The life that would be fruitful seeks showers as well as sunshine.

Kindness makes all kin.

All we get from heaven we owe to earth.

Pain is a small price to pay for the joy of sacrifice.

He who gives on feeling generally begrudges in fact.

Every loss met by love leads to gain.

The long look within ourselves will cure us of a lot of impatience with other folks.

The last person to enter heaven will be the one whose religion has all been in the first person singular.

We often talk a good deal about the salvation of souls in order to escape service for the salvation of society.

Much that is called orthodoxy is scepticism at heart, fear to examine the foundations lest there are none.

XV

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

Religion ought to be the most natural, desirable, and attractive thing to man, for it simply stands for the development of the best in us, the coming into the full and rich heritage that is ours as spiritual beings, and the realization of our highest possibilities of character and service. He who ignores religion is cutting himself off from the best and most beautiful possibilities in his life.

Some have talked of the necessity of making religion attractive. It does not have to be made attractive; there is nothing more desirable than the peace, the power, and prosperity of the real life which it confers. It is the imitation, the false and prejudiced presentation of religion that men endeavour to dress up attractively. In that they never succeed, for cramping the soul and twisting the intellect ever are opposed by the best in us.

From the caricature of religion we turn with loathing. Mummeries and mockeries, fads and forms leave us empty and impatient. The heart of man goes out to things fair, lovely, joyous, and uplifting, and they who find no God in the elaborate sermon or the service in the church somehow are thrilled with the feeling of the divine and inspiring in the woods and field and mountains.

All things good, all things attractive and lovely, uplifting and sublime have but one source. They touch our hearts because they come from the heart of all being; they reach our spirits because they are spiritual. Deep calls unto deep when the divine in man answers to the divine in the world without, in human affections, in noble aspirations, and in glorious deeds.

Too long have we believed that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with its glowing riches and bounty dropping daily from His hand.

It would be safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord—that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and beauty far beyond our dreams.

It is a good thing to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to take them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world good in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich our lives and lead them out in fullness of joy. Why should not we, like the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of the gladness of living.

Character may need for its full development the storms and wintry blasts of life, but it needs just as truly and just as much the sunshine, the days when the heart goes out and joins in the song of nature, when something leaps within us at the gladness of being alive, and we drink in of the infinite love that is over all.

Just as the sun seems to call the flowers out of the dark earth and draw out their beauty, calls forth the buds and brings the blossom into perfect fruit, so there is a spirit of divine life in our world calling us out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful. Man needs not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy impulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.

The beauty of holiness is the beauty of character. It is the adjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength and harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of praise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness, of love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.

Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating; cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other worlds.



THE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS

Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.

We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has been waiting close by our door all the time.

He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart, he falls by the way.

The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even now attainable.

Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have.

He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this day, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees all the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most High only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future.

No man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of his next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting food. The soul of man never can find its fullness through either history or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this living, pulsating, matter-of-fact present.

This world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are content with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and fail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day. The better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he can and securing all the good he can for his own day.

We need to give up the plan of saving the world by the piety of postponed pleasures and to find the fullness of life in the present, to get below the surface of things and discover life's real riches, to interpret this daily toil and struggle, and all this world of ours, in terms of the divine and infinite.

How much it would mean to our lives if we might learn, instead of sighing for the impossible, to get all the sweetness and joy that is in the things we have, how rich we would find the common lot to be, how many things that now seem dreary and empty would bloom into new beauty. In a child's smile, a wild flower's fragrance, a glint of sunlight, things possible to all, we would find joys unspeakable and full of glory.

This does not mean dull content with things as they are; it does mean the development of the faculties of appreciation, the growth of the life in power to see, the development of vision. It means the transformation of the dull earth with the glory of the ideal.

Some day, when we look back over our lives, how keen will be our regret as we realize what we have missed, how we have spurned the substance of life's lasting treasures, human loves, friendships, every-day beauties, and happiness, while chasing the shadows of imaginary joys.



THE TRUE PARADISE

The religion that has relations only to heaven and angels, or only to a supreme being remote and detached from daily life and from our families and friends, our business and affairs, issues in personal selfishness and is one of the causes of social disorganization and need.

It postpones to that dim future the problems that ought to be solved in the present. It promises those who are broken with the injustice and greed of their fellows a place where right would prevail and rest would be their portion in the future. It shifts to an imaginary and ideal world all the perplexities and wrongs of the real present world.

That kind of teaching ingrained in generations accounts for the dull patience, the stolid, brute-like content of the peasant in Europe; he is born a bearer of burdens, a tiller of the soil, to walk bent and never look up; it is all endurable because it is all so short; he some day will be better off than kings and emperors are now.

But as the generations are born the inspiring vision of that future loses its force; the ideals are gone and the children come into the world with their fathers content with their present condition, but devoid of aspiration and also devoid of their father's faith in the compensations of the future.

Then comes the reaction. Some daring spirits assert that if there is any good, if there is equity and rights, men ought to enter into and enjoy them here and now. And some who catch the vision of a God of real love are unwilling to believe that He keeps from His children the present joys of His home; they invite to a present heaven.

Then how easy it is to fall into the error of seeking only a material present-day paradise, to live as if the only things worth living for were food and clothes and pleasant circumstances. Better a worthy, beautiful ideal afar off than an unworthy and debasing one already realized. The heaven that so many are seeking will but bring all men to the level of the brute.

The danger is that we shall miss the real benefit of this great truth that whatever good is designed for man may be realized in large measure while he lives and shall make his good to consist only in goods. Better conditions of living easily become the foe of the best. Heaven is not meat and drink; it is the better heart.

Making houses and lands the supreme end of living is little better than looking forward to harps and crowns. It is easy, being freed from slavery to a superstition to relapse into slavery to our lower selves. We are in danger of living for a living instead of for our lives. We are "on the make" instead of being engaged in making manhood. We are digging the lead of commercial advantage with the gold shovels of character.

We may be measured by our own measurements. In sermons and orations we assure ourselves that we are a great people because we have here so many acres, so many millions of bushels of corn and of wheat, so high wages, so vast financial resources. We are living in the glut of things and setting these things as the end of living.

All this does not mean that prosperity is wrong; it does not mean that misery or poverty is a virtue. The danger is not in our many acres, our high wages, our millions of money; the danger is that these are the ends instead of the means; that we are existing for our living; that we make the man the tool of his money instead of the money being the making of the man.

Every man has in his breast the keys to his own heaven. If he will he may find the riches of character; he may enter into the paradise of a mind at peace; he may taste of the divine joys of serving his fellows; he may, in thought, commune with all the good and great; he may hear the morning stars sing together.

The eternal crown of glory is the crown of character. The streets paved with gold are the fair, clear ways of virtue. The harps of whose music we never weary are the strings of sympathy and love and pain; these make the heavenly harmony. The angels are in the faces we learn to love. These make heaven when we see them in the light of the presence of eternal love.



