11'! J^ mm mm^»^m !>M GIFT OF . THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD A SERIES OF SUNDAY EVENING SERMONS FROM THEMES DRAWN FROM THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS OF GENESIS By REV. LOUIS ALBERT BANKS, D.D. Pastor of Independence Avenue M. E, Church Kansas City, Mo. Author of "Sermons Which Have Won Souls," "Christ and His Friends," "Paul and His Friends," " David and His Friends," etc., etc. FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY New York and London 1910 ^tn COPYEIGHT, 1910 BY FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY Printed in the United States of America Published, September, 1910 7# THE MEMBERS OF INDEPENDENCE AVENUE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH This Volume Is Lovingly Dedicated By THE AUTHOR CONTENTS I. — The Background of Human Life II. — A World of Chaos .... III. — The Creation of Light IV. — Goodness and Light V. — Darkness and Light VI. — Man's Glorious Day VII. — The Treasures of the Night . VIII. — Light and Shadow .... IX. — The Atmosphere of Life . X. — The Appeal of the Sky XL — The Birth of Individuality XII. — The Sea and Its Sailors XIII. — The Romance of the Fields XIV. — The Clock of Time XV. — The Lamps of the Sky XVI. — Beauty and the Beast . XVII. — Man Created in God's Image XVIII.— The Garden of Eden XIX. — Marriage and the Family . XX. — Parleying with Temptation XXL— The First Lie XXII. — The Lost Paradise XXIII. — The Sinner Becomes the Tempter XXIV.— The Dawn of Guilt . XXV. — Useless Covering for Sin . XXVI. — The Cowardice of a Guilty Conscience XXVIL— The Call of God . . . . XXVIII. — Personal Responsibility XXIX. — The Conflict of the Centuries XXX. — The Promised Savior . VII PAGE I 13 25 36 47 59 70 82 93 104 114 125 137 149 160 174 186 198 212 225 240 251 263 275 288 300 312 325 337 350 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD THE BACKGROUND OF HUMAN LIFE ^ * In the beginning God. ' ' — Gen. 1 : 1. A DISTINGUISHED Scotchman once wrote with his finger, in the corner of his gar- den, in the soft mold, the letters of his son's name. He sowed garden-cress in the furrows, covered up the seed, and smoothed the ground. Ten days after this the boy came running to his father, and with astonishment in his countenance shouted to him that his name was growing in the garden. The father laughed at the report, and seemed to disre- gard it, but the boy insisted on his going to see what had happened. *^Yes,'' said the father, with assumed in- difference, * ^ I see it is so ; but what is there in this worth notice ? Is it not mere chance ? ' ' **It can not be so,'' said the boy. *' Some- body must have contrived matters so as to produce it. ' ' 1 2 TEE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD ^^Look at yourself/' replied the father, •'and consider your hands and fingers, your legs and your feet. Came you hither by chance?'' ^ ' No, ' ' he answered. * ' Something must have made me." *'And who is that something?" asked the father. He said, **I don't know." Then the father drew away the veil from this great background of human life and told him that * ' In the beginning God created. ' ' I This sentence which we have chosen for our text is one of the most stupendous utter- ances ever recorded in human language. The first time any man gives thoughtful utterance to it the mind staggers and reels under the weight of its tremendous meaning. As we steady ourselves for thought and contempla- tion, it is as tho we stood up against a great chain of lofty mountains — mountains so high and splendid that they form the background of wide-reaching valleys and far-stretching plains which draw all their fertility and beauty from the mountains at our back. THE BACKGROUND OF HUMAN LIFE 3 These mountains form the background to the valley. The valley owes its life to the mountains. The mountain summits lift their heads so high that they tap the clouds pass- ing by on the wings of the wind with mois- ture gathered in far-off seas and compel them to disgorge their precious treasures that they may in turn enrich the valleys and the plains. These captured treasures issue forth in springs, and in brooks, and rivers, moving forth from the deep canons of the rock-bound hills, and they give life and fer- tility and support to flocks and herds, and to \dllages and cities in the plains beyond. So you may follow up the valleys of human life across the plains of history and civilization until you have followed mankind back as far as you can, and you will come straight up against this great mountain range and look into the mystery of the Great White Throne, and hear this splendid but awful utterance, **In the beginning God." II The Bible does not argue concerning the existence of God, but in its first utterance it presents the fact of God as the key to the uni- 4 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD verse and as the key to