regret it when we see the sun descending in the west, we shall not be sorry when we feel that at length the evening is come. Our strength will be spent, and our eager passion for life will have abated. Slowly in the fading light the great change will pass over our thoughts and feelings, the ideals proper to youth and to manhood, the auroral fires and forms that woke our passion in the morning and sustained it at noon will give place to other and better things, and our hearts will be visited with visions out of the glory of sunset. The Transfiguration will come of its own sweet accord; we shall be as happy to sleep as once we were to wake, to be at rest as one day we were to be at work.

Death was never meant to be to man the horror that it so often is. It was meant as an answer to the well-spent and finished life, whether that life is long or short. Man is sent forth unto his work until the evening. He is sent forth to his great moral task in this world; he is sent forth full of aspirations and power. When the power is gone and the day's work done, the evening comes in the peace and beauty of the Lord. All our anxiety should be until the evening; when that has come, we should have none. We have toiled the entire day, the opportunity is here ended, and our strength and desire are spent. The release is a boon; the rest is from God.

"The storm is changed into a calm,
At his command and will;

So that the waves which raged before
Now quiet are and still!

"Then are they glad, because at rest,
And quiet now they be;

So to the haven he then brings

Which they desired to see."

The final suggestion in the text is not of rest, but a prophecy of new activity. The evening and the morning were the first day, and ever since evening has been followed by morning; the period of repose by a new opportunity for achievement. This last suggestion comes to us in the evening telling us of the new day which waits for our renewed power. This succession of days and nights, this marvelous alternation of activity and repose, this dual existence wherein we wake to sleep, and sleep to wake, carries us into the great thought of the endless life. Never since the sun first rose and set upon the world has this succession been broken. Never has there been a day upon which there did not succeed an evening, and never an evening and night upon which there did not rise a new day. Never since human beings appeared upon this planet has there been a man who did not have some opportunity and whose opportunity did not come to an end; never has there been a human life that eventually was not overtaken by death. The day of life and the

evening of death are universal facts. But we must believe that never yet has death come that a new sphere of being was not sighted, that new regions of opportunity did not dawn, that fresh powers of faith and of service were not bestowed. As upon the night rises the new day, so we must believe that upon death rises the fresh and radiant opportunity.

It is this faith that makes life solemn and beautiful. Whatever may be the character of our environment, whether our fortune be good or bad, the weather stormy or serene; on whichever level God has appointed for us our task; however soon and with whatever surprises and regrets the evening may drop down upon us, we can take it all bravely and thankfully if only we are sure of restored strength and the new and more glorious to-morrow. The solemn and yet cheerful beauty of evening after a laborious day lies here. The retrospect is on the whole gladdening, the history is on the whole good; and the prospect is all bright with promise, the future is full of the deepest inspiration. Between this history and this hope the toiler seeks repose; between this past and this glorious future the servant of God lies down to pleasant dreams.

XXIX

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS

LIFE

"Ye therefore shall be perfect as your heavenly

Father is perfect."

Matt. v, 48.

THE entire body of the teaching of Jesus Christ is in the atmosphere of the endlessness of man's life. Few are the words of Jesus upon this subject, because it is present as an illuminating spirit in all his utterances. We hear Him speak of the universe as his Father's house and of the abodes in that house for all the children of his Father; we note with intensity of interest his words to the penitent thief, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise"; we ponder his great answer to the Sadducees, "God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live unto him"; but we fail utterly to apprehend the teaching of the Lord if we conclude that these great and precious utterances are all that He has said concerning the destiny of man.

While He spoke his parables of the kingdom of God on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; while He fixed the solemn attention of his disciples on the wise man who built his house upon

the rock, and on the foolish man who built his house upon the sand, as He sat on the Mount of Beatitudes and watched the sweet industry of the birds of heaven and the lilies of the field blooming far and wide; while He told the multitudes in Judæa the story of the lost son in the gloom of overshadowing hills, the Syrian sunshine was flooding his outward world. In the same way his whole teaching is in the sunshine and glory of the endless life of man. God is our Father in heaven ; we are his family in the earth; the link between our lives and God cannot be broken; for weal or for woe we live here and there, for happiness or misery our existence is forever. That happiness is the inseparable concomitant of worth, moral worth; that misery is the evil issue of a cruel and inhuman soul. In the Syrian sunshine the Master spoke his great words, the sunshine which all felt while no one said anything about it; in the splendor of man's endless destiny as the child of God, Jesus uttered his whole message. Seldom did He dwell upon it because it was the universal and radiant atmosphere of the entire body of his ideas.

It sometimes happens that words that to our first consideration seem wildly extravagant turn out to be to our profounder thought the sanest and the purest wisdom. We have an example in the text. At first sight what could be more extravagant,