XVI

Truth and Life

Religion of a Practical Mind The Head and the Heart New Truths for New Days

A life is an empty lamp without the oil of love.

The only way to have happiness as a permanent guest is to keep your door open to the helpless.

Self shrinks the soul.

It is much easier to get interested in art doilies for Hottentots than it is to be simply human to the washerwoman at home.

Whoever helps us to think kindly of another aids the coming of the kingdom of heaven.

You are not likely to cheer the hearts of men by looking down in the mouth yourself.

No man climbs to the Father by treading on his brother.

Many things may keep you from the triumphs of life but only selfishness can keep you from the victories of love.

The child of heaven always sees something of heaven in the child.

There are too many people trying to clean up the world by scalding their neighbours.

XVI

RELIGION OF A PRACTICAL MIND

Is there a faith for the practically minded man and woman? Or is religion exclusively for the dreamers and those who are contented with sentiment and feeling? These people of action, who measure by results, who have no life to waste on things not evidently useful; these who feel so intensely the needs of humanity that they have no time to waste in anything other than work—is there a religion for them?

But religion is not a form of life nor a point of view for one kind of people alone; it is the spirit of higher things coming into the lives of all kinds of people. Its expression will depend on the temperament of the individual. It may lead some to sing hymns, but it will certainly compel others to build houses and to care for the sick and needy.

In a world of men and affairs no man is actually religious unless his faith is finding some practical expression, and the greatest need of our day is that our hard-headed men and women who do things shall become inspired with the spirit and ideas of religion and shall do those things which religion's spirit of love and service would indicate as needing to be done.

Pious people are deluding themselves if they think that they are cultivating the religious life and meriting the rewards of faith by simply sitting in church and feeding themselves on beautiful sentiments and thrilling visions, or even by vigorously attacking all those who dare to differ from them in matters of religious philosophy.

Nor can religion find full expression in harking back over the centuries and elucidating the mysteries of ancient miracles or tracing the history of ancient peoples.

If as much brain and energy had been given to solving the problem of society and leading men into the way of right living to-day as have been given to digging into the historical and philological problems of Scripture this world would be a better world by far. We must let the dead past bury its dead. Stay not weeping by the tomb of yesterday; do the work of to-day.

There will be much more real religion in the intelligence, care, and sacrifice applied to the problem presented by the millions coming in at the gates of our country than in the most pains-taking study of the emigration of a horde of Israelites millenniums ago. This is what the practical man feels; there is so much to be done, why waste time in dreaming of how things once were done or in wishing for a world where no need or sorrow exists? Therefore, he is apt to say, in the business of bringing things to pass religion has no place; it is only for the dreamers.

Yet no one needs religion more than the man who would do any worthy and lasting work in the world. Indeed, the possibility of such a work will not dawn upon him unless some of the spirit of religion and the possession of desire to do great and worth while things is evidence of the heavenly flame within. Any work for the sake of humanity needs a wider vision than that of its own field. Courage fails and hope dies if we see only the dismal problem; if we have only the practical outlook. Some vision of the ideal must enter into all great work; one must learn to see humanity in the light of divinity.

It is a good thing to be able to see the Divine in the commonplace, the hand of Providence in American history, the work of the Most High as recorded in the daily papers, as well as in the Gospels; to do our work whether it be laying railroad track, selling dry goods, making or teaching or trading, as part of the service necessary to bring in the better day.

Here is the religion of the practical mind, to express by the service of heart and brain and hand the belief that he has in the possibilities humanity, the hope that he has of a fairer, sweeter, nobler age than this, to make real the world's best ideals. So, seeking to bring to earth the best that heaven has dreamed, men have found themselves lifted into the light of infinite truth and love.



THE HEAD AND THE HEART

There are temperamental types which never reach any conclusion by pure reasoning; intuitions, emotions, and inspirations take the place of intellectual processes. It would be the height of folly to attempt to make such natures reduce their religion to syllogisms, or to ask them to bring to the bar of the head all the findings of the heart.

The emotional nature does not comprehend the manner in which the average mind must wait for its own light. These souls that move by great tides often reach sublime heights. The world would be poor, indeed, without their all-compelling enthusiasms, their glorious visions, and their dominant convictions. But such ones must not forget that there is no royal road to truth; that human nature is not cast in one single, unvarying mold; diversity is not necessarily heresy.

There are other natures, not less necessary to the world, not less glorious in their records of leaders, martyrs, and masters of men. These are those that find truth by the slow steps of reasoning; that seek the way of right, with hearts of reverence and feet of faith, in the light of the faculties heaven has given them. They do not feel, they do not understand the winds that, sighing round them, convey such mighty meaning to other souls; they cannot buy progress at the price of blindness. They are the intellectual type.

The conclusion that the emotional type must, after all, be the right one is a common one. This is because it makes the most noise and the most easily apprehended demonstration. And, therefore, some tell us that the man who seeks to find the way of truth by the light of the intellect must, without fail, wander into the pit of error; that the only way to come to religious truth is to shut the eyes of the mind and yield to emotion.

The thinker constantly is being warned that he cannot apprehend God with his intellect; that he cannot see the way to heaven with the eyes of reason. He is urged to give up the use of his head that he may develop his heart. He even is told that faith is incompatible with reason, and love with logic. So strong is the emphasis on this that he is led to suspect that indolence is seeking to deify ignorance, and that men whose intellectual faculties have atrophied by their subjection to the emotional now are envious of those who retain the power to think clearly, and would have them also deprived of these powers.

Nothing could be more clearly opposed to the way of truth than the notion that religion can be bought only at the price of reason, or that the consequence of using the intelligence is the losing of the power of affection for the divine, the good, and the true—of the warmth of heart and feeling that often determine character and conduct.

If the faculties are God given they are given for working purposes. If man has a mind and yet may not think concerning the deepest and highest things of his own nature and destiny, then the giving of that mind or the permitting it to develop is the most cruel mockery known to human history.

But the simple law of nature that every faculty has some purpose, that no power is without its duty, is the answer to all this. The mind is as sacred as the heart; it is as much a sacred duty to think as it is to aspire. There is nothing too holy for men to think about, to reason about. The mind must serve the truth—must with reverence lead to larger truth.

No man is religious who represses any of his reasoning faculties. Every one of the higher powers must be brought to their greatest perfection. Not by dwarfing but by developing themselves do men glorify their Creator. Just as the finest tree in the forest speaks most eloquently of the bounty and beauty of nature, so does the gigantic intellect glorify the intelligence that ordered its being.

Fear not to think of sacred things; nothing is sacred because it is mysterious; reverence does not dwell apart from reason. Faith does not reach its perfection in the fool; it shines most glorious where wisdom dwells. There still are the superstitious souls who confound darkness with divinity; who cry aloud against the light of knowledge. But they can no more stay the discovery of truth than the bats can hold back the dawn.



