Eleven years later he was called to London, where he saw Poultry Chapel replaced by the City Temple, and even this was overflowed by his congregation.

The story of David, called from watching his father's sheep to be anointed King of Israel is a story often repeated in history. And, while the men thus called do not always sit upon a visible throne, yet they are in just as true a sense kings of thought of thought and kings of men. It was the little village of Hexham, on the Tyne, that reared Dr. Parker for the world. His autobiography reads with the fascination of romance; but perhaps the most romantic thing about the story of his youth is that it is just such a life as falls to the lot of hundreds of thousands of people.

He was the son of a stonemason, reared in a home where every shilling counted, well-disciplined in a village school, its champion marble-player, then an usher, and finally a teacher in the

same

school and studying evenings until he entered the ministry, where he had further opportunities of continuing his studies in the University

of London. For most people it would have resulted in but an ordinary life; but this was not an ordinary man. At twelve years of age he was addressing total abstinence meetings. A few years later he delivered his first sermon without preparation or invitation, in a sawpit, where he had accompanied some local preachers. He was clearly one of those who preach because they must, and his home was a good nursery for such a soul. Of his early boyhood he writes:

"The best Radicals and Dissenters in the little town met under my father's roof night after night, and all the Nonconformist ministers foregathered round his hospitable hearth, the feast always being hot coffee and piles of buttered leavened bread; there, from secular and reverend lips I heard that the British world might at any moment be enveloped in flames. All this time I was

at once happily and sadly conscious of silently passing through a deep religious experience. To me it has, if I may say so without being misunderstood, been always natural to pray. From a child I 'felt after' God; I expected Him, I tarried for Him as for one with whom I had an appointment. I have never lost that feeling of expectancy and nearness. The idea of praying by the clock, or statedly, or seven times a day with my window open towards Jerusalem, would never occur to me, for it is my delight of delights to pray without ceasing. .. My boyhood was steeped in prayer.'

It was the lad from this humble home who was afterward to win the friendship and admiration of Mr. Gladstone, Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Binney and many other men of mark. But he never lost the sweet simplicity of spirit that characterized his early years.

ardent champion of the local preachers. He gave himself, without reserve, to the saving of men. He remained good with his greatness, and was great by his goodness. It is touching to read his reference to the beloved and brilliant woman who for thirty-four years was his faithful helpmeet. He says:

"As I thought of our unbroken and ever-ascending home-life, I have often been reminded of the words : No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon; but the redeemed shall walk there.' There was always with us One like unto the Son of Man,' so that never once were we conscious of solitude or incompleteness of joy."

It is as if when he closed his autobiography in 1899, in the seventieth year of his age, he felt

We ask forgiveness for the past,
In Thine appointed way,
And promise that the opening year
Shall crown a better day.

God of the old year and the new,

A world looks up to Thee,
With bended hearts and tearful eyes,
To set the prisoners free;
To arm each heart with stronger faith,
To battle for the right,

And trust Thy promises, that God
Is with them in the fight.

God of the old year and the new,
Thus do Thy children pray;

Hear them, O Father, from Thy throne,
And bring a better day,

When all shall praise Thy holy name,

And do Thy sovereign will, When God shall rule o'er all the earth, And goodness banish ill.

T

HE scene is laid in Bethany, in the house of one Simon the leper. The hour of our Lord's agony draws nigh. As He sits at meat one approaches Him who, after a truly Oriental fashion, gives expression to her profound love for His person and character. She holds in her hand

an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious," which she pours upon His head. Her act of devotion calls forth two directly opposite kinds of criticism. Some murmur indignantly, complaining that this ointment "might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor." To them the act is wasteful. But Another speaks, and His judgment distinctly conflicts with theirs. To Him it is "a good work," one that shall win for her an imperishable renown, as far-reaching as the spread of Christianity itself.

We have in this story two conceptions of utility. They differ fundamentally, and suggest two ideals of life as widely apart as Christianity and heathenism.

