outset, - these divide touches left on us by the crea : God's own hand. And if tive hand, -pass away. The freshness, the beauty, the glory, the innocence, the boundless vitality, the native hope, the instinctive faith, the high purpose, fade out. Something better, or something that better serves a present purpose, may take their place still they are good, glories put on us by any say they are but natural, only so much the more are they divine. Shall I never, so we are forced to ask ourselves, -shall I never have again the buoyancy of youth, the zest, the innocence, the unquestioning faith, the ardent desire and unconquerable will, the bounding vigor of body and mind, with which I began life? We do not get half way through our allotted years before these riches are gone from us. If they are gone forever, one half of life, at least, is spent under an ever-deepening shadow. It is difficult to believe that existence is so ordered; that God's increated gifts are annihilated; that the impress of his hands, the similitudes of Himself, are blotted out forever. It were unendurable for us, it were like a waste on the part of God, if these first riches of our being are to perish. It is easier to conceive of this mysterious soul that we are, as a garner in which whatever is good is preserved; that it hives the sweetness of life for future use, as bees hive honey for winter's need; that, as a flower folds its beauty and perfume in the husk-clad seed, and will produce them again, so these first excellences are hidden in the enfoldings of this life, to reappear when the spiritual body shall blossom into its eternal state. St. Paul speaks of the redemption of the body as something that is waited for. He means no narrow doctrine of a physical resurrection, but a renewal of existence, a restora tion of lost powers. It changes the whole color of life, and its character also, if we take the one view or the other,if we regard existence as a dying-out process, or as passing into temporary eclipse, to emerge with all its past glories when the shadows of death flee away. 3. We wait for the full perfecting of character. I do not mean, of course, that we are to wait in the sense of relaxing effort after perfection, —such waiting may end in an eternal failure of character, but rather that the effort that now only partially succeeds will finally reach success. There is nothing that weighs more heavily upon a right-minded man than the slow progress he makes in overcoming his faults. Here we are at twenty, with the faults of childhood upon us: peevish, ungoverned, insatiable; at thirty, with the faults of youth: vain, inconsiderate, pleasureloving; at forty, still wearing the badges of early folly proud, passionate, sensual; at fifty or sixty, but not yet wise with the experience of life: selfish still, unsympathetic, ambitious, full of conscious weaknesses, and perhaps with an ill-repressed brood of evil habits, and the characteristic vice of age, -avarice. Yet all the while we may have been striving after the good, curbing the evil, keeping our faces heavenward, all the while aiming to fear God and keep his commandments, never at any time wholly giving up the strife after ideal excellence. This, after all, is the tragical feature of life, that it is linked with so much failure in character; that it is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and self-command and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. This makes the bitterness of death, and calls out the cry, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! There is nothing a rightminded man desires so much as entire right-mindedness. Will it never come? Yes, - but it must be awaited. Entireness is nowhere a feature of present existence, else it could not be a world of hope and promise. On no thing can we lay our hand and say, Here is finality and perfection. The adamant is crumbling to dust; the orderly heavens oscillate towards final dissolution, and foretell "new heavens;" in every soul is weakness and fault. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the hope of it by struggle towards it. And it is the struggle, and not the attainment, that measures character and foreshadows destiny. Character is not determined by faults and weaknesses, and periodic phases of life, nor by the limitations and accidents of present existence, but by the central purpose, the inmost desire of the heart. If that be turned towards God and his righteousness, it must at last bring us thither. 4. We await the renewal of sundered love. When love loses its object its charm is inter rupted, for love is oneness and cannot brook separation. It is impossible to believe that God has organized into life an incurable sorrow; that He has made love, which is the best conceivable thing, being the substance of Himself, the necessary condition of the greatest misery. If man willfully perverts love so that it becomes this, it were another matter, but that God has so ordered existence that love is thwarted into unquenchable sorrow, it is impossible to believe. If this were so, we no longer have a good God. But what is infinite sorrow, what is greatest misery, but love sundered by hopeless death? There is but one gate that leads out of this labyrinth of mortal perplexity, one thing and one only will make life other than a curse, namely, a belief that love, being eternal in its nature, will have an eternal realization. Hence, we do not believe that death is an end of love's oneness. Love may suffer an eclipse, but it is not sent wailing into eternal shadows. It is as sure as God Himself that human love shall again claim its own. Will He have his, and not give us ours? Will the Father of men keep his children forever in his conscious heart, and not let me have mine? There is nothing in this universe of mingled light and shadow so sure as this. But this eternal union must be awaited. It begins here, springing out of mysterious oneness; it grows up amidst unspeakable tenderness, rising from an instinctive thing to an intellectual and moral union, losing nothing, and weaving into itself every strand of human sympathy till it stands for the whole sub stance of life, and so vanishes from the scene. If this prime reality is an illusion, then all else is. If it does not outlast death, then all may go. But love is not a vain thing, and God does not mock Himself and us when He makes us partakers of his nature. "What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain, 5. We wait for the mystery to be taken off from life. The crucial test of a thoughtful mind is a sense of the mystery of life in this world. The mind that regards everything as common, as a matter of course, has not begun to think. One who has even once put the question, Why? before life, its origin, its relation to matter, its purpose, may be accounted thoughtful. The main feature of the highest intellectuality is that of awe and question before the mystery of being and destiny. This is the reason that such names as Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pascal, Emerson, Hawthorne, and "Geo. Eliot," are placed so high in the list of greatness; whatever their treatment of the mystery of life, they have the deepest sense of it. It is this that makes Hamlet greater than Macbeth: one is a plain picture of a human passion; the other depicts a man who is brooding on the mystery of life. The critics cannot explain the drama; nor could Shakespeare himself have explained it; the difficulty lies in the subject. It is this that takes such a man as Robertson out of the ranks of ordinary preachers |