NEW TRUTHS FOR NEW DAYS

There are many who think they must live without religion because they cannot be content with the views held by their fathers. The facts on which the faith of the past was based have come into the light so that the modern man, examining them, finds himself in all honesty compelled to question them and often ultimately to call them fables.

The attempt to answer the questions of the clear-eyed modern scientific mind by accusing it of inherent antagonism to religion is cheap and ineffectual. There are honest doubters who at the same time are earnest seekers after truth, who desire the best, who are willing to pay any price for personal character and social righteousness.

It is because such men are honest that they refuse to be bound by creeds they cannot believe and to buttress beliefs they cannot indorse. No greater loss could come to character than to insist that we shall act and speak a lie in order that the body of religious teaching shall remain undisturbed. The heresy we most need to fear is that which blatantly declares one thing while at heart fearing that another is true.

The old generation in religion is accusing the new of treason to faith and the new is accusing the old of blindness to truth. When the father says to the son, "Believe this or be lost," the son answers that he rather would be lost in company with truth and honesty of conscience than be saved at the cost of both.

But do these divergencies mean that the man of the modern mind must give up religion and that those who hold to the traditional views can find no fellowship with those who see new light? This is more than an academic question; it presses on every man who, finding in him the universal thirst for religion, finds also standing before the living waters him who says, "You can drink only out of this cup handed down from the fathers; you can approach only on speaking our shibboleth."

Our fathers looked on religious truth as something complete and unchangeable, once for all delivered to the saints. But they forgot how different was the truth, as they saw it, from its vision as given to their fathers. Every age tends to look upon itself as the final goal and on its views as the last possible statement of truth.

Yet how clearly does the past teach us that our vision of truth is ever changing. The science of to-day will be largely the folly of to-morrow. Truth, in any realm, is a country whose boundaries lie ever before us, whose geography each age must write anew. Truth is a road, not a terminus; a process of search and not the thing discovered alone.

He only is religious really who opens heart and mind to the increasing vision of truth, in whom religion is not a cut and dried, fixed and unchanging philosophy, but to whom it is a method and motive for living, a process of adjusting himself to all his world in the full light of all the truth that can come to him.

There is a religion for the man who must deny many things that once seemed essential to religion; for the man who feels compelled to doubt all things; it is the religion of the honest, open souled, unreserved search for truth and the translation of that truth as it is known into character, and living.

If the setting of the face towards truth means breaking through ancient theology it also will mean bringing us face to face with the infinite. It is a good thing to lose the symbol if we only will seek for the substance. The heart of man cries out for the reality that lies back of all our words and for the realization of our doctrines in deeds.

When the test of trouble comes, when earth is a desert and the heavens are brass, we find our refreshing, we find the real resources of religion not in doctrinal statements, not in formal creeds, but in that creed which experience has written on our hearts, in the consciousness of an eternal love not demonstrated by logic, in the sense of the unity of ourselves and our race with the infinite and divine.

Every day must have its new creed, its enlarging vision of truth, but back of all lies truth itself, the reality upon which our fathers leaned and the unfailing springs where they were refreshed and the glowing visions that led them on. In that reality lies every man's religion.



XVII

The Fruits of Faith

Root and Fruit The Orthodox Accent The Business of Religion

Killing hope is moral suicide.

Sow happiness and reap heaven.

Every man is made up of many men.

You cannot travel towards heaven with your back turned to honour.

Earthly prudence is a large part of heavenly providence.

Homes are often closest knit about some grave of separation.

Your credit in heaven depends on earth's debts to you.

To attempt a great work is to become a great worker.

The practice of happiness does much for the power of holiness.

No man ever found this world a weary place who had a worthy work to do.

It's no use talking about the religion in your heart if it is not visible in your home.

XVII

ROOT AND FRUIT

There is honest inquiry rather than querulous criticism in the question, often asked, Why does not religion produce a higher and stronger type of moral character? Enthusiasm for the teachings of Christ often is cooled by contact with some flabby-willed, narrow-minded professed follower of those teachings.

It is a common saying with business men that it is hard to find a man of absolute integrity, one who even measures up to the standards of commercial honour among those who are religious, either by vocation or avocation. At any rate, it is true that a certificate of religious affiliations by no means is equivalent to a guarantee of high moral worth.

Yet it is easy to arrive at wrong conclusions when judging the effect of religion on personal character as tested by daily business and living. One is in danger of judging from exceptions. We may remember as a religious person the man who makes the loudest protestations of his piety and fail to recognize the religious sources of strength in the quieter one of whose sterling qualities we need no persuasion.

When religion has little root it often springs up with a rapid self-assertive growth; but it withers even more quickly under the scorching sun of the market and business affairs. It also would be the height of folly to conclude that religion contributed nothing to a man's moral worth, because the morally worthless seek to hide their nakedness by wearing it as a cloak.

If we stop to think of the strong men and women we know, of those whose integrity is undoubted, whose character wealth constitutes the real reserve and bulwark of our business stability, we shall find that they are controlled by religious ideals and principles, that the strength and beauty which we admire in them in itself is religion.

They may have or may not have ecclesiastical affiliations; these are but incidental. They do have religion. Somehow we feel that their actions rise not from superficial wells of policy or custom but from deep springs that go back into the roots and rock of things. They look out on life with eyes that see beyond questions of immediate and passing advantage; they see visions and ideals; they are drawn on by lofty aspirations.

The recognition which we accord to real worth, to high, and noble, and strong manhood and womanhood, with the scorn we have for the canting weakling, is but part of our discrimination between a living, deep religion expressed in conduct and a mask or pretense adopted for profit or convenience.

Still there are many good people, sincere in their religious professions, who practically are no good at all when they come to some strain on conscience, or some real test in life. Is it not because in their minds religion never has been related to conduct? They are grounded on the eschatology of Christianity but not on its ethics.

It is possible to go through a full course of religious instruction in the regularly appointed agencies of many churches and to come out with clear-cut conceptions of heaven and angels, but with the most misty and even misleading conceptions of right relations among men, of honesty, and justice, and truth.

The schools teach us about the stars and the earth, about men dead and beasts living; the church teaches us of saints and seraphs, and about an ancient literature; but who shall teach us and our children the art of living, the laws of human duties? Of what value is all our knowledge unless we get the wisdom of right living?

No man is saved until he is made strong, sane, useful, and reliable. The most irreligious thing in this world is a religion that makes people think that an imputed or technical salvation absolves them from the necessity of practical salvation, the working out of the best and noblest in their lives. Religion without morality is a mockery.

Real religion is the secret and source of the highest, strongest, cleanest character. It furnishes the life with motives mightier than any considerations of advantage or profit; it ties the soul up to eternal and spiritual verities; it refreshes the heart as with living waters when life seems all desert; it sets the heart in step with the Infinite One who marches on through the ages.



