of poor human beings. As I struck the moor, the sun was setting. The lonely way lay in the great transfiguring radiance. It became a path of beauty and infinite tender suggestion; a heavenly meaning seemed to beat in the boundless glow; a sense of companionship, not understood then, settled in the heart, delight took the place of loneliness, and the journey that thus lay in the path of the setting sun I could not wish to end.

More than forty years have come and gone since then. Farewells have been spoken to many friends for the last time on earth. The journey has been through much of the beauty of the world, and still the way has been over hill and moor, crag and torrent. The pilgrimage has often seemed a type of the lonely and sorrowful migration of man from the shadows of morning to the gloom of the evening. The happiest experiences have not deafened me to the still sad music of humanity; the evanescence of all things earthly has been a constant refrain in my spirit. Despair and utter heart-break would long ago have undone my days if nothing heavenly had been found to glorify and comfort and protect the precious burden of human love. "The light that never was on sea or land" enfolds the way of every pilgrim. He is traveling in the glow that falls upon time from the Eternal; his path is in the transfiguring presence of the Infinite Love; he has

but to ponder the meaning of the delight that has come to him, the strength that has been given him, the thankfulness, the peace and the hope that have entered his spirit, to know that he is walking with God.

"Who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?"

VIII

THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER

"Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee."

Gen. xi, 1.

OUR first impression on reading these words is that here we have to do with an extraordinary man. We have come upon one of the turningpoints in the fortunes of mankind. Here is a character of great originality. Here is one who is to found a new nation, who is to inaugurate a new era in human civilization, who is to write the first chapter in a new volume of human history, one whose influence and genius are to penetrate to the final chapter in that volume.

Our second impression on reading these words is that there is something of universal application in them, something in them suited to the life of every man; for sooner or later every generation arrives at the hour in which it finds these words ringing in its ear, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee."

Examples are abundant and near at hand. There is the son of privilege who must give

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account of himself to the public conscience; the member of a large family harassed with poverty who while only a boy must go forth to earn his own living; the child of a devout home who has been trained in the most careful way, defended against temptation, shielded from all evil, who now that he has become a man must do battle for himself against the world and stand or fall by the might of his own arm. Nearer still to our subject is the person whose ancestry has been a deteriorating ancestry. The hour arrives when this man feels that if the descent of his line is to be discontinued, he must become an Abram and renounce his past. For one reason or another, therefore, all serious persons on arriving at manhood are met with the austere imperative, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." To millions of our fellow-citizens that imperative came; they are here because they were moved by a divine intimation and a vast hope; their first great type in the Old Testament is this fascinating man Abraham.

Abraham was a mighty idealist; he was an illustrious pioneer among idealists; and in order that we may gain some sense of his value in the evolution of revelation I shall ask and try to answer several definite questions.

1. What do we mean by an idealist? We use

the word continually and not always with a clear and sure sense of its significance. Let us try to attach to our use of it a fixed and intelligible meaning. In a general way we may say that the idealist is one who is dissatisfied with the world as it is, and who has a vision of a better world that may be. He is one who has drawn an indictment, an enlightened and wise indictment, against the world as it stands, and who has framed a wise, enlightened programme for the world as it should be. He is one who is sick at heart over the falsehood, the iniquity and the inhumanity in the world as it is, and who lives in a great and splendid vision of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. All men are idealists who are dissatisfied with the world as it is, and who have a definite picture of what they would like the world to be. All men are wise idealists who from honest and adequate insight are dissatisfied with the world as it is, who from honest and adequate insight discern what the world ought to be.

Two examples will, I hope, add clearness to this general statement. Till the middle of the last century British opinion about Oliver Cromwell was generally expressed in these rather uncomplimentary terms, "regicide," "hypocrite," "universal villain." Abuse almost unlimited had been heaped upon Cromwell for two centuries.