singing birds is not for us. Art and poetry and gentle culture exist only in a world of dreams,-while, if we once gave ourselves pause to meditate upon the deep things of God and the soul, on time and its meaning, life and its mysteries, heaven and the glories which we thrust away, why-we might miss the next car. The injunction which insults me every time I travel by the underground is "Please hurry on for the lift." The "please" is in diamond type, and you need a microscope to see it. The "hurry" you can read a mile away. Hurry then, by all means, for we could not live if we did not kill ourselves to get somewhere else!

And yet, if we are determined to do it, even in the frenzied rush of our city life we can hear and heed the Savior's call, "Come ye yourselves apart, and rest a while." One fine and gracious opportunity is offered to us by our summer holidays. The happiness which they bring us is of the first importance in a healthy, holy, Christian life.

We pray God to forgive us our sins; we ought to pray to be forgiven our sadness. There is no virtue in misery. The melancholy person is not necessarily a superior person; and if he were, the superior person is generally detestable. A face as long as a fiddle, and a voice like that of an Alpine crow will not be imputed to us for righteousness. We shall not go to heaven for our tears, nor to hell for our smiles. Humor is a gift of God as well as pathos. In His presence is fulness of joy. We are all sinners, and sometimes we deserve to be miserable. But it has not yet been shown why on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we should call on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost and then on the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three Persons in one God, to have mercy upon us, miserable sinners! One day Paxton Hood had to preach in a Yorkshire church, where it was the custom for one of the officials to announce the hymn. It was a glorious summer morning, like to-day, when God's mercies fall on waiting hearts like the gentle rain from heaven, and the earth smiles in the light of His countenance. And the good brother gave out:

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead-"

when Paxton Hood leaped up and said: “Oh, no, they don't! My thoughts do not roll on anything so dreadful." Let us sing:

"Come let us join our cheerful songs

With angels round the throne."

Let us have done with these solemn hypocrisies of conventional worship. Let us frankly claim our heritage of happiness in a world whose builder and maker is God. "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, they were like unto them that dream. Then was their mouth filled with laughter, and their tongue with singing." And one day, when these laughing, singing ones, whose captivity the Lord had "turned," saw their work approaching completion, and Jerusalem promising to stand once again as a city that is compact together, the assembled thousands, as one man lifted up their voice and wept. But Nehemiah, the governor, and Ezra, the priest, reproved their moanings and stopped their tears: "This day is holy unto the Lord your God: mourn not, nor weep. Go your way; eat the fat, drink the sweet, send portions unto him for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord; neither be ye grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength." It is not for nothing, surely, that the Apostle Paul speaks to us of the glorious gospel of the "blissful" God; nor that our Savior gives us the blessed assurance, "These things have I said unto you that your joy may be full."

In all ages religion has claimed certain days and freed them from labor for the happiness of men. A "festival" is, historically, a day set apart for religious observance. The history of feasts and festivals is the history of religion and of civilization. The religion of Israel was rich in such "feasts." Every seventh day was a Sabbath. Every seventh month was a sacred month. Every seventh year was a Sabbath year. And let us never forget that, altho Exodus dates back the Sabbath to the imagined rest which the Creator took on the seventh day after working on six, yet those deeper, truer interpreters of God whom we call the prophets allege a vastly different ground. Why do you always read the Ten Commandments from Exodus? Deuteronomy is a better book. It is the book which Jesus loved. Listen:

"Observe the Sabbath-day to keep it holy, as the Lord thy God commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath unto the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thine ox, nor thy ass, nor any of thy

cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy man-servant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God brought thee out thence by a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm; therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath-day."

That is divine because it is so human. And that Sabbath was only one of innumerable festivals, in all of which we trace the direct and conscious effort of religion to give men a breathing time, a time to feel and meditate, a time to escape the toil and drudgery of life, an anticipation of the Savior's invitation, "Come ye yourselves apart and rest a while." One fact is too colossal and ubiquitous to be ignored. Religious festivals, the wide world over, have degenerated into license and sin. Every school boy reads this of the festivals of Greece and Rome. The Old-Testament pages are crowded with warnings, entreaties, and threats as the prophets see the festivals of the church become an occasion of vice. The carnival scenes of a thousand Roman Catholic towns witness to the same insensate law. Let us learn the lesson and heed the warning. How foolish many of our holidays are! And how harmful! We come back, worn out in body and mind, jaded, restless, disappointed. We have tried to see too much and do too much. We are not greatly wiser, after all, than Mrs. Poyser: "I'd sooner ha' brewin' day and washin' day together than one o' these pleasurin' days. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an starin', and not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; and keepin' your face in smilin' order like a grocer o' market day for fear people should not think you civil enough. An' you've nothin' to show for it when it's done, if it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin' things as disagree."

