truth, and permit him to take his choice, he would say: O God, the truth is for Thee alone. Give me the privilege and the joy of search.

There is another thought with which I have played sometimes. I have thought that it might be fine if the generations which had preceded us could have left for us, not merely the results of their study and their work, but their trained faculties and powers as well, so that we might start with the advantage, not only of what they had accomplished, but of what they had become. And yet, when I look at the idea, however alluring it may seem, I detect that it would be folly. In the first place, these people who have gone, as I believe, to another life, want their own brains and training, their faculties and powers; and they cannot afford to leave them behind for

us.

Then there is another consideration. Whatever is simply given to us, without any effort on our part, fails of its mission. We need not merely the accomplished results: we need the culture and training which come with the searching and the striving and the effort. It is much better for us that we should strive, and grow in the striving, even if we do not attain, than that we should have the finest things in the universe laid at our feet, leaving us undeveloped and uncultivated children, because we have escaped the pain and the effort, the toil and the study, and so have lost the development which comes from this onreaching and outreaching after the things that are before us.

I have now at some length gone over a great many departments of life, and shown you how incomplete, how unsatisfactory they are. We never get through, we never attain, we never find the place where we can say, Now we are satisfied, let us sit down and rest. But there are a few other considerations which seem to me to abate the fault we are inclined to find. I wish to call your attention to a few of them.

The old Roman Stoic, Seneca, has given us a suggestion that may serve our need. He says, I give only his thought, when we are finding fault because things are taken away from us, is it not well for us to remember the good of their having been given to us? While we have things, are they not good? A beautiful morning, was it not beautiful? A magnificent sunrise, was it not just as magnificent as though it had lasted all day long? Should we have thought it was quite as beautiful if it had lasted all day long? A lovely experience that we have gone through, was it not lovely? Suppose a friend takes you for a whirl in the country in his automobile. You had no claim to this pleasure: it was given you outright as a joy, a fine experience. Instead of being grateful for it, after the drive is at an end, will you find fault with the owner because he did not give you the machine? Will you find fault because the drive was not longer? This is what we are doing all the time. We receive good things, for which we have no claim; and then, the minute they are removed, we begin to grumble and find fault because we cannot keep them, instead of being grateful that we have had the blessed experience. This you may carry out, and apply in a thousand different directions.

Then there is another consideration. Have we really lost the things we have had, and which we think have passed away? Have you lost your childhood? Have you lost the friends of your childhood? Have you lost some blessed experience that you passed through last year? Have you lost the early years of your married life? Have you lost the joy of seeing the little children round your feet, because they have grown up? Are these things lost, or is it not rather true that all the things that are really precious, that are important to us, have become a part of us? They are wrought into the very fibre of our being. They are not only shadowy

images, memories: they have made us over. We are different men and women from what we should have been but for these. And so we keep them. I do not believe that, as a matter of fact, we ever really lose anything important to our lives.

And then there is another consideration, which I have touched on at different times. If we lose the poetry, the beauty, the brightness, of life, let us ask ourselves seriously if it is not our own fault. I said, a moment ago, that faculties which we do not cultivate become atrophied, that they become as if they did not exist. The world with which these faculties bring us into contact may seem to us no longer to exist; and yet it may be all round us, touching us on every hand, just as the glory of the world may encompass one who is blind, or the music of the world one who is deaf. If we are really anxious to come in contact with these beautiful, poetic, romantic, lovely, spiritual things, we must train and keep alive the faculties and powers that enable us to appreciate them. If we do not, is it God's fault that we think the world is poor, or is it our own fault, if we have kept alive only those things that bring us in contact with the grossest, the most material, the most commonplace parts of human life? Shall we, then, charge God with having made the world poor?

There is another suggestion worthy of our thought and attention. We are on a journey in this world; and we should not like it if we were stopped, any more than we like it because we have to go on. We are made up of a kind of material that is bound not to be satisfied either way; and it is a blessed thing that we are. Whether we like it or not, then, we are on a journey. We are travelling from childhood to manhood; and the question is, Is it wiser for us to keep our eyes fixed on some far-off, alluring end, and in the mean time to be

dissatisfied because we are not there, or to live by the hour, the day, to appreciate and rejoice in the beauty, the good, the glory, as we go along? Suppose I am starting for Rome or Constantinople or Cairo. I am to stop at a great many smaller places by the way. Now what shall I do? Shall I think about Rome all the time and the glorious day when I shall arrive there, and in the mean time be impatient with delay? or shall I say, In this small place where I must pause there is a cathedral, or a modest church, or a picture gallery, or a public hall, or a fine bit of landscape, a river, a waterfall, something worth seeing. Shall I see the beauty of these things as I go along? Shall I rejoice in every phase of this journey? Is not that, after all, the rational way to live? And yet the most of us, if we have some desirable thing in the future that we are striving after, keep our attention on that so continuously that we are dissatisfied and fault-finding till we get there. And, when we get there, what? Why, we have made ourselves restless, dissatisfied, and fault-finding by the way; and so that is the kind of person we are when we arrive. We see everything from the point of view of such a person, so we are never satisfied with anything. It seems to me that the rational way for us is to live by the day.

Now one other consideration. Would we have things different? Is there not some charm in their frailty, in the fact that they change and fade so speedily? Would you care for a rose quite so much if it would keep its color and its shape for a year or for ten years? Is not the very frailty one element which makes it seem so beautiful, so desirable? Are there not experiences of love and friendship that get their finest edge and quality from the fact that they are fleeting? Does the mother not love the little baby all the more because she knows that every single day the baby is changing, and will

soon outgrow its babyhood? Because we are haunted with the shadow of illness and death and the unknown, do we not clasp in our arms a little more tenderly those whom we love, and whom we know we cannot always keep just as they are? Would you have it otherwise? Perhaps in some hours we would. But I question whether God is not wiser than we. What does growth mean? It means outgrowth of course. It means leaving things behind, because we have outgrown them. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in one of his humorous but pathetic poems, tells us of a man who wanted to be a boy again; but, when you came to question him closely, he wanted to keep his own boys, his wife, and the achievements of his manhood. He was not ready to give these up in order to be a boy again. But you cannot have your own children and the wife and the home and the achievements of manhood until you have outgrown being a boy. This is what life means everywhere. If you are to become something more, something better, something higher, something finer, it means that you leave things behind you. You remember how Paul expressed this thought, "When I was a child, I thought as a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things." It is lovely to see a little boy with his cart or a little girl with her doll; but it is one of the most pitiful things when a boy stops growing, and after he gets to be the age of a young man still pushes his cart or when a little girl old enough to be a mother to her own child has not outgrown the period of playing with the doll. Growth, then, means outgrowing; and we have no right to find fault because we must outgrow our present conditions.

Note, then, the marvellous significance of this fact that we are never satisfied, that we are haunted with unattainable ideals. What does it mean? It means