One of our number has been suddenly taken from us who was never without this gift and who lived his rarely beautiful life in the constant exercise of it. He was not slothful in business; he was also fervent in spirit. He took up his share of the burden of giving laid down by his honored father, and he bore it with steadfast step and the sense of privilege to the end. He carried in all the instincts and forces of his nature the humanity of business, the obligation of wealth, the spirit of service, the refinements of the Christian heart, and notwithstanding his reserve the genius of friendship, and in spite of his humility, the sense of the Eternal. His death in his prime is a calamity not only to his family but also to this church of his fathers, to the entire community, and to all the causes that good men carry in their heart. To those who knew him even at a distance and but slightly, he embodied signal refinement and evident honor; to those who knew him intimately and who saw him in one after another of the finer and more serious experiences of his life, the image that alone is adequate for the expression of their admiration and love is given in the words spoken of Stephen as he stood before the Council, they "saw his face as it had been the face of an angel."

He has joined the great company of pure

1 Wolcott Howe Johnson.

spirits that have gone to God from this church. Our first feeling is of loss and the paralysis that comes with it; our second feeling is that we have not lost them; their character is part of our strength; their presence with us is one of the certainties of our faith and we address them in gratitude and hope,—

Ye, like angels, appear

Radiant with ardor divine!

Ye alight in our van; at your voice
Panic, despair, flee away.

Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, reinspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,,
Follow your steps as you go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the city of God.

XXV

THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL

"And it came to pass, as he sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples."

Matt. ix, 10.

THE perfect religion, according to a great German poet, must blend in its spirit three reverences: there must be reverence for what is above the worshiper, there must be reverence for what is on the moral level of the worshiper, and there must be reverence for what is beneath him. This great insight goes to the very heart of religion, and it is verified abundantly and beautifully by our Christian faith. We look up to the Lord Jesus, to the untraveled heights of his moral greatness; we look up to the God and Father of Jesus, to his infinite compassion, to his eternal love; we look round us upon the men and women occupying the same moral level with ourselves and we revere the great human nature that we wear; we look beneath us into the regions of sin, shame, and woe, and we note there, with awe, the possibility of climbing from the lowest depths to the utmost heights, and in that amazing possibility we behold the presence of God. Christianity unveils to us the heights: it reveals to us the

great tableland where normal men and women live; it uncovers the depths, and in each way it brings us a new and tremendous sense of God.

The redemptive ideal is the last and the most beautiful motive in the Gospel of Jesus. In a true sense we have all gone astray from the right way and we need to be recovered. This ideal of recovery of the lost is set forth by our Lord with the utmost tenderness, the utmost beauty and power, in his three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. The sheep is not in the fold, it is in a strange environment, it is exposed to fatal danger, it must be sought till it is found and brought back; the coin is not out of existence, but it is lost to the uses of the household and the house must be swept diligently till that piece of money is found and once more put to the high uses of family life; the son is in the far country away from the true sphere of his being, and the father, with his great passion of fatherly love, must wait and must believe that his fatherly heart and home have power over the filial soul of the lost boy to bring him to himself and to bring him back. There is nothing in the teaching of the world comparable to that. Here is a purpose that admits of no eternal waste in the universe, a programme that sees no impossibilities before it, that seeks to reconcile the impure with the pure, a

humanity damaged in the tragic processes of sin with the perfect character of God.

What an amazing hold the redemptive ideal of Christianity has taken upon the world. What moral hope it has created in the heart of multitudes of men who had long abandoned all expectation of good for themselves. Not only has it created hope among outcasts; it has sustained men face to face with their highest ideals. For what saith the idealist when he is genuine? "Woe is me, for I am undone; I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and mine eyes have seen God the Lord of Hosts." Let any man have that vision and read his life in the light of it, and we shall find that the first note in his experience is despair.

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Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord"; that is the cry of another despairing idealist. It is the shallowness of the world that accounts for the absence in it of the sense of sin 1; it is man's moral triviality that makes him content with his goodness.

We have in the text a simple, natural and an impressive presentation of the influence of the redemptive ideal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus gives a banquet and invites publicans and sinners to eat with Him. Let us see if we can discern the influence at work here and the two chief spheres of experience in which it moves.