THE ORTHODOX ACCENT

Perhaps the chief damage done by the confusion of tongues at Babel was that it tended to a multiplicity of words. Whether it was so before that time or not, it is certain that ever since there has been a constant likelihood of religion and every other good thing being drowned in floods of rhetoric. Where there are ten ways of saying a thing it is so much easier to use them all than to do the thing in the one way in which it may be done. Words become the chief enemies of works. A volume containing all the words of the great Teacher would look mighty insignificant beside the ponderous tomes of the modern exponents of His teachings. That is because the minister has become the preacher.

The tendency also is for laymen to prove their piety by becoming teachers. It is so in every direction. Reforms dissipate into theses; it is always easier to make speeches on the city beautiful than it is to refrain from throwing the refuse in the street. We are all talking about what ought to be done. Perhaps some leader will arise and institute the order of the practicers.

Dreamers, philosophers, thinkers, writers have poured forth their floods upon a thirsty world. But the only words that have been worth anything to mankind have been those that have grown out of the speaker's soul as it has been molded by his living and doing.

Because talking is so easy to the knowing ones it is not strange that they should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less knowing ones from their reservoir of words. Then it is the most natural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most easily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth becomes the saving sign.

But salvation does not depend on any shibboleth. No man is going to fail of seeing the Most High because he cannot render the precise name by which one race chose to call Him, nor will the sun cease to shine upon him should he seek the highest good in other ways than names. The heart of the universe asks not that we be consistent with the syllogisms of the past, but that we be true to the truth we know ourselves.

Every man has some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed up in front his deeds soon die. Where words reign they soon reign alone, with nothing but words to serve them. Orthodoxy is so general, because it is so easy and so meaningless. Catch the accent and you are orthodox. But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men would rather pay board, somewhere else.

No life can be interpreted in language alone. The church is but an obscuration on Christianity when it meets only to analyze the life of its Lord and never to exemplify His deeds. What must heaven think to see a thousand able-bodied men and women gather in a beautiful building to sing hymns of praise to their Diety [Transcriber's note: Deity?] and to listen to arguments about His divinity while, within block of them, there are, in sickness and squalor, distress and sorrow, the ones to whom He sent these people to minister? The doctrines manufactured about Him have hidden the directions given by Him.

The trouble is not that we have too much doctrine so much as that we have the wrong kind. The Master's great teaching was, Do the divine things, and the divine truths will take care of themselves.

The kingdom will never come until His will is done. Half-tones of heaven will not keep people warm in winter; it is half tons of coal they need. The world will believe in any church that tries to do good. But the church does not believe in itself yet; half the people are strenuously endeavouring to fool themselves into what they call spiritual warmth. What they need is plain Christian perspiration. No man really credits his own religion until he converts it into reality.

But the man who prides himself on his heterodoxy is often equally guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies himself with the cant phrase of irreligion.

We need most of all to treat religion as sensibly as we do business, to leave the science to those interested while we give ourselves to the practice of its art, the doing of its deeds, the living its life.



THE BUSINESS OF RELIGION

Any religion that will not stand the strain of modern business may have been good for some other age; but it is valueless in this one. The test of your piety is not peace in the pews of the church, but power and direction in the stress of the market, its adaptability to your activities as well as your meditations.

The problem of the reconciliation of business and religion is not nearly so complex as we would believe. The people who are saying it is impossible to be upright and get on in the world mean that it is impossible to be honest and to gain all the questionable advantages on which they have set their hearts. When a man says that religion and business will not work in harmony he either has a wrong brand of piety or a false conception of business.

Religion is built for business. The only creed that is worth a moment's thought is a working creed, that is, one that gets into action. Religion is not the mere acceptance of a speculative philosophy of this and other worlds. It consists in principles, ideals, and motives which dominate conduct. It is more concerned with the kind of a world you are making here than with the conceptions you may have of a world beyond.

Religion is more than an institution; it is a course of life. It has to do with the church only in so far as the church serves its purposes. It is more concerned with what a man pays his employees than with what he puts into the plate at the collection. The man who can put all his piety into the prayer-meeting and the services of the church never has enough seriously to embarrass him under any circumstances.

If for your religion you have adopted principles of high living; if you have set the worth of the soul above all other things; if you have determined to frame your life according to the golden rule of the great Teacher, and, with Him as hero and ideal, are seeking to do good to others and make this world a better place for us all, with less of sin and sorrow and more of joy and love, you will make your business as well as your praying the servant of these ends.

But if you have said that you wish to do these things, that you wish to live the pure and beneficent life while in your heart your sole desire is to get riches, to gain fame, to secure power, then there is bound to be conflict between the religion you profess and the business that possesses you.

Everything depends on the purposes of living, on the things a man really and deep within himself sets first in his life; he will follow those things no matter what other professions he may make. Business as a servant deserves our allegiance and devotion; business as a master is the most evil and soul devastating thing in this universe.

There is the most perfect harmony; there is relatively easy settlement of problems and difficulties if but this principle be adopted; that you have taken as your chief business in life the ends of true religion, the development of character and the service of humanity, and, with this purpose, the daily toil, the opportunities and enginery of your trade or profession shall be made to serve these higher ends.

Religion then becomes the motive in business and business the manifestation of religion. A man serves the Most High in his office with the same devotion and elevation of spirit as a priest at the altar. He is doing a great work, because the spirit is great. In questions of conscience he can afford to lose everything except the great end; he will not sacrifice the lesser to the greater.



XVIII

The Force of Faith

"The Victory that Overcometh" Fear and Faith Faith for the Future

Some talk so hard about duty they have no strength left for deeds.

When a good man gets down in the dirt some one is sure to stumble over him.

Many a man who would make a first-class lighthouse is wasting his life trying to be a fog-horn.

The mournful saint works a good deal more harm than the cheerful sinner.

The faith that shows up strong on the fence may fail altogether when it gets on the field.

It's not the man who says the loudest amen who makes the most impression on heaven.

There are too many folks trying to meet the world's hunger for love with essays on affection.

Lots of people let their daily manna spoil while they pray for butter and sugar to spread on it.

People who lay their sins on the old Adam are not anxious to have their successes attributed to him.

Many a man thinks his life is clouded over when the truth is he is burying his head in the steam of his own sighings.

XVIII

"THE VICTORY THAT OVERCOMETH"

You cannot believe little things and do great ones; you cannot believe in half successes and accomplish whole ones. A man's faith sets the boundaries of his work. He will do what he believes and accomplish what he believes can be accomplished. Mountains are not subdued by men who stand discouraged at a mole-hill. A man must conquer the fatigues of the way in his own heart or he will never set out on the road.

Back of all free action lies some creed, some conviction. All great battles have been fought and either lost or won in the heart. The simple or stubborn confidence that leads to all-conquering effort, this is faith, the vision that vitalizes. The eye of faith sees the prize at the end long before it is reached; the eye of fear looks so closely at the difficulties and dangers of the course that the prize is not seen at all.

