pacity for communion with the Eternal, with an aptitude for the life from God, a being with persistent thoughts, enduring purposes and deathless love; a being with a life that has already survived a thousand shocks, and that is the worthy heir of the endless years. Find the immaterial in the material, the imperishable in the perishable, that which has been constant amid the fleeting; find God in the cloud and in the fire, and immortality will seem the only reasonable faith.

It is a great thing to believe in God with all one's heart. It is a great thing to rise to the grasp of the Christian creed at any point. It calls for the deepest sincerity and earnestness. Humanity, intelligent humanity, is not treated to its faith, as the mother bird treats its helpless brood in the nest, finding the worm and putting it into their open mouths. There are no ready-made clothes for the soul, and no food for the heart of the inactive. The mature bird finds its food either on the wing or by digging; and the human mind must toil, must both dig and soar, if it is to come into the great possession of a rational and living Christian faith.

It is a vast help to faith to remember that permanence is the great note of human greatness. Even in human productions we look for the eternal through the temporal. The picture

that always keeps its charm, the song that is sung by all the generations, the building that even when it has become a ruin maintains its sway over the imagination, the books that are the abiding teachers of mankind, the characters that interest all ages and all peoples these are the productions, these are the men that we call great. The value of a character, a book, an age is to be determined by the mass of the Eternal that there is in it. God's presence made that vagrant cloud and that uncertain fire enduring as this earth, and God's presence determines the worth and lastingness of all things, all productions, and all beings. When we discover that only the works, the thoughts, the characters, and the spirit that transcend time are really worth anything, that only these are the truly great things in human history, we are all the stronger in our stand for the immovable things of the Christian faith.

One of the finest views in Switzerland is obtained from the summit of the Bernina Pass. It is seven thousand six hundred feet high, and from this elevation the entire valley of the Engadine is visible, with the peaks of a hundred mountains ranging from eight thousand to thirteen thousand feet in height. Then in another direction the glorious view extends into Italy, the prospect melting upon the far horizons into an

enchantment of beauty. But to me, as I stood upon this pass, the most impressive sight was not the deep blue of the cloudless sky, nor the sublime summits that rose in stainless white and dazzling brightness into its pure depths, nor the far prospect of combined beauty and grandeur; but the two quiet lakes that stood so near together, separated only by about a hundred feet. So near are they at the first, so far apart are they at the last; for the waters of the one end in the Adriatic and those of the other end in the Black Sea! And all this difference at the end is because of the seemingly slight difference at the beginning. The watershed is between them, and because of that decisive elevation, they can never join, they must forever flow farther and farther apart. That points the great question of life. Where do you begin? On which side of the watershed of being do you live? You may be very near each other at the first, you and your believing friend. He believes in God, and you do not; he believes in disclosing God through this poor earthly life, and you do not; he believes that the spirit of man lives forever, and you do not; and this vastness of your inherent difference is hidden by the fact that in your business, in your neighborhood, in many of your tasks and interests you are so near. You are on one side of this great watershed and he is on the other.

These two lakes that seem so near, at the first, are at last as wide apart as east and west. So great are the antagonisms, so wide are the contrasts, so far away from one another at the end, are the believer and the unbeliever, the devotee of righteousness and the apostle of pleasure, the communicant in the Kingdom of the Eternal and the fugitive among the shadows of time, the worshiper of the living God in Christ, and the disciple of cloud and fire.

IV

THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE

"If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."

PB. CXXXIX, 9-10.

WHEN We look at a piece of noble tapestry, we see at once how much it owes to the figure in it, to its color, its character, its distinction; and in the same way when we examine a specimen of great literature, we perceive at a glance how much the wisdom and the sentiment of that literature are indebted to the imagery in it. We all agree with Edmund Burke, in his contention that a fine sentence should be composed of three parts, a striking truth, a corresponding sentiment, both rendered doubly striking by a beautiful figure; and we recall at once this orator's èxemplification of his canon, when, in the heated political campaign in Bristol, his comrade fell dead at his side, and that immortal figure sprang from Burke's lips, "What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue." In a series of figures bearing upon the evanescence of pleasure, Burke's great contemporary, Robert Burns, has enriched our tongue for all time: