discovery is chiefly of Peter's midnight state of mind hitherto "but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him." Thus Peter's vision ran into the mould of the actual world.

What Peter needed most was enlightenment and breadth. This he got intellectually through the vision; when he carried the vision into action he was truly an enlightened and broadened man and this was the course of his life from that day to the day of his death.

For ourselves, what shall we say? Your ideal is trust in God, and your life is surrounded with perplexities. Be sure your ideal is your power and these perplexities your opportunity. Break through them as a man breaks through a troop and leaps over a wall. Your ideal is your personal honor and you are confronted with terrible temptation; but from the morning of time who ever had such an ideal without being so confronted? Take your ideal and stand by it, resisting unto blood, striving against sin. Your ideal is one of sympathy with your kind; go out into the great world in its agony and bloody sweat and pour your sympathy into its wounds, and you will see how the ideal finds its home in the world as God has made it. The ideal is in truth a prophet of the possibilities of manhood in every emergency of life. A day's work for a day's pay: there is

your ideal and there is your actual, side by side. Goods up to the level of the mutual understanding of the buyer and the seller; there is your ideal in your actual world. The products of the farm, the mine, the factory, and the shop answering to the contract made; again there is your ideal in your actual. Wriggle out of your contract and you are not an honest man; stand by it and you are a triumphant idealist. The world abandoned by the ideal is the world delivered over to Satan and his followers; it is the Devil's world and not man's.

So long as we keep these two spheres, the one as servant and the other as master; so long as we toil at that problem, the universe is on our side. There is only one way out of the labyrinth; follow the clue and you will emerge; refuse to follow the clue and you never can emerge. Life is a labyrinth, and the only way that leads out of it is the shining moral ideal. "Deal justly, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God,"

that is one form of the clue; "seek first God's kingdom and righteousness," that is another form; "let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus," who had a sense of his sonhood to God and became the supreme servant of man. That is still another form of the great Christian clue to the labyrinth of life.

On the whole, and in the long run, the actual

world is conformed to the service of the ideal. There is the river Rhone, one of the most fascinating rivers of Europe. It rises in the Rhone Glacier, nearly six thousand feet above the sealevel, forges its way downward, through one difficulty after another; flows onward with the Bernese Alps on the north and the Lepontine and Pennine Alps on the south; loses itself for fortyfive miles in the great Lake of Geneva, emerges with greater might, sweeps round the southern spur of the Jura Mountains, winds through the famous city of Lyons, and like one who has gained his freedom it rolls on, silent and triumphant to its goal in the Mediterranean.

You may talk of the boulders in the path of the stream, the spurs of the mountains that turn it this way and that, the mighty ranges that crowd and determine its course; you may speak of its submarine life as it shoots through Lake Leman; you may dwell on all its windings and turnings and distresses as much as you please, but these are all incidents. From its source to the sea, over all those five hundred and four miles, the earth is in favor of the river; it cannot be resisted, it cannot be denied its goal.

That is life. It takes its rise in God; it has the power of that elevation evermore behind it. It meets temptations, sorrows, difficulties, trials, temporary defeats, submarine tragedies on the

way; but from first to last the world, the universe is in favor of the man who is the servant of the kingdom of God. And this is one of the great meanings of Palm Sunday. Jesus had one day of absolute triumph and that one day was the revelation of the structure of the human soul through all time; the channel was laid bare in the light of that triumphant day in which Christ's Gospel was to run, have free course and be glorified. There are few doubts that cause me much trouble; our doubts are, for the most part, incident to the finiteness of man. There is, however, one doubt that means death to manhood, — that is the denial to the soul of power to carry into life the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is not a mere doubt; it is a lie born of the brutal experience of the world, and every honest man must stand out against it as its sworn, eternal foe because of the interests of his own humanity and the humanity of his kind.

The vision to-day is matched by the three men waiting at the door to show us the path to service. The vision is the ideal; the ideal is the final resistless power. The actual world is opportunity; in opportunity the actual world waits upon and supplicates the ideal for freedom, exaltation, and peace. The ideal and the actual belong together in sacramental union: “ What God hath joined together let not man put asunder.”

XXVII

THE POSTPONED IDEAL

"Until the day dawn."

Pet. 1, 19.

THESE words are poetry, and like all great poetry they carry in them a philosophy of man's life and of the wild, infinite universe in which that life is set. They reveal the attitude of a disciple of the Lord Jesus living in the first half of the second century of our era. He had found something great, something inexpressibly precious. It was his duty to hold that treasure fast and his duty was illumined by a great hope. Everything within him, everything about him, was unsatisfactory; the ideal of life and the world was a postponed ideal.

It is worth while for us to look at this postponed ideal through the mood of this ancient disciple of the Lord, and guided by the exquisite poetry of his words.

1. In the first place, this man was living in the twilight of existence. Gloom overhung his entire world. He was able to make out something about the reality of God, the truth and the power of the Lord Jesus in whom he believed, the spirituality of his own human nature, the moral