There is a good deal of fatalism seeking to pass as faith. People say we must have faith in God; let things take their course and they will come out all right. The church long commended the slothful who let things drift, and called their laziness resignation. But faith feels the certitude of a harvest because it has first diligently plowed and sown and because of the goodness that has ever brought the seed-time and the harvest.

Superstitious credulity is not faith. It is more than the foresight that feeds on visions of a future heaven; it is the clear eye that looks keenly at the things of to-day. No truth is the better for being taken on trust; it cannot be possessed until it is known, not on the authority of another but on your own experience. No man ever became a martyr for a truth he received at second hand.

Only a first hand faith is a force in the world. It is born of life; it determines life. Your faith forms you. If you do not believe men, how can you be a man? If you do not believe in things better, nobler, purer, how can you move towards them? If at bottom your faith is in things mean, sordid, sensual, base, then thither turns your life, and no extraneous efforts, no badges, buttons, or creeds can change its course.

You can measure a man's weight in this world, by the strength and clearness of his convictions. Poor you may be, friendless, alone, weak, unlearned; but all this can be overcome if bright in the heart there burns the unquenchable flame of some great passion, some high faith. Given this fire within them, all the tools shall be found, but without it the finest endowment of brain and body is valueless.

Given but some great principle, some purpose that becomes a holy passion, something that leads you, like one of long ago who "steadfastly set His face to go up to Jerusalem," then all power is yours. The man who has faith to remove mountains always finds the picks and the steam shovels somewhere. He takes the tools he has, though they may seem but toys beside his task, and lo! some morning when the dreamers awake the mountain is no longer there. Faith has had her perfect work.

It is faith that gives fortitude, faith that gives force. The dreamers of dreams have ever been, after all, the doers of the great deeds. Seeing the things that are not seen is the secret of doing the things that remain to be seen.

No worthier word was ever said of the divine Man than that which spoke of Him as the leader and completer of faith. So great a work was possible only with sublime confidence in the glorious possibilities of mankind, only with unshakable assurance that all that was good and true in the universe was working with Him for the good of all. With Him faith was an eye that saw man's hidden good, a hand that grasped the infinite might moving for the best.



FEAR AND FAITH

To many faith simply means denying the reason and relying on emotion. They have what is called saving faith and are able to feel that the Almighty forgives their wrong-doings, ceasing to be angry with them; their faith being perfect when it takes away fear of punishment. To these faith is that which they pay in the form of credence to whatever is ecclesiastically asserted in exchange for the complaisance of diety [Transcriber's note: deity?].

Those who deny all religion assert that it is founded on fear. There is enough in that assertion to give it the colour of truth. Yet fear of the unseen is but the survival of savagery. Faith founded on fear becomes servile, debasing, superstitious. If religion has no higher motive than that of fear, the trembling and dread before some great omnipotent unknown, it can give the world neither help nor uplift.

What is there in God to fear? Is the Lord of life also the foe of our lives? Is the author of a world so fair and lovely, inviting us to joy and inspiring with feelings of pleasure, the foe of happiness? Has He made the world a paradise and planted in man's breast the seeds of kindness, gentleness and sweet thoughts only to glower over His world in hatred and to damn it with dread of Himself?

All things that can be known argue the goodness of the unknown. As soon as a man learns to live with nature he loses his fear of forest, beast, and sea. Familiarity breeds confidence, affection and reverence. Only the remote and unfamiliar fill us with dread. The city bred tremble in the woods at night, where the native feels himself amongst well loved friends.

In the same manner the fear of the divine, born of unfamiliarity, instead of being an evidence of reverence or of religion, becomes the mark of ignorance and cowardice. Rectitude of conduct, resulting wholly from regulating oneself as under an all-seeing critical eye and in dread of a far-reaching devastating hand, cannot produce enrichment of character. Hatred never gave birth to holiness.

The souls that in all ages have lived nearest to things spiritual, that have most enriched the world with thoughts, whose inner visions pierced our outer clouds, seeing something of the glory of the infinite, brought back no pictures of a face austere, of a cruel despot, or of aught for love or truth to fear.

True faith instead of being a compromise to allay our fears of unknown ills and calamities, ever has been the fearless, reverent search for the face of the infinite. It does not say: "I believe that God will let me alone because I did those prescribed things"; rather it says: "I cannot be satisfied alone and apart from Him, the source and sole satisfaction of all life."

Science with its passion for truth, art with its passion for beauty, ethics with its passion for rightness, are all but parts of true religion, the soul's passion for the infinite heart and mind in which all ideas of truth and beauty take their rise and find their full realization.

The soul of man never has ceased to cry out for the living God; the religion of fear has given it no satisfaction. Its followers have been too busy building themselves shelters from the heaven they dread, shelters that become as leaden shields shutting out the eternal tenderness and beneficence. No man ever found the celestial city or its glorious king so long as he regarded his religion as a cyclone cellar.

To those who, with eyes of reverence, seek to find the good in all things here, believing that love is better and mightier than hate, that whatever is good, kindly, tender, pure, and ennobling in us, is but the reflection from the glory of the infinite, traces in our dust by which we find our way to Him who inhabits eternity, these, through eyes of faith, have found a presence beyond description or definition.

Fear sets afar off a mighty monarch; faith finds near at hand one whom it calls "Father." Fear shrinks from the impending wrath, love rests in the unchanging goodness. Fear imagines a throne and flaming sword; faith has confidence in a better day ever dawning, in the triumph at last of right, in the reality of an incomprehensible love that sings in its joy, soothes in its sorrow, strengthens in its discipline, a life and love nearer and more real than any of the other facts of living.



FAITH FOR THE FUTURE

You cannot tell much about a man's faith by his willingness to deal in futures without any foundation in fact. And yet no man is ready to face the future unless his heart is nerved by a high and worthy faith. This alone can give strength to look down the coming days and to take up their tasks.

None of us can know what these new days hold for us; fear readily conjures up pictures of disaster. But because of certain sublime confidences we hold we banish our fears, shake off our sloth, and gladly step out into the unknown and untrodden country of to-morrow.

Faith is the force of all the ages. It accounts for the past; it enters and determines the future. Because certain men in days gone by believed certain things intensely; because they were thrilled by great visions, by glorious ideals, history was wrought out in the forge of their convictions, under the hammer of their wills.

No great things are done except by the power of faith, under glowing hopes and compelling convictions. It is her faith in her boy's future that makes the mother willing to suffer, keeps her patient, that buoys up the father in the strife and weariness of life. No man or woman is doing anything that makes the world richer for mere bread and butter; some purpose and vision is behind the worthy work.

It is because somehow we believe, no matter how we may phrase the belief, that destiny is behind this strange weaving we call life that we are content to seem to be the shuttles jerked hither and thither. We bear the ills of to-day because we dimly see the glorious goal of the good of all. We do a full day's work only as we see somehow an eternal wage.

