This title carries one beyond our best thoughts to the transcendent glory of God. He is in our world and in all worlds, but infinitely beyond extends his perfection. This is the great idea of the prophet. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord; for as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my thoughts than your thoughts and my ways than your ways." There is the comfort of living in a universe whose excellence is so great that our thoughts are but shadows upon the hillsides of the Eternal reality! With a universe infinitely perfect and resourceful, we can expect anything; with a meagre God and a meagre universe, however well-disposed, not much is to be expected. Jesus said that with God all things are possible. If that is true the heart may be at rest. The older I grow, while I am increasingly thankful for the great thoughts that God has given to the world, about himself, the less do I trust in them, and the more in the Ineffable Reality behind man's highest thinking.

Ten years ago I spent forty-six days and nights on the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. I took one ship after another and all the ships were good and all brought me to my desired haven in peace. I had no reason for anything but grateful thoughts of those ships and the service they rendered; but while they were doing

me this service I thought what tiny things they were compared with the wide rolling ocean, sweeping either pole and washing the West and the East; how incommensurate they were with that great sea, two thousand miles in length, that stretches from the pillars of Hercules to Asia Minor; little boats they surely were; the sea and the ocean were the transcendent reality. Thus it is with our thoughts about God, the Lord Jesus, the moral order of our world, the moral order of the universe; the worth of humanity, the preciousness of the individual soul, the forces and tides of retribution, the sense of life beyond death. Our thoughts at their best are precious, they will take us to our desired haven; but they are nothing in comparison with the majesty and the eternity of the Reality! We build not upon our insight, precious as that may be, and indeed essential; we build on that to which our insight leads; we found heart, home, state, church, our whole humanity upon the being of God.

III

One more introductory question remains to be considered. This question concerns a word or phrase current in the present chapter, recurrent in all the other chapters of this book-the Eternal. Has that great, vague, august word any real meaning behind it? Does it indicate the

cloudlands of imagination or does it stand for the greatest of human thoughts? Is the Eternal the background of all human thinking, the judgment-seat at which the mind of man, and man's entire world in time must appear? Is the apostle to the nations right in his classification and valuation of judgments? He says, " But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing against myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord." The world-conscience is elementary, introductory; the individual conscience is great but not final. The Lord is judge; through him life goes up to the Absolute conscience for the final verdict.

*What do we mean by the Eternal? Many persons would say, the everlasting. We mean that and much more. The idea of the everlasting is not the core of the Eternal. The wild Pragmatist says the Eternal is the static, the temporal is the dynamic, and men must change their homage from static being to being in progress. Our reply is that all this is on the surface. No man ever loved the Eternal because it does nothing, or because it simply endures. The Eternal has laid men under its spell because of its worth, its absolute worth. When they have found that the

1 1 Corinth. 4:3-4.

Eternal as Absolute worth endures forever, they have found in it their home:

"Lord thou hast been our dwelling place

In all generations." 1

In the great version of Isaac Watts:

"Our God our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come;

Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our Eternal home."

When we say that we mean by the Eternal worth Absolute, the question comes, What do we mean by worth? We do not mean by worth the order and beauty of nature, nor its adaptation to life. These things may be, conceivably at least, by chance or necessity, and chance and necessity are no part of worth. We mean by worth, good will, effective good will, the will that is Love and Power. Worth is an attribute of persons, the valiant soldier, the beloved physician, the incorruptible judge, the pure patriot, the wise ruler, the great prophet who gives himself in life and in death to his cause, the coming of the kingdom of man. If worth is an attribute of persons, the Supreme person, or mind, will have the highest worth. The Supreme mind, or Person, is God; therefore the highest worth belongs to him; therefore he is the Eternal God.

If we look into the New Testament we find

1 Ps. 90: 1.

these clear ideas: that eternal life is the knowledge of God; that eternal punishment is life without God; that the Eternal as worth is God, and that in Him it is endowed with everlastingness. This is the Being that Mrs. Stowe brings before us in her beautiful elaboration of a phrase in the 139th Psalm:

"Still, still with thee, when purple morning breaketh, When the bird waketh and the shadows flee: Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight, Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with thee. Alone with thee, amid the mystic shadows,

The solemn hush of nature newly born; Alone with thee, in breathless adoration,

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In the calm dew and freshness of the morn.

When sinks the soul, subdued by toil, to slumber, Its closing eye looks up to thee in prayer; Sweet the repose, beneath thy wings o'ershadowing, But sweeter still to wake and find thee there. So shall it be at last in that bright morning

When the soul waketh, and life's shadows flee; Oh, in that hour, and fairer than day's dawning,

Shall rise the glorious thought, I am with thee.” Here is the great awakening into the presence of the Absolute worth; the wonder of nature as the symbol of the Transcendent worth; the exhaustion of life and its refreshment in the consciousness of that sure but elusive Presence, the final act of life, death, and the endless morning, in the being of the Infinite mystery.

One looks upon a beehive, and one wonders at