And other excesses there are which indicate that the holiday has served as an excuse for throwing off restraint, for the repudiation of the moral law, for an indulgence in mere brutish pleasures, from which, in our soberer hours, we should have disdainfully turned away. Let us listen again to the gracious invitation, Come ye yourselves apart, and rest a while," for if it is in His company that we rest, every holiday will be a holy day.

66

I have spoken briefly, but I have said enough to show that from the point of view of any rational conception of religion the holi

day is good in itself, that happiness may be accepted as God's good gift. And happiThe ness may well be a minister of holiness. genius of our language links together health and holiness. Heal and hale, whole and holy, are one in structure and in spirit.

Yet there is more than this. For in our holidays we may come quite wondrously within the deepest ministries of God to human hearts. In our holidays, as in all else, we must preserve a certain catholicity of temper nor attempt to prescribe in what form another man shall keep holiday. But for the most part we find our happiness in escape from the city to the country, to the mountains or the sea.

There we meet with God.

In the most impressionable years of my life I came under the influence of a teacher who was a philosopher, historian, and poet. Nature he loved with a deep and tender and passionate love, and nature never did betray the heart that loved her. She filled his life with blessings, but her richest was the love he bore her. Wordsworth was his master; but the great classical passages of natureadoration from Byron and Matthew Arnold were also day by day upon his lips. The Presence. whose dwelling is the light of setting suns," " "the heaven which lies about us in our infancy" "the light which never was on sea or land," with all those magical lines from "Immortality," "Tintern Abbey," "The Excursion," "Childe Harold," and "Obermann," which, once heard, make melody in our hearts forever, grew more real, more full of meaning and power, when they were half-spoken, half-chanted, by his deep organ voice. And one summer Sunday night, when our work was done, and we were walking home, after quoting as he used to, not caring whether any one listened or not, some of these glorious lines, he said to me: "I am all my life trying to get at the reality which lies behind the illusion of God's richer, nearer presence, the illusion which made Wordsworth what he was, and which turns all our thoughts, yours and mine, to poetry tonight." As he spoke, I had no word to say. But I know now. I can hear him say: "There must be some reality. I wish I could tell what it is." And I know what it is! It is all reality. There is no illusion. It is God Himself who draws near to us, and lays His hand upon our hearts, and speaks to us, and makes us know Him and feel Him nearer.

The revelation of God in beauty is as real as any revelation of Himself which God has made and man received. I believe that the sense of beauty in art as well as in nature has laid hold on mortals and brought to them the realization of immortality. I have been told, and I believe, that God has come out of His eternal invisibility and touched men's lives to finer issue when the Hallelujah chorus has smitten with its passion on their hearts; when a Madonna of Raphael or Murillo has smiled her sadness or her sweetness into their souls; when the majesty of the great cathedral, Ely or Milan or Cologne, has hushed every sense and sublimed every faculty to worship. But I speak of that of which I am more confident when I say that God Himself is near me; I know that He is near, when the fields blaze with scarlet and gold at my feet and the mountains tower grim and grand above me, when the river laughs and sings in the sunshine, or the moonbeams chase each silver wave over the bosom of the unresting sea.

If I try to analyze this ministry of God, I find it to be first peace and then power.

It is peace with oneself. Under the calmly conscious stars, on the wide moor, among the eternal hills, or lulled by the multitudinous sea, passion dies. Fretfulness, repining, foolish ambitions, petulant disappointments, take unto themselves wings and fly away. We wonder how earth can be unhappy while heaven leaves us not merely youth, and love, but nature, ourselves and God.

We are

And it is peace with God. It must be peace with Him, for we are one with Him. We are immortal, here and now. mind of His mind. We have yielded our will to His pure and perfect will. In Him we live and move and have our being.

And it is power. Our first feelings are of our insignificance. Later, we know that we are infinite. When we consider the heavens, the work of His fingers, the moon and the stars, which He has ordained, we Cower

before the revelation of our littleness. But as we consider them, and yet again consider them, we find ourselves of ten thousand times more consequence than they and all the spheres of light. Then we rise to the knowledge of our majesty, for Thou, O Lord, hast crowned man with glory and honor, Thou hast made him but little lower than God! To us the prayer has been fulfilled, the prayer of him, surely the most religious of unbelievers!

"Ah, once more," I cried, "ye stars, ye waters
On my heart your mighty charm renew;
Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you,
Feel my soul becoming vast like you!"