It makes little difference what creed a man may hold, for that has become almost wholly a matter of philosophical speculation regarding things unknown and often unimportant, but it makes all the difference what measure and quality of faith he has, whether he feels the force of great aspirations and is controlled by eternal principles.

It may belong to few of us to be heralded as heroes, and the judgment of history may confer on none the martyr's crown, but the hero's joy and the martyr's glory are in the heart of every one who boldly reaches up to and lives out the highest he conceives, for he will not do that without sacrifice and pain on his side nor without enriching for mankind on the other.

The largest faith may be manifest in the lowliest places. When all the work of the ages appears, when the weaving of the centuries is turned with its finished side towards us, we may see that the man who has laid the brick or fed the furnace or the woman who has washed and cooked in the home and tended the little ones, doing these things for love, has shot the most glowing colours into the great fabric.

It is not the thing you do so much as the spirit in which you do it that makes it great or small. Faith determines this spirit, for faith is that which fashions the ideal of the one we love, the ideal we serve and for which we joyfully suffer. The prophet whose burning words cannot forget lives by the faith in a vision broad and sweeping; but not less is the faith of the humble toiler who lives each day by the vision of his home and fireside.

Nor is this all. It is faith that draws on life's invisible sources of power and refreshing; it is faith that finds inner contact with the invisible. How empty is life if it hold nothing but things; how hungry grows the heart fed only on cold facts. For each day as it comes we need to be able to draw on the deep springs of the water of life, the springs from which our fathers drank and found strength to lay the foundations of our day.

Faith is not the blind confidence that, somehow, Providence will send us daily bread. It is the faculty by which the heart eats of the bread of heaven, by which it comes into fellowship with the great and immortal of all ages, by which it walks with Jesus of Nazareth and every spirit like His and learns to read life as love law and see it as leading to eternal good.



XIX

Hindrances and Helps from Within

Worry A Cure for the Blues The Gospel of Song

Airing our aches will never heal them.

This would be a sad world but for our sorrows.

A merry heart kills more microbes than any medicine.

It is always a pleasure to boost another sinner down.

We make mistakes; other people commit sins.

Nothing worries worry worse than work.

A little modesty often hides a lot of vanity.

He whose life leads nowhere is never late in getting there.

Love runs over but it never gives over.

Never put off to-morrow the meanness you can put off to-day.

Happiness rests on thoughts and not on things.

He who has friends only to use them has them only to lose them.

To-morrow's burden is the only one that breaks the back of to-day.

XIX

WORRY

Worry is wicked because it causes weakness. It robs the life of its powers; it thwarts our possibilities. Anxiety is wrong, not because it indicates infidelity as to the wise and loving providence overruling life, but because it is a criminal waste of life's forces, it prevents our doing our own work, and it irritates and hinders others.

What a great cloud would be lifted from our world if all the needless fears and frowns were chased away. One scowling man, going to his work worrying over it, will spread the contagion of apprehension and cowardly fretfulness through almost every group with which he mingles. Our mental health has as much to do with our success and happiness as any other thing.

The fog that bothers us most of all is that we carry on our faces, that which rises from our heart fears. Once savage man lived in perpetual fear of innumerable malignant spirits; civilized man lives in fear of invisible and imaginary accidents. For every real foe that has to be faced we fight out hypothetical battles with a dozen shadows.

Worry is a matter of outlook and habit. It depends, first of all, on whether you are going to take all the facts into account and look on life as a whole, or see only the dismal possibilities. Then it depends on whether you will yield continually to the blue moods that may arise from apprehension or from indigestion until you have become colour blind to all but the blue things.

How trivial are the things over which we worry, by means of which we cultivate the enslaving habit of worry, whether we will catch the approaching car or the one that will come two minutes later, whether it will rain when we want it to shine, or shine when we want it to rain.

How ineffective it all is. Whoever by worrying all night succeeded in bringing about the kind of weather he wanted? More than that, it is fatal to successfully accomplishing those things that do lie within our power. The worry over catching a train or doing a piece of work so agitates the mind and unsettles the will that it reduces the chances of efficiency.

But there are larger causes of worry than these, sickness, loss, impending disasters. Yet how futile to help and how potent to increase these ills is worry. The darkest days and the deepest sorrows need that we should be at our best to meet them. To yield to fear and fretting is to turn the powers of heart and brain from allies to enemies.

No occasion is so great or so small that we can afford to meet it either with fear or without forethought. The imperative obligation to make the most of our lives is not met by apprehending the worst, but by doing the best we can. We have no right to give to forebodings the time and force we need for preparing for and actually meeting our duties.

The best cure for worry is work. In the larger number of instances if we but do our work well we shall have no need to worry over the results. Much of our fearful fretting is but a confession of work illy done and the apprehension of deserved consequences.

Then faithful work by absorbing the thought and energies cures the habit of worry. It is the empty mind that falls first prey to foreboding, and is most easily filled with the spectres of woe. Do your work with all your might; let it go at that, knowing that no amount of further thought can affect the issue of it.

No matter how dark the way, how empty the scrip, the cheerful heart has sunshine and feasting. And this not by a blind indifference, a childish optimism, but by the blessed faculty of finding the riches that are by every wayside, of catching at all the good there is in living. If you would dispel your gloom and depreciate your burdens, begin to appreciate your blessings. Do your best, seek out the best, believe in the best, and the best shall be.



A CURE FOR THE BLUES

There is an honest confession, and one that proved to be good for the soul of the man who made it, in the Seventy-seventh Psalm. Asaph, the singer of that song, had had a bad spell of the blues. He was nervous, sleepless, fretful, full of vague regrets and querulous complainings. He had reviewed the whole troop of his imaginary miseries, and wound up by wondering whether God really cared anything about him. One might well believe that he had been taking in altogether too many social functions. Whatever the cause, he had come to an exceedingly disagreeable condition.

Despite the fact that many suppose that saintliness is never fully achieved unless the whole nature be soured, it still remains true that of all the blights upon this earth, few are more contrary to the will of a God of love and sunshine than the disposition that abides in the chronic blues. It lives on regrets for the good things that might have been and dreadings of the evil things that yet may be. It is either complaining or criticising.

Their gall enters the hearts of such people. They who look within and see nothing but bitterness, when they look without find a film over their eyes that colours their whole world, until they lose faith in God and hope for man. Then they lay the blame on their circumstances, or, worse yet, on what they call an "All Wise Providence," whom they imagine to be as bitter against them as they are against the world.

This attitude soon becomes fixed. Unconsciously it is cultivated. Then friends and members of the family turn with loathing from the atmosphere of chronic pessimism; the habitue has become a cuttlefish among his fellows, only emanating floods of inky misery. He wonders why things do not come his way; why business associates desert him and troubles assail him more and more. The truth is that imaginary troubles tend to become real, and fortune never smiles on a man who turns a sour face towards her.

