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every working day in the year in the monotonous and undeveloping employment of making pin-heads. There is the poor seamstress who is supporting herself and, it may be, her fatherless children by giving herself morning, noon, and night to the needle until the doleful "song of the shirt" wears itself literally into her very nerve and fiber. But this man carries in his mental constitution, undeveloped and ungratified, all the faculties of the philosopher. The poor seamstress has lying within her the latent faculties of a poet and a prophetess. The physical limitations of this life are for the present putting impassable barriers up around these souls. Their opportunity is yet to come. Immortality will furnish them the limitless landscape and the theater in which they shall yet develop their powers to the full. We have already noted the fact that nature, for instance, seems to carry the data for unlimited physical knowledge. Man with all his wealth of attained science has yet only made a beginning toward exploring nature's exhaustless resources. The great counterpart of this truth is that man has only yet begun to discover the real wealth of his faculties, of his own possibilities. We believe there is not anywhere in the universe a hidden fact of possible usefulness for which man shall not yet develop the art of discovery. There are no laws or energies of nature so concealed as finally to baffle his power to capture and to master them. But lying close alongside of these truths is that other inevitable fact that every child of God must finally have full opportunity for self-development. The man most laden and limited by life's drudgeries has dreams at least in which new doors seem opened upon his vision-vistas which lead away to Elysian fields and to unoccupied kingdoms which he feels by right are his own. And they are his own. Near-by realms, as yet unseen and unexplored, haunt the thought of many keensighted minds. If our souls were in perfect health and we had full command of their faculties the landscapes of the spiritual universe would be seen lying all about us. Some highly attuned mystical souls, as we know, seem at times to have direct vision of divine things. Some of us have been lifted into high moods when, if a single new window had been opened to our souls, our vision outward would have been apocalyptic. The sons of God, tabernacling

here in the flesh, have not yet found their spiritual vision. The best are as they that see through a glass darkly. God's more glorious universe, the spiritual, has as yet been revealed only in prophecy, in types, in occasional experience and revelation of a partial order. Its wealth lies around us mostly unseen and unrealized by us because our spiritual faculties lie within us too dormant to be awakened by its surpassing glories. It will not always be so. For us who toil a day of emancipation will come. The drudgery of life will be lifted away, and the soul, with fully awakened powers, will be free to lead forth its faculties into the larger universe of realization. And who shall measure or describe to us the meaning or the opportunities of the heritage of immortality for the sons of God? We find ourselves at present living in a physical universe practically infinite in its dimensions and resources. In the sphere of intellectual possibility the immortality of mind is only paralleled by the immensity of worlds-worlds all of which are under the common sway of God's scepter, and the study of which it might require an eternity to exhaust. But we may not forget that the material universe, immense and glorious as it is, is but secondary in its values. The real glory of God's greatness is moral. The crowning destiny which he purposes for man is moral. The highest pursuits and enjoyments of the sons of God will be forever spiritual. And if God has overwhelmed our minds by the discoveries he has made of himself in his physical universe, what infinitely more glorious moral and spiritual revelations may not his sons expect? While eternity moves on, God will forever press new revelations of his own exhaustless glories upon the unfolding vision and receptivity of his children. Not to the most inspired vision as yet has there been revealed more than the alphabet of man's infinite possibilities. But as the alphabet carries in itself the potencies of exhaustless literatures, so the best that has yet entered into the visions and experience of prophets and saints are but the foregleams of continents, kingdoms, intellectual dominions, moral vision, spiritual raptures, Godlike attainments-all of which shall be the heritage of God's sons.

Our best vision to-day is near-sighted. We are hedged in by barriers of inheritance, of narrow education, of untrained faculty,

