souls leap to triumphant thoughts, and whose eyes are open to ecstatic visions. The great issue of all that I have been saying to you this morning is that these two sorts of men belong together, make one world, are serving the purposes of one God, and making ready one celestial kingdom, and deserve each the other's whole-souled respect. It is not that the lesser man is making his life successful by making possible a higher life which some other man may live, though that is much. It is not possible to look at it in such detail as that. It is that in this universe, where natural and spiritual succeed and minister to one another, he who at any spot is doing good work of any kind is serving the Universal Master and contributing to the Universal Success.

Christ had His word of encouragement and strength to say to every soldier in His army and to every worker at His work. He made both Martha and Mary the servants of His will. It is not only His loftiest disciples at their loftiest tasks. It is all souls, all hands and feet that have duty to perform. They all belong to Him; not merely scholars in their studies, not merely missionaries in their martyrdoms, not merely saints in their closed closets, but every working man and woman everywhere, — they are all His. The spirit which proceeds from Him may pour through the whole mass and find out every particle, and give to each an impetus towards its own next higher stage of life, and so bear the whole along together towards the completion of each man and the completion of the whole business and social life, and politics, and education, and then, as the crown of

them all, Religion. "That is not first which is Spiritual, but that which is Natural; and afterward that which is Spiritual!" But they are all God's; and to make each instinct with what measure of His life it is capable of containing, that is to build them all into a flight of shining stairs, sweeping upward into even clearer and intenser light, until he who mounts to the full summit stands by the altar of God's unclouded presence and realizes the blessedness of perfect Communion with Him.

XV.

THE STONE OF SHECHEM.

"And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us; for it hath heard all the words of the Lord which He spake unto us: it shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God."-JOSHUA Xxiv. 27.

JOSHUA had led the people of Israel over the Jordan and into the promised land as far as Shechem. There he halted the host for a most solemn ceremony. It was a poor and insignificant thing; it made their great invasion to be only like any restless movement of one tribe of heathen into the territory of another, unless they entered the promised country and began their new career distinctly as the people of God. Therefore at Shechem Joshua makes them renew their sworn dedication to Jehovah. He gives them once more the old familiar Mosaic message of the Lord: "Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in truth." And when the people had answered the voice of God with solemn promises of loyalty, then Joshua sealed the whole ceremony with a picturesque and striking figure. He took a great stone and set it up there under an oak which was by the sanctuary of the Lord. He said, "This stone has heard what God has said; here it shall stand as witness to you lest you deny your God." "You may forget," he seemed to say. "Your minds

are soft and lose impressions. They are hot and burn with reckless passion." Here is this hard, cold stone. It never will forget, it never will distort the voice that it has listened to. When you need it for encouragement and when you need it for rebuke, this stone which has heard what God has said shall be here to utter forever His unforgotten words.

All readers of the Bible know how common in its pages is this simple, majestic, childlike figure which Joshua employed,—the figure which clothes an inanimate and unintelligent object with perception and memory and the power of utterance. It is the figure which children use in their plays. It is the figure of a primitive and unsophisticated people, and seems to show how near they stand to nature, how close they are in the confidence of the rocks and trees and stars. It is the figure which creates a large part of the mythologies and is at the root of much of the monumental instinct of mankind. And in the Bible it is constantly present in its highest, freshest, and most vivid form. When Cain kills Abel in the book of Genesis it is the actual literal blood of the murdered man that takes a voice and cries out from the ground so that God hears it up in Heaven. When Job tells the story of creation, he makes us hear the very morning stars sing together in the sky." When the same Job asserts his integrity and justice, he calls upon the very earth that he has tilled to contradict him if he does not speak the truth. "If my land cry against me, or that the furrows thereof complain, let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley." When David goes out into the morning

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sunlight he hears the "Heavens declare the glory of God." When Habakkuk is denouncing woes upon the covetous men and the oppressors of the poor, he makes their very houses speak and tell of the iniquity and cruelty which built them. "The stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it." When Jesus rides across the rocky ridge of Olivet toward Jerusalem, He declares that the rocks under His feet are all ready to break out in His praises if the voices of the people fail. "I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." And when St. James upbraids the cruel rich men of his day, even the coins of which they have defrauded their servants take a voice. “Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth." The Bible is preeminently the book of man; but the world in which man lives and the material things he touches are always present in the Bible for his sake.

The splendor of the sunshine, the whisper of the wind, the very smell of the rich ground, are always there, not for their own beauty or sweetness, but for their ministries and messages to man; and man and nature stand as close to one another as in the child's fairy story or the poet's dream, which keep the Bible tone and coloring for all the ages.

I have referred to all these instances only to remind you how thoroughly Joshua is a man of the Bible when he sets his stone up at Shechem and calls upon the people to endow it in their imaginations with the powers of hearing and of utterance. "This