Character is contagious. Even if we had the right to enjoy our own misery we have no right to infect our neighbours with it. You are bound by social obligations as well as by selfish reasons to cure the blues every time you have them.

And there is a remedy. Asaph began to cure himself when, instead of saying, "All things are against me," he said, "This is my infirmity," my fault; I am enough to turn a beehive sour. His cure was almost perfect when he said, "I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High." The cure for the blues is simple, then. First, own up to it that the largest part of your miseries comes out of your own mind, out of your distorted views of things. Then begin to thank God for His goodness, call to mind the many things for which you should be grateful.

To remember our mercies is to bury our miseries. There is a lot of good in this old world and they get it who go for it. There is something good in every man; the best people find the best in people. After all, our lives are determined not by the things about us but by the things we invite into us. It is impossible to keep that man blue who persistently looks for the bright side of things, or to keep him poor or sad who is affording a welcome to every good thing, every happy, cheering thought. Soon the man who lives like that gets so busy keeping track of his own and other people's happiness that he forgets to think whether he is happy or not, just as a healthy man forgets to count his pulse or his respirations. So, if you are tempted to feel blue, remember it is a sin to nurse your sadness; it is a duty to cultivate happiness.



THE GOSPEL OF SONG

Singing cures sighing. Lift up a note of praise and you can raise the heaviest off and roll it clean off the heart. Christianity is a religion of song. Its forerunner, Judaism, left the ages the rich legacy of the Psalms. Its founder, when he knew that death was imminent, sang one of those ancient songs with his friends. His followers early gathered for worship in song. Peter beguiled prison hours with hymns. Meeting in the catacombs, the early Christians made the galleries echo with their praise.

To-day every revival is but a wave of song. The successful churches know the inspirational and the ethical power of good hymns. The decline of many a church may be traced to the exclusion of the people from their share in the worship, to the attempt to praise God by proxy, or to substitute an artistic exhibition for an act of exaltation.

Not only in public worship, but in private life, hymns and songs have a significant influence. It is always easy to remember rhymed forms of truth; happy the heart with a store of good hymns; it is provisioned for many a long voyage. When the light burns low the heart is illumined by the memory of choice thoughts expressed in poetry, by songs sung long ago. When the burden seems all too heavy, and the traveller would fain lie down in despair, he remembers some word of cheer, some stanza from another pilgrim's song, and he is strengthened for the road.

Christianity is a singing religion, because it is a happy religion. It came to end the gloom of this world. The song must take the place of the sigh. Happiness must rule the utterance. Even a hearty whistle may be a wonderful means of grace. Every natural expression of happiness becomes a religious act. The flowers praise the gardener by being beautiful and fragrant, and men praise God by being happy.

Song is a creator of happiness. You cannot sing songs of joy and nourish jealousy or hatred. A song of gratitude for things you have will often chase away the clouds of gloom over those you dread. It is a sin to be sad when you might as well be glad, and it is a sin to be silent when you might as well be singing.

One song may surpass many a sermon in its power over a life. Great songs have sung men into battle and stiffened their melting hearts. Great songs have touched our clay and thrilled it to the divinely heroic. Songs sung in the stillness of the evening over the baby's cradle have ever been the mother's consecration for all her sacrifice. Hymns bring back hallowed memories; a strain of song will touch a chord no syllogism could sound; the simple words of an old hymn bring comfort and new hope to hearts broken and crushed.

We may not all make sermons, but we can all sing songs. To make the good singer there is needed not the artist but the heart. Sing away the gloom; sing in the gratitude, the joy, and love, and strength; sing in the courage, the aspiration and hope. Men may reject our sermons, but they will rejoice in our songs, for they are theirs also. The creeds change, but the old hymns stand.

Store your memory with the songs that time has tried. The thoughts that were meat and strength to others shall be your bread in desert days, your light in darkness. Praise God by a life of happy praise.



XX

Does He Care?

The One at The Helm The Shepherd and The Sheep The Father's Care

Faith's fervour is more than effervescence.

The lights of the world are not advertising signs.

Sow the sand and you reap only cinders in your eyes.

No man ever broke his back under his brother's burden.

The fear of reputation is often taken for the love of righteousness.

You cannot cure your sorrows by taking them out in a wheel chair.

A niggardly purse in the pocket becomes a thorn in the side.

Tears over yesterday's broken toys blind us to today's treasures.

Things do not prove themselves sacred by segregating themselves from secular concerns.

Heaven intrusts no great cargo to the vessel that spreads its sails to every wind that blows.

When a man is getting fat out of the fall of others he is sure to be a warm advocate of their right to be free to fall.

Many a man will be surprised when he gets to heaven to find how large a place his little kindly deeds occupy in its history.

XX

THE ONE AT THE HELM

Danger tears away our disguises. In hours of peril the true man appears, and at such times, if ever, the man speaks the truth. Fearing the boat was sinking, the disciples had little thought of the dignity or the divinity of the one who lay asleep in the helmsman's place. Rudely they awaken Him with their indignant cries, wondering why one who had spoken such wondrous words before seems indifferent now to their danger. "Carest Thou not that we perish?" they cry.

Every man who has been accustomed to take God for granted has used almost the same words at some time in his life. The hour of tempest, when the uncontrollable waves of trouble and winds of adversity seemed ready to overwhelm him, when he had done all that mortal might do, then it seemed as though this God to whom he had prayed so often, of whom he had learned to think as part of his life, was absent or indifferent.

It is the question of every soul in sorrow or testing, "Does God care anything about me?" It is more than a speculative inquiry then. Theologians may have drawn up their specifications of the Most High, and, in the peaceful ways of their lives, they may be satisfied with their handiwork. But when, even into their cloistered walks, some great sorrow or grim death has come stalking, then, with dry lips and moist brow they cry, "Master, are you asleep? Do you not care?"

What is there at the helm of this great ship of life? Is there any one or is it steered automatically, blindly holding its way and heeding neither waves nor rocks nor other craft? Has this universe a heart or only an engine at its centre? The inquiry becomes pressing and pertinent, indeed, when inexplicable distress and anguish that seem all unnecessary break down all the man's strength and courage.

A man can no more content himself with a far off being, sitting in the heavens in royal state, winning reverence by remoteness, than his own children would be satisfied to know him only as a sovereign. He craves the friendship of that one; he longs for compassion, sympathy, assistance such as friend gives to friend; in a word, he looks for love. You cannot love an absentee God any more than you can love an abstraction or a theory.

But the need of one who will come close into our lives, who aids in the hour of extremity, does not meet itself. The fact remains that often we seem to be left to the mercy of the tempest; the elements do their worst and no hand is lifted and no voice is heard that still the waves. Full often the storm seems to finish its work and only clinging to the wreckage or swept on the waves do we come into port.

Is there any answer to the great question, Does any greater one care for our lives? If we are looking for an answer as susceptible to demonstration as a mathematical proposition we are doomed to disappointment. It is possible to believe in providence without being able either to prove or fully comprehend it. The child must become the parent before he can understand the ways of the father or mother with him; yet he can know their love before he can comprehend their ways.

