of man; it had a body built out of the intellectual and religious world in which Paul lived. There are many atmospheres and some are clearer, others dimmer; but all atmospheres, at one time or another, enable those who look through them to see the bright and everlasting stars. All ages have their intellectual moods, customs, conditions; if men are to see the Eternal it must be through the temporal. Some ages are lighter, some less light; but all conditions admit, some of the time, the beatific vision.

Horace Bushnell, a great spirit in the religious life of our country, came one day from his study into the room where his family was; there he stood with a face lighted like the sunrise. His wife said to him, "What have you seen?" His reply was, "I have seen the Gospel!" That vision cannot be gained from mere history or from mere reasoning on historic data; only by brooding, only by the opening of the whole nature to what is brooded upon, only by candor, that rarest quality in the human mind, by sincerity, invocation of the truth, whatever the truth may be, and readiness to go with the truth whithersoever it may lead; only thus can men come to the great final achievement, not only to see the figure of Jesus with the historic eye, but to behold something of the meaning of his soul for the world.

This dicussion may fittingly end with the great

warning of the Master as to the sure way to approach the universal meaning of his Soul and message. No one knoweth the Son save the Father. No human soul can be understood apart from God; no man's higher nature can be apprehended except in and through the being and love of God. Mere animals all men will remain, creatures of time and space only, workers and sufferers under the sun, shorn of all transcendental import, till they are seen through their relation to the Infinite love. If this is the case with men of ordinary magnitude, how shall we approach and lay hold of something of the significance of the one sublimest Soul in all history, unless we come to behold him in his relation to his Father?

CHAPTER VII

MAN AND THE MORAL IDEAL

I

THE moral ideal may be described as the insight or dream as to what life should be, and by human endeavor, in a friendly world, may become. It is the vision, according to one's light, of the supreme good, or some important aspect of it, conceived under the form of privilege and obligation, and reflected in the colors and splendors of imagination. That the ideal is conceived as privilege is plain since it is seen as the sovereign good; that it is regarded and felt as obligation is clear, since one is under bonds to lift life to this complete satisfaction. The moral ideal unites the awe that duty inspires, and the gladness that goes with the sense of privilege, because duty and privilege alike rise out of the vision of the Eternal good. That this vision may command the whole power of feeling and appeal to the will with the greatest might it must be reflected in the hues and fires of the imagination.

The indestructibility of the ideal appears from the fact that mankind are guided by the sense of the future, by the expectation of good. If the ideal were to die all movement and action, other

than purely automatic, would vanish from the world. Absolute pessimism means absolute stagnation and death. Truth is sought as a satisfaction, that is, as a good; so beauty is sought, inward worth, conformity of will and being to the Highest. All these are ideals: they allure under the form of the future; because they remain imperishable, science lives, art lives, philosophy continues to advance and religion retains its unquenchable interest for human beings. Where the ideal dies the man ceases to hope. If one becomes a sceptic as to the validity of scientific conclusions that moment science ceases to be a serious concern, and if pursued, it is pursued as the result of habit or as an amusement. Still more evidently feeling enters into Art. The day that beauty ceases to excite the hope of its appropriate satisfaction, that day beauty dies and Art is no longer a possibility. The wonder of the Universe inspires philosophy, and the hope of seeing a little way into this soul of wonder sustains the philosopher at his task. When he has lost faith in the possibility of any insight whatever into the Universal mystery, his career is ended. The hopeless philosopher is a paralytic; he leads a dying life. Religion at its highest justly conceives God as the God of hope. The future is the sphere of hope; all ideals look to, and are versions of the future, and the God who was and who is, the

Ancient of Days and the contemporary Deity,is also the God who is to come. All ideals have their origin, their chastisement, their support, and their realization from God. They are, therefore, as imperishable as the soul is surely a pilgrim of the world that is to be, as imperishable as the being of God. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, because his Maker has put eternity in man's heart.

It is strange that the feeling of unfulfilled desire, reflected in imagination and projected into the future should be the central moving energy in life. Yet so it is. It is perhaps still stranger that when this desire is defeated on one level of existence it should rise to another, transform its character and again govern our actions. It is strangest of all that when the desire of good has been defeated through the entire experience of the individual, and in the case of the race, over the whole breadth of history, this same desire of good, this passion for the ideal, wise or unwise, should renew itself in the youth of the world, and that the ideal itself should rise as from the dead, reappear in the van of humanity, and like a pillar of fire, light with alluring brightness the great future. Here is something inevitable. Is it the irony of fate or the fresh apocalypse of God?

The moral ideal is indestructible; its life is coeval with the life of humanity. This indestructi