water out of the heart of the rock on the mountain-side, its playful, joyful, vigorous rush down the mountain-side, its struggle with all sorts of obstacles, till it becomes a river, and sweeps on and forever on to the sea that is its goal. It is this moral ongoing that gives worth to our life, the sense that we are bound for the Eternal, and childhood, youth, manhood, and old age are but the different phases of the river that seeks the infinite sea.

3. Again, Paul's ideal provided for the continuous purification of his mind. Our conceptions of ourselves are poor things, and when we hold ourselves to the mere estimates of to-day, we hold ourselves cheap, we insult our humanity. Wordsworth reminds us that we are greater than we know; and herein is the glory of our being. Our nature stretches in all directions, sinks into the abysses, rises into the heights; and so we need the expanding conception, the purified ideal. You see a child trying to understand its nature as its mother does, as its father does, trying to climb up to the mature thought of its existence out of its childish thought; you see a student struggling with his subject, trying to abandon his own poor conception of it and to struggle up into the conception held by the accomplished teacher and thinker; and in the same way you see the disciple Paul in the presence of his

Master, trying to understand himself, sure that he has not yet understood himself as Christ understands him and resolving to pursue that flying goal forever.

Is there anything finer than this daily life in the presence of a sovereign Master who knows what we do not, who understands the meaning of our life as we do not understand it, receiving from him every year vaster and sounder thoughts and turning upon the fact of human existence a purer and a more trustworthy mind?

4. Finally, Paul was a man of hope because of his Christian ideal. He believed that when God sets before a man an ideal, He defines for him his task as a moral being and assures him of the conditions without which the task cannot be done. The Greek Plato believed in the immortality of the soul as surely as any man ever believed in it, and he believed in consequence of his vision of the endless errand of the human mind in the search for truth. Kant, one of the great masters of modern wisdom, believed in immortality with a great and serious belief because he saw that an endless opportunity is indispensable for an infinite task. Jesus, when he set his ideal for his disciples, "Ye shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," provided for the realization of that ideal endless life in the eternal world. In each instance, the ideal brought

hope; in the case of our Lord the ideal filled the serious and serving brotherhood of believers with a hope that turned night into day.

In the light of the ideal, our God is seen to be the God of hope. Our moral ideals, our Christian ideals are the imperfect images of his design in our being, his purpose concerning our life. God gets his deep-laid and mighty moral plan into the mind through the glowing forms of the imagination; in the splendid pictures and gorgeous banners of the moral idealist, He gives intimations of his infinite purpose and loving kindness for our race; in the vast and blazing scenery of the Christian imagination working upon Christian duty, He brings to an apocalypse his redeeming decree, his endless saving grace. As God has set in the infinite spaces the stars in all their pure and wild beauty as the visible and multitudinous tokens of his power, so He has set in the heaven of the human imagination the moral ideals of mankind, in all their stern and terrible loveliness, as the enduring and burning witnesses of his character of infinite honor and love. When you see these moral ideals working in childhood, gleaming now and then through the mists of animal want and childish interest, when you note them in youth coming to a tremendous disclosure of their power, flaming forth their indignation at sensuality and brutality of every kind and brand

ing the young soul with the moral order of the world; when you observe them in mature men and women, looking with grief and disdain upon their slackness, their sordidness, their desertion of their high calling and urging them with the terrible intensity of moral light and fire to return to their duty as men ; when you behold them in old age creating an infinite silence, filling the gloom of evening with illumination and peace, opening the gates and swinging back the everlasting doors that the weary and the heavy-laden may enter the eternal rest, "put off thy shoesfrom off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Here you may behold the open heavens; here you may look into the supernatural and divine; here you may watch something more glorious than sunrise, the dawn of the great and terrible day of the Lord, the advent of the Kingdom of Christ, the coming of the Holy Ghost.

III

THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL

"And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light."

Ex. XIII, 21. NOTHING could be more evanescent than cloud and fire; the one vanishes and the other burns itself out. Both are types of the perishable in life, in literature, in history, in faith, in being. God was in them, and so these pillars of cloud and of fire became symbols of the presence of the eternal in the most fleeting forms of our world. In the twofold significance of the words of the text, in the adequate and inadequate use of it as a type, we shall find ourselves in the presence of some of the most fundamental antagonisms of existence. For, after all, there are but two absolutely contrasted and eternally incompatible views of the universe, human life, and history; all the controversies between rival sects of believers are almost petty, are certainly incidental, compared with the great and solemn battle which all believers wage with all unbelievers. What were the small differences which the early Christians had among themselves compared with the mighty difference which existed between