ligion without it. There is say-so religion; there is a lip-service; there is a cant, a pretense; there are heavy burdens; but there is no spontaneous, radical religion. After all, we know that the holiest saint that prays to God must be like the humble infant in the mother's arms; we must all come into the child-like condition.

I would not dare to preach, I could not preach if I did not have confidence in the Love that is watching over us, if I thought I was the minister of some awful power, some terrible mystery. If I thought that I must carry to dying beds and to scenes of mortal need only the great dark shadow of a mystery, I could not preach here. It is because I think I have to speak of infinite love, of love greater than we can fathom, broader than we can compass, more full than we can express; because I feel that there is a power back of the humble words which I speak, to flow into the hearts of men and lift them up. Nor can you receive religion, or be religious, only as you come with the full confidence of love to God the Father.

Oh, it is a great thing to be children even when we are old, to be children when our hair is gray, to be children when our faces are wrinkled, to be children when our hearts are scarred with the troubles and mysteries of the world; it is a great thing to come in penitence, in trust, in confidence to God. That is the essence of all real humility; that is great indeed, the greatness of the kingdom of heaven.

SEEING DARKLY.

For now we see through a glass darkly.—1 Cor. xiii. 12,

N the first place, let us endeavor to get the meaning

IN

of these words. They occur, as you are well aware, in one of the most glorious passages of the Bible; that passage where the Apostle Paul, writing upon the troubles of the Corinthian Church, its contentions and pretensions, its evils of Jewish literalism and Greek license, pauses for a moment in the foaming tide of his argument, and melts away into that New Testament psalm of love that wonderful description and eulogy of Christian charity. Having shown the Corinthian converts that this is the deep master-principle of the soul, without which all things and all performances are vain, and having, in lines of indelible brightness, traced the features which it shows amid the conflict, the sin, and the limitation of the world, all at once he rises into the assertion of its imperishableness, and with that thought breaks beyond all earthly barriers, and carries his readers away into that region in view of which all material conditions dwindle, and all mortal imperfections dissolve and vanish, while no

boundary is set to future attainments, and nothing is suggested that balks the idea of endless progress. The excellence of that state compared with our loftiest possessions and powers in this is as the completeness and freedom of manhood compared with the germinal qualities of childhood, and this earthly domain of facts and faculties is only a nursery for the soul; this little planet, that goes swimming through space, is but the cradle of the intellect. Our most regal thinkers think but as children yet; our guesses and prophecies are but as the babe's wisdom; our most oracular utterances are but the alphabet and fragments of the truth. "When I was a child," says the Apostle, "I spoke as a child; I understood as a child; I thought as a child." But even in that higher kingdom, where all the childishness of our mortality is put away, this principle of love—the mother's love, the martyr's love, the love of the good Samaritan, the love of God and man, the love of saintly sweetness and heroic sacrifice, this same love that throbs in weak human hearts, and, amid all these uses and limitations, goes forth to anoint, to bless, to endure all things, and hope forever-this same love abides there, and shows in its native realm the divine beauty which it has never lost below.

It is in delineating this contrast between here and hereafter that the Apostle introduces the simile of the text, holding up in view the fullness and brightness of that higher region. "For now," he says, we see through a glass darkly." We must beware of a mis

conception on account of this word glass, as it appears in our English version. It would more properly be rendered mirror; and in meditating upon this figure, we should think of the metallic mirrors of the ancients, in which things would be obscurely and vaguely represented. So this universe, so this life of ours, so this object-glass of being, which blends the two-fold action of our thought and the things upon which we think, so is this a mirror in which we now see but darkly and dimly, receiving only hints and shadows of reality. And this statement suggests the general current of my remarks at the present time.

"For now we see through a glass darkly." In the first place, let me say that there is a literal significance in these words. It is a literal fact that here, in our mortal state, with our physical organs of vision, we do not, in any instance, see essential realities. We behold only the images of things. I need not dwell upon this elementary law of optics; I only urge the suggestiveness of the fact that our sensuous vision is a mirror upon which realities cast shadows. We may expect a more direct and intimate perception of these realities when this material organism is shattered, and when this spiritual faculty within us which is hidden beneath all this organism, really sees; when this is set free from these physical limitations, and goes forth into new and fresh conditions of action. As to the most common and intimate objects in the world around us, we only see as through a glass darkly. It is in this way

we see our fellow-men with double vails between ourselves and them-they hidden from us in a drapery of flesh, and we looking through the glazed windows of our own organism. How much do we actually apprehend? How much do we really know of them? They make themselves known to us only in shapes and outlines, only through the glass of expression which, if it sometimes helps reveal them, sometimes conceals them all the more.

It is the case with those with whom we are most familiar, who associate with us every day, and who mingle with us in the most ordinary transactions of life; it is the case, even here, that we don't see them, we don't apprehend them. That there are depths of their nature, features of their humanity, which do not come up and stand before us, and that may be by whose side we have toiled year after year, with whom we have communed in joy and in sorrow, in sunshine and in storm, there are many who might say to us, as Christ said in the closing hours of his ministry, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me?" It might be said, in many instances, by those with whom we are most intimate, and who are most familiar with us. And if this is the case in this comparatively limited and familiar circle, how much more is it the case in regard to the great community at large, those whom we encounter only occasionally, and under peculiar aspects, whom we see only in this angle of vision, only in this particular work? How much