There is one consideration which we can not escape. What of the myriads of our brethren pent up in mean streets, prisoners of the counting-house and the shop, slaves of the mill and the mine, the poor and heavy laden of every nameless class, to whom these words are bitter mockery, for whom no changing seasons bring cessation from toil and weariness? What of them-in these days of summer suns and joy?

There should be none such-except the vicious. And Christianity can not rest while such mortals live disfranchised of their right to rest and happiness. The unaccomplished mission of our faith is the redress of every economic inequality. There is no gospel which is not a gospel of social service, We live to bring all mankind into the family of God, joint heirs with the most favored life on earth of the unspeakable riches of Christ. But, meanwhile, while such poverty remains, while such evil conditions sadden and appal us, what right have we to our holidays, to our happiness? Can we sit at our feast blindfold, or dare we open our eyes? What right have we to any feast while our brothers starve in sight of plenty? What right? None-if our lives are wrong. If we are living for ourselves, thinking, planning, toiling, accumulating, enjoying for ourselvesnone. But if all life is to us a sacred trust; if happiness is only so much stored-up energy to be expended in divine, redemptive toil, then go keep the feast and share the festival, charge your blood and brain with health, and flood your soul with joy. And come back to our world of suffering and wrong to spend your new-found strength again in the blessing of mankind.

But, for the present, go away and forget! It is a counsel of perfection, and you would

not follow it, else I would say to you: Go where you can have no letters, no newspapers, no telegrams, where the ring of the telephone bell is never heard, and where even Marconi can not come! But at least do your best to forget! Forget your business. Forget your debts! And forget your debtors! Forget that in this world is suffering, sickness, or sin. Only remember that the sun

shines for you; the moonlight and the starbeams are for you; the tides ebb and flow for you; the gorse upon the hillside, the purple heather, and the fields which stand dressed in living green are all for you. The earth and the air and the sky are yours, and Christ is yours, and God is yours, and all this God is all your own, your Father and Friend!

your

And the remnant that is escaped out of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward.-Isa. xxxvii. 31.

THIS is a promise for the encouragement of a downcast people. It is a prophet's way of looking over the heads of enemies and seeing the victory a little beyond. It is the seer's way of looking through the clouds and finding the sunshine. Judah had stood like a splendid tree, with roots deep and branches wide. The hurricane had struck it, and it was plucked up by the roots, and was being torn by every wild beast that passed, the sport of the elements and the victim of pitiless forces. The kings of Assyria had swept down on the people of God like a very besom of destruction. Their cry to God brought back the assurance that His hand was still on the kings of Assyria and that He had a large hope to offer Judah, the hope that the remnant should grow again, taking root downward and bearing fruit upward. It does not take a large start to come to large growth. Your great trees that stretch protecting arms over many feet of earth and make meetingplaces for swarming bird life-these great trees, a tiny child could once have borne about in his play, so slight were they. But taking root downward and bearing fruit upward they have come into the larger life. Rooting for the sake of fruiting that is not a play on words; it is the law of the whole circle of life put into a phrase.

Rooting for the sake of fruiting-it is a familiar and favorite scriptural thought. "He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, which bringeth forth his fruit in his season." In the parable, the seed that grew so quickly withered away because it had no root. Fruitage was denied it because it

would not submit to rooting. The fig-tree which bore no fruit was dried up from the very root. And so on, probably twenty times in Scripture, where rooting and fruiting are connected.

Of course you observe the simple naturalness of it. That is what we are accustomed to everywhere else. That is what we are to expect in the spiritual life. It is a step worth the taking that brings us into sight of the naturalness of the spiritual forces. Drummond was sorry before his death that he had called his book "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," because it seemed to imply in its title that the spiritual world and the natural world are the same thing, that, for example, the attraction of gravitation in the natural world which pulls a stone down, once you let it go, is the same law that pulls a soul down once it is let go. He meant to point out, not the identity of the two worlds, but their analogy ; that, passing over from the natural world to the spiritual world, you are in no strange and mysterious territory, and the laws of the two are of the same family. You are constantly finding illustrations of the working of the spiritual laws in the workings of the natural laws. In each is a law of degeneration, of reversion to type, and also a law of evolution and growth. Trees and plants take root downward and bear fruit upward. So do souls; each in its appropriate soil and each in its appropriate fruit, but by processes that are as natural in one case as in the other. You can not explain the process in either case without God; you need Him at the start of it, and in the progress of it, and at the end of it. And you find Him working through the laws He has made. The spiritual life is not an exception to the rest of the round of life; it is the same natural life, has its laws as native