highest significance and serving as the goal of all the social organization of mankind. If God should reveal that supreme purpose to you, and if it should engage and dominate your soul, you would be saved indeed. Even though it should not possess and control you at every moment, though it mould not every action and fail to regulate every affection, though you achieve no perfect and unrelaxing obedience to its demands; still, even in your imperfection and failure, the knowledge of this great aim and purpose of your life would be an immeasurable gain. It would give insight and wisdom. It would show what place and proportion your various needs and wishes must assume if they are to serve the end which gives them their true law. Every interest would be seen from the height of the supreme standard. Having the highest measure of all duties you would understand your duty in perplexing situations. You would be emancipated from the frivolous and petty standards of a world absorbed in things seen, immediate and transient. You would comprehend ideals. Your tasks would be illuminated by the vision of the mount. Your soul would have the widest horizons. In your secluded and narrow vale of life, you would be mindful of the vast, perfect, beautiful entirety which outspreads it and is its sovereign realm. You would see your life as God intends it.

Christ declares to us this supreme purpose.

The religion of Jesus was devotion to this supreme standard and intention. The religion of Jesus demands that here and now, in every moment, in every thought and feeling and choice, we shall live according to the demands of that purpose which utters the divine intention for life. Jesus does not cancel any natural need or striving. He knew that man needs bread and raiment and rest and relaxation. He affirms that God's bounty provides all these things, not as ends in themselves, but as subsidiary and contributive good. Seek the supreme purpose and all these things shall be added unto you. Seek first the Kingdom of God. That kingdom awaits you— make new your life for that. Be ready for it now. Watch and be ready for the hour when it shall dawn. Set your heart upon it. Count it your treasure of gold, your jewel of priceless worth. Live by that kingdom's law. Be ready for its perfections now. And the appealing and unforgetable thing in the record of Jesus is that he accepted and interpreted all the tragedies of his lot as contained in the wisdom and beneficence of the Father's great purpose for the lives of His children. Jesus lived and Jesus taught a heroic, daring idealism of trust in this supreme intention of the divine goodness.

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God! The seeking lifts us very near to God. Such yearning sees and seeks a life wherein all spirits together enact the justice and benevolence which is the

character of God. It discerns a vision of a family of men who mirror in their disposition and action the perfection and the beauty of the divine good will. It seeks a life where all animosities are hushed in tender loyalty, where all the strife between "mine" and "thine" dies in the happy strain of "ours," where all the cruelty and selfishness have passed away and the longprayed-for peace of God enfolds the world with its serenity and rest; where the sweet affection of the home has expanded into a wide and ardent love of each and all, filling life with new and intenser joy such as we scarce dream of in this troubled state. That is a life where the precious boons of knowledge or any noble good are shared by all, where doubtless the stumbling-blocks and hindrances and blighting failures that now cumber the path shall be banished by the full knowledge and the bounteous skill and unstinted affection of the perfect state. It will be a world made new by a complete pervasion of the divine life, and the hearts that now are mournful shall sing their thankfulness to Him who is the fountain of such love and joy.

Christian, your citizenship is in that heaven. Your heart burns within you when you hear of it. The vision of it compels and necessitates you. It is your soul's desire and your soul's law. All your duties are faint foreshadowings of that sublime duty. All your cravings are the partial longings of that one perfect desire. When you

behold it, your spirit throbs in responsive selfsurrender to its claims. There is your great sovereign purpose, the purpose that gives meaning to all these fragments of life, the purpose that evokes your highest powers and feeds you with enduring strength and inspires you to patient heroism and unlamenting self-denials, the purpose that gives wholeness, vigor, consistency, health to all striving and reveals the due measure and degree of the present occupations, the purpose that generates a holy and heavenly spirit in you and enables you to be a fountain of faith to the weary and despairing, of comfort to those that sit in loneliness, of hope to those that are blighted and ashamed.

Where will this great fulfilment be and when? Will it be on the earth or only in higher mansions of God? Is this the destiny only of some far-off generation in the future of earthly history, or shall I, too, inherit this desire of the soul when my days are told and I pass hence from the present work and the voices. sweet to hear and the lingering handclasps of human love? When these questions are asked, the soul that asks them gives answer with passionate faith. We trust the instinct and prophecy of our deepest nature even though an exact knowledge of all the where and when and how is denied us. That perfect world is the goal for all the earthly history that shall be. The deep inevitable law of our being is to live for the social weal and only that vision

of love and sonship which Jesus names the realm of God has the right to be a social order. That perfect world is goal and destiny for you and me and every one, though the perfect welfare of earthly history be postponed to incalculable distance, for only that perfect order has sovereignty of right over me now or ever. In its binding sovereignty we read our prophecies. Wherever it may lie, that goal is authoritative and challenging to every moment of personal existence. Wherever its perfect realization may be, whether on earth or in modes of existence veiled from view, it is the law of life now, we are related to it now, it is the soul's yearning now and every partial realization of its life in the fleeting moments of our purest good is the joy above all other present joy. The many questions left without clear and definite answer, escaping our power to picture and imagine the reality which our faith asserts, these incessant and unsatisfied questions mean only that the one life we know is not described and expressed and bounded by conceptions that lie on the plane of knowledge. What we know with the exactness of science is a knowledge of the forces in nature's determinism that we must use for the practical control of that mechanism of nature. Yet even here, as we are well aware, we deal with an abstracted part and not the whole of reality. We abstract this play of interrelated forces in order to use it for our practical needs, but we leave aside from our sci