fluence. Our fine views are like the play of starlight upon polar ice. We are wanting in depth, in seriousness, in sympathy, in greatness of character, in the influence born of the sense of crisis and tragedy.

The Lord Jesus sounded the whole depth of our humanity and rose beyond its highest height. He was a guest at the wedding; He went to the house of death; He was the friend of rosycheeked, bright-eyed children; He was the adoration of idealistic youth; He was the friend of manhood and womanhood under the heat and burden of the day; He surrounded Himself by his sympathy with the victims of inheritance, misfortune, perversity, disease, and evil of every kind; He took them all up into his fellowship and began after that manner the sublime epoch of redemption. It has often. been noticed that in many directions Socrates points the way of the Lord. We see Him at a banquet, eating and drinking with his pupils, listening to their talk about love with coarseness and buffoonery in it, with much in it offensive to a Christian mind, with much in it that must have been offensive to him; he listened, eating and drinking with the rest of them. Then he speaks of love; he takes that universal passion and lifts it till it becomes absorbed in the vision and passion of the eternal loveliness. We see Him again in the tragic side

of life, as given in the "Phædo." There he is, face to face with death; with the mistake, the cruelty, the inhumanity of the world, calm, clear, serene; he lifts the tragedy of the world, partly by his reasoning, but far more by his spirit, into hope in the presence of God.

This is a genuine prophecy of what our Lord does, not for a few eminent disciples, but for all human beings who wait upon his ministry. He goes down into the depths and preaches hope to every soul. Do you know what that means? Are there no young men here this morning who can remember times when they went into collapse, not because they were not well and strong, not because they did not have friends, not because the world was not inviting and full of opportunity for them, but simply because they could see no ground of moral hope, no basis for hope of sovereignty over the courses of life? When that hope came, was it not the coming of God? There are no halleluiah choruses great enough to sound forth the tumult of delight in the soul of the man to whom hope of a redeemed manhood, after the image of Christ, has come.

Does Jesus keep us only in his fellowship? No. The ultimate goal of his thought was the Father. You have the sun and the planets revolving round it; the planets are in fellowship with the great solar luminary upon which they

wait. That is not the whole splendid story. The sun is on a vast, indefinable, mysterious pilgrimage through the infinite depths of space; it is moving onward upon some goal unguessed by the profoundest student of the heavens, and all the planets are on the same pilgrimage, carried forever onward upon that same undefined, undreamt-of end. Thus the disciples of Jesus keep Him company; onward and onward still they fare with Him in his pilgrimage to the God and Father of all. To his disciples Jesus said, "Lo I am with you alway"; here in his presence the redemptive ideal might. Jesus said to the penitent thief, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise"; here again is the redemptive grace of his presence. His pilgrimage covers time and eternity, this world and all worlds; when we join Him in this pilgrimage we are on the way to the eternal beatitude, we are moving to our home in God.

XXVI

THE IDEAL AND THE FACT

"And while Peter thought on the vision the Spirit said unto him, Behold, three men seek thee."

Acts x, 19.

ACCORDING to the Bible the actual world is the field of the ideal. In reference to the Old Testament this faith is set forth in these striking words: "See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount." The ideal is to the actual as the design of the architect is to the mass of material to be raised into the great building. In the New Testament we at once recall our Lord's parable, "The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened." The ideal is the spirit that penetrates, exalts, and turns to new utility and beauty the bare material of the actual world. And here, in the text, the vision of Peter is the ideal. The three men seeking him represent the actual, and these two spheres stand to each other as power and opportunity.

In the presence of this great insight and faith our age is often bewildered. It seems sometimes that there is no path from the ideal world to the

actual or back again from the actual world to the ideal. The words of the apostle, "We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out," are often applied to these two spheres of being. They are set apart; they are independent, without communication, like the two divisions in Hades. In one division are assembled the righteous, in the other the wicked; Lazarus is in bliss and Dives is in torment; neither can go to the other because between them there is a great gulf fixed. Thus the ideal often seems the region in which are assembled our deepest insights, our purest desires, our loftiest longings, and our greatest hopes. The actual world is the place where we sin, where we break down, where we suffer, where we are defeated and die; and between these two regions there seems to be an impassable gulf.

This appears to me the profoundest and the most tremendous doubt in the world of men, the utmost blasphemy against life. Compared with this all other skepticism seems superficial. This doubt goes to the heart of everything and is equal to the denial of God, the denial of spirit in the universe, the denial of spirit in man, the denial of all hope here or hereafter.

The doubt of which I have spoken goes on under our eyes. There is Goethe, the greatest of German poets, lyric and dramatic poet in one, a