Nothing could do more harm than to have the absolute assurance that an almighty friend would fly to our aid and protection in every time of danger or need. A friend whose power relieved us from the necessity of prudence or courage or endeavour would be a foe indeed. The All Wise loves man too well and too wisely to make plain always His ways of caring for him and His purposes of protection.

The furrowed faces and whitened heads of men may be the will of love as truly as the smooth ways of ease and complacency. There is one at the helm, but His concern is more for the making of strong sailors than for the securing of smooth sailing. The best evidence of the care of the Most High for all the sons of men is not in the immediate unbaring of His arm for their protection, but rather in the manner in which He causes the wind and the waves, the struggle with the tempest, the need for the nerving of the soul in the hour of peril all to work out His will, the will of great love, the bringing of the mariner to His likeness in character and soul.



THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP

Millions have lived and died in faith in that word, The Lord is my Shepherd; nations have sung its strain into the strength of their being. The picture of the one who leads His flock, who carries the lambs in His arms, appeals to all; yet who has not some time, perhaps often, questioned: After all, is there any one who cares; is there any eye to see or heart to heed if I—or, indeed, all men—should faint or fall by the way?

Perhaps there are some who no longer find aught beyond an imagery of poetic beauty in the old strain, who even feel that it would be retreating intellectually to conceive of an infinite heart that broods over men or a hand that helps. They tell us that science has wiped out the possibility of such an one as this great Shepherd of the flock of humanity. Yet even they are not dead to this great thought that so long stirred men's souls and made them brave, ready to sacrifice, to die.

The truth is, the singer of long ago was but giving expression, in figures familiar to him, of a truth we all apprehend with greater or less clearness, one that alone gives strength, hope, and faith to our hearts, the conviction that back of all the warring purposes and jangling discords of our lives and our world there is reason, and order, and beneficence.

The science that seemed to wipe out the conception of a mighty Creator who fashioned the first man with His fingers, but emphasizes with a stress that grows from day to day the fact that this universe is not without order, its forces as sheep without a shepherd; that the stars are not wandering, nor the least atom without guidance; that, as one put it long ago, all things work together for good.

If the remotest particle of matter is bound up with the mighty laws of the universe, guided, governed, led to its appointed end, bound to serve its purpose, shall we not have faith that the law that guides the atom and holds the planet, pervades all the universe and takes us in its mighty grasp?

Not with doubt but with larger meaning and deeper assurance may I sing, "The Lord is my shepherd," thinking not only of one who takes up my little life and carries it, but of the great fact of all life under law, law divine, all pervading, moving in majesty on to the completion of its purposes. I may not know what the Shepherd looks like; I may have lost my old simple pictures of personality and appearance; the larger fact grows too great for fixed words.

This is to see the guidance of the Shepherd in the great things of our world as well as in the little. It is a strange, a poor religion that believes that providence will send a man his dinner but never gives a thought to the great purposes working out through all the strife of our common life, through our industrial, social, and political problems, nor remembers that life is more than meals or millinery.

There is the large faith which we need for all times, to believe that a plan is being wrought out behind all the seeming chaos, that there is a purpose even though we cannot yet trace its lines, to be willing to go on doing our work, laying down our lives, because the great world needs us; the Shepherd cannot bring His flock to the green pastures and the still waters unless we live and labour and die.

There is only one solution to all the mystery of our lives, the riddle of history and the universe; it is the spirit solution, that we are but the offspring, as all things are but the creation of Spiritual forces; that we are working out spiritual destinies, the green pastures and the still waters are but emblems of felicities and beauties beyond our tongue, the full orbed glory of the soul to which the Shepherd leads by toilsome mountain ways or dreary desert trails; but at last we come to the house of the Lord, where we may dwell forever.



THE FATHER'S CARE

Formal creeds have little to say of the belief in the overruling care of the All Father. Perhaps the belief is so nearly universal as to be without the range of debate so dear to creed makers. Yet at all times, in all lands, man, whether the savage, the oriental mystic, or the cool-headed Christian, in various ways and with different phrases, has recognized the hand that, from behind the scenes, touched his affairs and often seemed to order his life. Whether it be the hand of force or of friend, the fact has been felt.

True, the laziest man is apt to have the readiest sense of the intention of Providence to care for him, to send him bread well buttered; the foolish and thoughtless depend on heaven to do their thinking, and many court bankruptcy while praying for solvency. But the improvidence of man does not disprove the providence of God. So far from encouraging sloth and recklessness this truth provokes to progress by the assurance of the cooeperation of infinite powers with our best endeavours.

It is a thought we cannot escape; the all wise must be the all loving. The spirit at the centre of all must embrace all within the circle of his love; and that love will not lie quiescent, helpless when its objects are in distress, in perplexity, or need, when it might succour, save, or suggest the way of success. If there is a heart of love there is a hand of help.

Yet it seems too great a thought. What are we but dust on the wheels of the universe? Often do our fainting hearts question whether there be any, outside our own little circle, who care whether we suffer, whether we succeed. Can it be that the petty affairs of a life that passes like the hoar frost before the morning sun can even interest, still less call forth the aid, of the one in whom we all live and move and have our being?

Despite all questionings men will ever go on praying to that one; they will turn to an ear that hears, they will seek a heart that feels, and look for hands reached out in hours of necessity. Experience indorses their faith. Nearly all can look back and see where destiny has seemed to breathe upon them; their old plans wilted, and new ones, and new ways sprung up, bearing other and fairer flowers than they had ever dreamed; a mighty, mysterious power had intervened.

What does it all mean? That we are but puppets in these strange unseen hands; that we can neither will nor work for ourselves? No; it but means what poets sang long ago when, seeking after that which far transcends all thought and all imagery, they cried, "Surely Thou art our Father." That which was best in them, the holy fire of fatherhood, became a mirror in which they saw the infinite.

From the source of all life, humanity has learned the great lessons of family care and provision. All that is good in our families is true of this great family of all mankind. The great purpose of this family, as of all families, is the development of the highest, fullest life in its members. Fatherhood regards the provision of food, clothing, and shelter but as incidental to the great purpose of training the children.

This is the purpose of the Father of us all, to develop the best in us. When our weak hearts cry for ease, for rest, for pleasures, He sends the task, the sorrow, the loss. When we think all life's lessons well learned He sends us up to higher grades with harder tasks. Yet ever over all is the pitying, compassionate yearning of a father's heart that never forgets the weakness of the child.

Wisely the father's love seems to hide its working. Like all things deep and sublime it passes comprehension; it may often seem like indifference. All the child can do is to bend every effort to do his best, to work out the father's plan so far as he knows it, to know, through all, that God is good. Then, when the child grows to the man, the man towards the divine, the things that seemed strange are made plain in the light of the Father's face.

THE END