it that for a man to gain money so is wicked? Here is where the breaking of the spell must come. Men in all ages have doubted or denounced the gambler's life. The gambler's own conscience, if he sets it free, denounces it. Before the universal human experience and the personal conscience, the standard of the gaming-house finds itself corrected and rebuked.

I will not multiply illustrations. Do you not see how they all point the same way, how they all tend to urge the same kind of life,—a life profoundly rooted in the here and now, a life that is in quick and earnest sympathy with what is close about it, a life that altogether is disposed to think its own time and its standards right, and yet a life which is always looking wider and looking deeper, — wider to the universal experience of man, deeper to the personal conscience which it carries in itself?

I appeal to you whether what I have described is not the character, the kind of man, whom the community most trusts and honors, on whom it most learns to depend. The servant of the hour, but not its slave; in sympathy with the day, the place, the business, the party, the circle of society in which it stands, but not in blind subserviency to it; ready to protest and having a recognized right to protest because of an undoubted sympathy and love; always bringing in new elements and forms of nobleness out of the fields of history, and up from the depths of its own nature, is not this the character of the man of his own age, the man of his own class, who makes the whole world and all time more rich? Is not this the timely and yet universal man whom

it may well stir the ambition of any young man to become.

I know but one step more to make, and that, while it need not take us long to describe it, is a great step, for it brings all our subject out into the rich land of religion. We talk about getting into association with the universal human experience, and about listening to one's own conscience, and then some one starts up and says, "Ah, yes, that is all well, but what am I to do? I, who am no scholar, who can be no traveller, and who, when I listen for my conscience, hear only a turmoil of doubts and perplexities all in confusion down below." When I hear questions such as that my thought goes back to Jesus, and the question which the people asked one another about Him, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned," seems to throw light upon it all. He was no scholar. They had never seen Him in their schools. But He knew man and knew Himself, and by and by they learned that it was because He knew God.

That if we know

What does that mean for us? God, if we are forever trying to find out what is His will, if we are seeking for it in the Bible, if we are seeking for it in Christ, we find in knowing Him the true enlargement and corrections of the present standards; we find, in knowing Him, the revelation of the universal experience of man and the awakening of the personal conscience.

How true that is! In every man of God there is a breadth and depth which makes him free of the world in which he yet most intimately lives. In God there

is the universal man and the true life of every individual child of His. Therefore, whoever loves and serves Him finds in Him the constant enlargement and adjustment of his life. Demas need not leave Paul and Paul's Christ in order that he may love this present world. He will know how to love and serve this present world all the more completely if he knows Christ and the great Revelation of God which is in him.

Oh if I only could make you young men see how there is here the true solution of the problem of your lives! Shall you be God's or the world's? Be both! Not in any low miserable compromise. Not by the effort to serve God and mammon. But by a brave and filial questioning of God that He may tell you just how He wants a child of His to live in this peculiar time and under these peculiar circumstances of yours. There is a type of universal human life in harmony with the best life of all the ages. In tune with the sublimest and finest spiritual music of the universe, in harmony also with the profoundest dictates of your own personal conscience, which you can live in your parlor and your shop; and that life you can reach if you are consecrated to God in your own place and time. If you live that life, the world of the present owns you and claims you and rejoices in you. The most distant life of man looks in on you and recognizes you as a part of itself, and says, "Well done!" Up from your own conscience speaks your selfapproval. And God your Father bends His love around you, and out of His blessing feeds you with His strength.

Compared with such a life, what miserable things are these feverish efforts either to suit the present world or to reject it and rebel against it. Either Demas strolling once more in the streets of Thessalonica with his sight of divine things faded from him like a dream, or some poor starved hermit sitting in his cave and trying to think that he despises that life to which his human heart still tells him that he belongs. How miserable are they both beside the life which goes like Christ's, from duty on to duty, from experience to experience, heartily in them all, and yet above, beyond them all, in hourly communion with God, with the complete humanity, and with Himself.

May we so live! May we be men here, now, and yet men there and then; in the infinite, in the eternal, while yet the duties of the present world are claiming us, and we are doing them with hands made faithful and skilful by the fire of God!

R

XIV.

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.

Howbeit that was not first which is Spiritual, but that which is Natural; and afterward that which is Spiritual. — I. COR. xv. 46.

"THE Adam comes before the Christ," St. Paul declares. And he is simply telling the story of the Bible. The man of the Garden, untrained, undisciplined, self-indulgent, incapable of self-control, comes before the Man of the Cross, who willingly surrenders the present for the future, the body for the soul, and Himself for others. And the earthly life comes before the life of heaven. The life of temptation, and resistance, and surrender comes before the life of spontaneity, and freedom, and attainment!

These are St. Paul's two great examples; and then he seems to gather out of them the wide and general truth which they contain. He surveys the universe and finds the same truth everywhere. Everywhere the higher comes to make the lower perfect. Everywhere the lower is provided first, to be the basis and opportunity of the higher coming by and by. Everywhere the lips must be before the speech; the canvas must be before the picture; the candle must be before the flame; the brain must be before the thought. It is the teaching which natural science is giving us profusely. She traces the long progress in which the