of skeptical habit, all of which bar us from wide outlook upon the universe of our real possibilities. We are provincial in our habits. Our beliefs are narrow. Our spiritual vision is not adjusted to telescopic distances. We are like dwellers in caves by the seashore, rather than explorers of the mighty deeps. The wings of our souls are not yet trained for familiar flights through the starry spaces. Man's intellectual provinciality and lack of insight, when we stop to think of it, excite our wonder. When Adam first walked in Eden, nature was as rich as to-day in all the stored facts out of which the sciences are constructed. But for all the millenniums the human race walked the earth with no perception of nature's wealth. And how skeptical of the splendid possibilities in nature is the average human mind. Supposing that one hundred years ago some prophet had pictured to the common view a panorama of things familiar to us in these days. In this panorama there should figure the telegraph and the telephone, electric cars and automobiles upon our city streets, the twentieth century express train and the titanic steamship. Such a picture, whatever wonder it might excite, would be looked upon as the creation of an insane dreamer. Because these things were unknown it would be the habit of mind to deny instantly that they were possible of achievement. Well, it is to be feared that we are all very much in the same habit of mind in relation to both the intellectual and spiritual universe in which we dwell. We have a materialistic way of practically valuing our lives by the gauge of our narrow experiences and negative vision. Whereas, if our sight were more clear, our knowledge broader, our faith more inspirational, we should know ourselves as citizens and proprietors of infinite intellectual and spiritual dominions. What we need to do is to cultivate the divine side of ourselves. We are the sons of God. The immensities and the eternities are our birthright. We ought to remember that the one thing for which we should seek vision and enlargement is our souls. God made these souls for something sublime, for inheritances more enduring and glorious than ever yet entered into the dreams of prophets. True wealth of being is wealth of soul. It is only what the soul appropriates that makes life rich. Money is not wealth. It may have power to buy for its

possessor luxury and idleness. But luxury keeps company with palled appetites, and idleness is the vocation of the tramp. Tiberius, the imperial sensualist, held in his hands the scepter and the wealth of Rome, but so jaded were his appetites that he would willingly part with half his kingdom for the sensation of a new pleasure. The soul whose vision is Godward, and which is at home with high thought, may dwell alone with a Bible; but it will keep company with prophets and saints, it will stand on mountains of transfiguration, and will walk the avenues of apocalyptic glories. It is not travel, not physical locomotion to distant parts, that gives resource to life. It is vision of soul. To such vision all environment responds. The soul that has vision carries everywhere in its journeyings whole provinces of God's beautiful world. Its windows look out upon rose gardens and landscapes most choice. Its room walls are hung with pictures of divine beauty. Its libraries are vocal with the songs of genius, and are peopled with the choice spirits of the ages. The way to secure this vision is not by cultivating the greeds of earth. These greeds will perish. The soul that cultivates them will shrivel. Soul vision comes from walking in the divine daylight, from living upon high levels, from looking into God's face until the transforming touch of that face shall awaken with ever-increasing perfection that which is Godlike in ourselves. But such a soul can know no palled appetites. Its vision will grow ever richer, its joys ever deeper, its goodness ever more beautiful, its knowledge ever broader, its attainments ever more Godlike. And the wealth of its future none can picture, for eternity alone can complete the history of its progress.

George R. Mains

ART. IV. THE POET'S GOSPEL OF IMMORTALITY.

A FRENCH critic on Wordsworth once said that on account of the scientific tendencies of our age poetry would cease to be read in fifty years. We have just about reached the end of the allotted time. Is poetry holding its own beside science, a twin brother with science in the revelation of God? How have the poets fallen! Tennyson, and Browning, and William Morris, and Whitman, and, last of all, Edwin Arnold have dropped their pens and gone to sleep. On the muse of three of these at least science had laid its burden. It is because they were so great as poets that they set even speculation singing.

Kant said the three great inevitable problems of metaphysical reasoning are God and freedom and immortality. The same thing has been said of poetry. Poetry, and not science, has always been the bulwark of the faith and the inspirer of hope in immortality. Poetry has prepared the dying for his end, has consoled the bereaved, has immortalized the virtues of the departed in funeral elegy and epitaph. The ages change but little the simple faith of the poet. Whether it be Petrarch glorying in the triumph of love over death in those tender words:

In her appeared what th' unwise term to die;

And Death sate beauteous on her beauteous brow,

or Wordsworth drawing from childhood recollections his intimations of immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar,

we recognize the same spirit of hope and trust. But these men lived lives apart from speculation on physical science. The faith of the one was the outgrowth of his philosophy of love. The faith of the other was the faith of a little child. Either no questions were asked or they were such as could be simply answered. But to-day our questions are not answered simply or by revelation. They are answered by pantheism, sensationalism, supernaturalism. Science has laid its hypothesis, and it is extending it year by year.

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