Utility is indeed a true standard or measure of values. We have a right to demand of any life or act which challenges our admiration that it should serve some useful end or purpose. But utility must be interpreted in terms of generosity and breadth; care must be taken lest we narrow or starve the meaning of "useful" until we deny the credit of utility to whatever fails to minister to our lower and temporal good. The critics, whose

murmurings the evangelists record, were in full sympathy with that philosophy of life with which Satan sought to attract Jesus in the first temptation, and which our Lord repelled in the declaration, "Man shall not live by bread alone."

If Jesus had given Himself to the form of service which is solely concerned with man's temporal necessities, He would have yielded to Satan's command, "Make bread of these stones." But, while He ministered directly and often to men's bodies, that could not be the exclusive or chief business of His life. His standard of utility must rise infinitely higher. In the hour when He refused to conform His career to the standard of usefulness which Satan suggested, remaining true to the divine ideal of service, He for ever put behind Him as inadequate that conception of utility which found expression in the criticism, "Why this waste?"

We must indeed place unceasing emphasis upon the fact that utility is a true standard of values. Condemnation, swift and certain, shall overtake that which is finally useless. God writes His approval of this standard of values in large letters upon nature. In God's great house

often the agent of disease, has its uses, and these of the most important kind. But for dust, we should not have the beauty of the glorious sunsets which so charm and inspire us. The blue sky is dust's gift to our enraptured vision. The world would probably be uninhabitable if dust were wholly eliminated. Dust has justified its existence on the ground of utility.

More than this, as every student of nature knows, beauty is the outward symbol of utility. We admire the soft beauty of the leaves in the early spring, and are patient with the on-coming of winter because it is heralded so splendidly by the gorgeous autumn tints which transform our forests into panoramas of indescribable loveliness. But the varying shades of the leaves are not for the eye alone. Their beauty is, in some sort, an incident. Utility justifies their charm. The life of the tree is preserved, in good measure, by those changes in the tints of the leaves which so delight our eyes. Even beauty must find its justification in use.

Ruskin calls attention to the fact that the decline of architecture was contemporaneous with the divorce of utility and beauty. When mere ornamentation began to content the architect, or when he lost concern for beauty and was satisfied with utility alone, he sacrificed his art to lower ideals and deterioration began to mar his work.

But nature is an unfailing rebuke to those who interpret utility in terms of narrowness or mere temporary profit, or advantage, or pleasure. How admirably Dr. Horace Bushnell puts this truth in his great work, The Moral Uses of Dark Things." Dealing with the subject of "Waste" he writes:

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"When we see that God pours out of His abundance, in creative lavishments that never can be turned to any practical use by us, we are taken quite away from the conceit that something worthy of Him

is to be found only when we discover in His works adaptations to our physical want or convenience. It has been a great study of science for many years past to discover such points of adaptation, and so great progress has been made that many are ready to assume the fact of nature's universal adaptation to our human uses Doubtless in the bodily conditions. nature is adapted somehow to our uses, but not of course to our physical uses. Some things will be the better adapted to our mental and moral uses that they are not adapted to our physical, and because they are not. Everything created must somehow be the expression of God, and all that is in God is adapted certainly to our best uses in thought and duty and character. But if we could reduce both Him and His work to a mere contriving of physical and mechanical adaptations for our comfort, we should make Him out a scheme of morality in about the lowest figure of utility that ever was or can be imagined."

In these noble words false utility is rebuked and true utility defined. We must incorporate into our conception of utility all man's needs, his spiritual necessities even more than his physical, his eternal nature. even more than his temporal wants. Not only so, we must not think of man as isolated or unrelated to the universe. We must conceive him as related to all the intelligences of the universe, and above all to that great First Intelligence, the Fountain and Supply of all that is worth while in us.

The critics who sat at meat with our Saviour have many representatives on earth to-day. False standards of utility still pervert judgment and lead men to proclaim that to be waste which is in the truest sense useful. Thus our utilitarian friend condemns art galleries, particularly those which are supported out of the public purse. He has calculated to a fraction how many streets might be paved, how many sewers constructed, how many tenementhouses built, out of the capital invested in pictures and statuary. But he forgets that man has an