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creature should be made better and purer and greater, — he has caught sight of the whole; and though he walks in silence and perplexity and suspense, he does

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not curse.

And so we come to this, the sacredness and graciousness of the whole. He who sees the part, grows bitter. He who sees the whole, is full of hope. We curse the part, but not the whole. The reason must be that he who grasps the whole, touches God, and the human soul cannot really curse Him. The whole is sacred. It is more than the sum of its parts. It has its own quality and character. It is great and mysterious. In it is peace. He who sees it all finds rest unto his soul. He who catches glimpses of how he shall see it all some day has something of the power of that rest already.

Remember I have not preached to you blind satisfaction and complacency. I have tried to press on you the old noble and ennobling exhortation, "Lift up your eyes," see all you can. What you cannot see with your eyes, see with your faith. Then go through life not feebly scattering curses by the way, but bravely hopeful, strong in God whose being and love surround it all, blessing and being blessed, at every step and at the end.

XIII.

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.

"Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this Present World.". II TIMOTHY iv: 10.

OF Demas we know almost nothing except what is suggested in these words. Once in the Epistle to the Colossians, and once in the Epistle to Philemon, St. Paul alludes to him as his own fellow-worker, in tones of sympathy and love. Then in the Epistle to Timothy there comes this statement of his follower's defection.

With so few facts to restrain us, we may give some play to our imagination. We may ask ourselves why and how it was that Demas turned back from the company of Paul, and gave himself to "this present world." It may have been mere lightness of nature, which grew weary of the severe and lofty life which the apostle lived. On the other hand, there may have been something more than that. Demas may certainly have been a man of some degree of seriousness. I can think of him as being first drawn to Paul and Paul's Christ with real enthusiasm. His heart was touched. His mind was fascinated. Lo! here was something greater than the ordinary life. Here was the true life of man. I can imagine him. thinking that for a long time, and then I can imagine a misgiving creeping in upon him. "After all," I

can picture him saying to himself, "what is this life of Paul, my master? Is there any hope that he can make the world that which he thinks it ought to be? Is he not striving for an impossibility? Is he not before his time? Is he not so far apart from common standards that all his teaching and work must be only a powerless episode, out of which, when it is over, no permanent result can come? Will not the true, the healthy, the practical man rather seek the best standards of his time and live in them?" With thoughts like these, I can conceive this vague and shadowy Demas, by and by, perhaps with deep regret and courteous farewells, forsaking Paul, his master, "having loved this present world."

If any such picture of his history were true, should we not have in Demas a very interesting study of the comparative power of Higher and Lower Standards, and of their relation to one another? We should see a man pressed on by the immediate conditions of his place and time urged to behave and live as his contemporaries and his fellow-citizens were living and behaving; then tempted out beyond these immediate surroundings by the sight of vaster experiences and the more ideal possibilities of man; and then again deliberately leaving and disowning these, and coming back and saying: "No! Beautiful as it is, it is a delusion. Man must live in his own place, and in his own time. The universal and the eternal must not bewilder him. He can identify and integrate his life only in the moulds of his own race, his own family, his own class. Let him find his standards there. Let the bird be the best bird, and the mole the best

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mole, that it can; but let neither lose its distinctness and special value by aspiring after some vague dream of universal animal life." This is what we should see in Demas if our imagination concerning him were right. And so we should understand the scene when on some dim and hazy morning he turned his back on Paul, and went back to the "present world" which he loved.

Was there ever a restlessness in his soul afterwards? Did the heaven which he once had dared to seek haunt him in his lower life? We are almost sure it must have haunted him, for not by any one resolution does a man shut the windows on the higher standards which once have shone upon him. He cannot so look to earth that he will not be aware of the heaven, any more than he can so fix his eyes on the heaven that he will not know there is an earth. An old mediæval legend says that mankind are the incorporation, the embodiments, of the angels who in the strife between God and Lucifer could not determine on which side they ought to be. They never have finally decided. And so this special fallen angel Demas may, as well as any other man, give us the starting-point from which to think about the true relation of the higher and the lower, the universal and the special, standards to the life of

man.

ing.

That is what I should like to do this morn

Let us start, then, with the fact that every human being is born into a group of local, ready-made standards, to which, in the absence of any broader and more absolute ideas of life, he naturally and legiti

mately conforms. The child takes it for granted that what his father and his mother do is right. The ways of the household represent for him the perfect life. As he goes forth from the house door into the school, into the city life, into the Church's teaching, it is all right for him that each of them should welcome him into a set of standards all formed and accepted, which should be presumably the best. He does not know enough to question them. The presumption is enormously upon their side. The very fact of his being born into the midst of them implies a certain kind of evidence that he brings such a nature as will be best suited to them, and such as they will best suit. They represent the same stage in the development of man. And so the child in the household, and the scholar in the school, and the citizen in the State, and the Christian in the Church, starts with a cordial acceptance of the local standard, and desires to live as other men are living in the institution of which he finds himself a part.

In a yet larger way, the same is true about the age in which a man finds himself set. I am here in the nineteenth century, and I am presumably in its spirit, and think it the best century which the world has seen. The same causes have produced it and me and the men who are living in it at my side. I see its light; I feel its nobleness. Other centuries I must go abroad to seek. This century is here. I breathe its breath; its blood is in my veins; its passions are my passions; its ideas are my ideas. And so presumptively, and by the first natural dis

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