreak, blackness of darkness, death; but the issue is the morning, the calm light, the still sea, and the purified heart of man. Who are these and whence came they? These are they that came out of the great tribulation; they were made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light by the

tragic beauty of the world. Widen your vision of this enterprise of the Holy Ghost till you include all peoples, all ages, all types of human experience; till the race of man in historic and prehistoric time is within the compass of your intelligence. The earth will then seem to you God's great gymnasium for the creation of moral capacities and values in the souls of men; and eternity will stand forth as another, similar, grander process working for the same end. Bliss and woe are here; bliss and woe are beyond, the indispensable servants of enlightenment and worth. Open your heart to-day to some of the things that are going on under God's government every moment; pain and sorrow issue in death in one unending process:

"The souls did from their bodies fly,

They fled to bliss or woe;

And every soul it passed me by,

Like the whizz of my crossbow."

This is what you hear, and on a scale too vast for words. What shall we do with it? Turn it into a guide down into the depths; convert it into eyes wherewith we may see and understand something of the dark and terrible process that issues in moral worth, in the capacity for moral worth. This is the world as tragedy; this tragedy creates values in souls for time and for eternity.

In the Apostles' Creed we read of Jesus, "He

descended into hell," descendit ad inferno; no words could more fittingly symbolize the comprehensiveness of the Lord's understanding heart. While on the earth He descended into the darkest human lives till He came to the light that is older than darkness. The tragedy in the lives of publicans and harlots was woe to Him, but it was a woe under the sovereignty of his Father. He beheld the rich young ruler who had kept all the commandments from his youth, and He loved him; He said with a profounder accent of sympathy to a penitent woman, "Go into peace." Jesus looked upon a world in wreck, and aside from complaisant hypocrites He turned eyes of pity and hope upon every sort of sinful man and woman. In the depths of sin He saw the suffering and the ineffectual struggle to be free. His soul read the divine in man's world as that world lay in wickedness; He entertained the vision of man's infinite worth to God, as that vision came up from the abysses of abused love and contradicted hope; and that insight drawn from the midnight of the life of our kind He glorifies in the message that He brings straight from his Father; that insight He sanctions by his sublime life; that insight He attests by his victory over death.

XXIV

PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE

"That as Peter came by, at the least his shadow might overshadow some one of them. Acts v, 15.

KNOWLEDGE, power, personality; these are the deepest sources of man's influence over man. Ideas count for much, true ideas; power-that is, ideas filled with vitality and purposecounts for more; personality, the central and often unconscious reality of the spirit, counts most in the influence of noble human beings upon one another. We thank the man who gives us the light of thought, but we are not satisfied with this gift. We are grateful to the leader who puts his character into his teaching and yet we cry out for something more. We rejoice in the teacher and inspirer whose soul, through the whole atmosphere and silence of life, wields a heavenly influence upon our souls. We look at some great planet shining out of the deepening dusk of evening; we behold there light, power, beauty; we consider some great prophet of the Christian faith, and we find in him ideas, ideas in action, and beyond them the beauty of a tender and lofty soul.

Such a soul was Peter. We seek in vain either in his teaching or in his character for the source of his best influence. He had rich sympathies; he was endowed with the attractive grace of the humanities; there was within him a soul of honor and of tenderness that moved men and helped them. They longed to be where he was; to forget themselves in the play of his personality; to feel upon them the healing shadow of his soul.

1. Here I think we have the revelation of a law in the life of man, in the character of Christ, in the nature of God; the last and finest thing in the disciple, in the Master, and in our Father in heaven is the ideal grace.

For this ideal grace we look in our heroes. France has recently given a national illustration of this contention. Napoleon has lost the supreme place in the imagination of Frenchmen; a scientist who lived to heal human diseases and mitigate human woes took the warrior's vacant throne. There is intellect in Napoleon, there is power in him; but there is no grace of spirit. We read our national history by this sovereign instinct. Alexander Hamilton was a greater intellect than Abraham Lincoln; Daniel Webster was a mightier intelligence. In both these statesmen there is more light and more might than in Lincoln; but they lack the crowning grace, the ideal spirit. We compare Martin Luther and John