are brought to bear on life. Life is ductible, elastic, and takes shape according to the forces that act on it. To have the manly, hopeful attitude that I would cómmend to you instead of the despairing one of our text, we do not need to believe in the perfectibility of the race: we only need to believe in its improvability under the right conditions. It does not mean the cheap optimism, the easy-going faith that things must go on somehow all right, that all is for the best, and every change is progress. When we know the facts of history and the facts of life we are kept from braggart comparisons between ourselves and our fathers. We see cycles of degeneracy, periods of barrenness, times when good seems vanished out of the earth. We see that there is no innate principle in the world raising it ever higher without effort or hindrance. We see that progress has to be bought by blood. We see that every gain of the past has to be acquired at great price, and has to be kept at the point of the sword. The shallow rose-coloured views about perfectibility, so common in the writers at the period of the French Revolution, are false, even though to-day these views are expressed in scientific dress, under names like evolution and suchlike. It does not follow that our days are better than former days. Say not that. Thou dost not speak

wisely concerning this. You must show that it is so by larger thought and grander build of character and nobler life.

But our days are better than former days in this, that we have greater opportunities, to us have come the wisdom of the ancients, the ripe fruit of experience, advantages of knowledge, wider outlets for every gift. All this will be none avail if we lose faith. We cannot lose faith in God, and keep faith in ourselves and our future. Without faith we have no sure guarantee that will make effort purposeful, and we will sigh for a mythical golden age lying behind us as a race. The golden age is before us if God leads us on. We prepare for the coming of His Kingdom when we make His will ours, and serve His ends, in which are bound up the true end of man. With such faith we need not look back upon former days longingly, upheld in our own day by the thought of God's presence. We face our own task, and take up our own burden with hope and self-respect. Said Molière," The ancients are the ancients; and we are the people of to-day." We need a manly faith in our own destiny, the faith that God has a place and a purpose for us-even us the people of to-day, as He had for the ancients.

Christ is to us the pledge of that, and the promise

of it. In the faith of Him we take large views in

space and in time.

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward look, the land is bright.

XXVII

THE PRINCIPLE OF JUDGMENT

I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts.-JEREMIAH vi. 19.

To the prophets punishment was never a mere misfortune, an adventitious thing that came to some and missed others as by chance, some hard lot that befell a certain number who did not have the luck to escape, as falling stones strike individuals of a crowd by haphazard. It had an essential relation to life, the result of cause and effect as universal as physical law. It was not fortune; it was fate. Not fate in the sense of a blind, resistless, remorseless force; but the result of purpose, reason, law. They traced everything past the external appearance to the inward moral source, which alone gives consistence and true meaning to human life. They, no more than modern science, could conceive of anything as causeless. But they were not content to find out secondary causes and rest there. They saw the will of God as the inspiring force of nature, the

hand of God shaping history, the law of God ruling all life.

Jeremiah pronounces judgment in the name of God, and points to outraged law, to wicked deeds, to disregard of the moral conditions which alone make life possible. He speaks with certitude as of a man who sees into the sources of things and will not abate his warning because the appearance at the time seems to give the lie to his fears. The rulers of the people took roseate views of the situation, and said, "Peace, peace," deceiving their own hearts and the hearts of others with pleasant dreams that all was well, and lulled themselves into a sense of security. Jeremiah saw that there could be no peace on such conditions. It was a frivolous age, when men thought to silence the thunder by shutting their ears; and when God's watchmen said, "Hearken to the sound of the trumpet," the trumpet that presages doom, they said, "We will not hearken." To people in such a frivolous mood punishment when it came would be looked on as calamity: they would think themselves the sport of cruel fortune. Where the prophet saw law, they would only see chance: where the prophet saw cause, they would only see accident. So, he strives to enlighten them and convince them that God's judgment was based on prin