human history. Joseph Parker once said: *M have a great and cunningly contrived lock called the uni- verse, and the question is how to open it. I can not tell. It is a grand lock, and I should like to open it. The Bible says, ^I can give you the key of that lock.' Then I say, 'You are a bold book, and boldness is an attribute of truth.' Do I stop there and say I believe there is a key because I have read a book which says there is one? No. I say to the book, whatever its name may be, 'Where is the key?' When the Bible says, 'The key is God, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, righteous, merciful, holy, just, brighter than the light, more patient than motherhood, more pitiful than fatherhood, full of compas- sion, and most long suffering,' I take the key, I press it into the lock, wholly and easily — what do I do? I kiss the Book, I love it, I call it God's Book, I meditate there- in day and night. Have you a better reason ? Let me have it: I will try it exactly in the same way — only it must cover all the ground, it must be available night and day, it must not be subject to climatic changes, it must not succumb to atmospheric effects, it must TEE BACKGROUND OF HUMAN LIFE 5 keep time on the Alps, and keep time in the valleys. ' ' in Now the greatest conception and the most important which the mind of man can enter- tain is the kind of God which the Bible brings as a key to open the lock of the uni- verse in which we live. All our religious life, all our religious experience, indeed, all our civilization must be dictated by our concep- tion of God. Men have often made gods of their own imaginings. Eobert Browning, in his unique poem, ^'Caliban upon Setebos,** turns preacher and gives a remarkable ser- mon, and fearing lest some careless reader might not be sure of his meaning, he printed the words of the psalmist as a text above it, **Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." The poet-preacher takes Caliban, Shakespeare's grotesque monster, and pictures him rolling and wallowing in the slime of a cave on an island, thinking and talking to himself about God. In the heat of the noon, Caliban wallows in the mud, while Prospero and Miranda sleep. He, not drudging at their task, as he glee- 6 TRE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD fully thinks, talks to himself about '^that other/' of whom his dam Sycorax had told him, the god Setebos — a god of the Patago- nians. Caliban thinks Setebos dwells in the cold of the moon; hates the cold of the moon, but can not live away from it ; and out of very weariness, envy, listlessness, or sport, made all things — made Caliban him- self. Caliban considers what he would do if he had the power and thinks of Setebos as doing the same. Suppose Caliban could make a live bird out of clay, a bird that could fly; he would break its leg oif if he wanted to, or give it more legs. And Setebos does absolutely as he likes, too, knows no law but his own caprice and is entirely gov- erned by caprice in his actions toward the things he has made, neither loving nor ha- ting. Just as Caliban does with the crabs. He watches them going down to the sea, lets twenty pass him, and stones the twenty-first ; throws a worm to one, two worms to another. **As it likes me each time, I do; so does he.'' But Caliban thinks also what he would do if the creature he had made grew proud of its doings, for he thinks Setebos is able to make things with powers he (Setebos) himself does THE BACKGBOUND OF HUMAN LIFE 7 not possess. Caliban has made a rude musical instrument. Suppose it were to grow proud of the poor music it made, and thought to claim credit for it. ^^I make the cry my maker can not make with his great round mouth. He must blow through mine!'' He imagines the reed saying, ^ ' Well, then, would not Caliban smash it with his footT' And of course Setebos does just the same — de- stroys his own work out of resentment and envy. But Setebos, he thinks, has a particular spite against poor Caliban, just as, on the other hand, he favors Prospero. No reason ; just caprice of the god. Caliban has built a trap for the turtles, and a wave comes and sweeps it away — the work of six months gone in a moment. And Setebos has sent down a ball of fire to kill him ; it struck where half an hour before he had been sleeping in the shade. Still in his monstrous mind he justi- fies the god. Above all things, he himself must be free to do as he likes. He knows and can imagine no rule to guide conduct excepting caprice. And Setebos must do as he likes also. Caliban can understand that the thing which would seem most hate- 8 TEE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD ful to Setebos would be the supposition that he is bound to act uniformly or consistently. And further than this, Caliban must not seem happy. Setebos would be jealous. Whenever he feels happy and content he must do his best to seem wretched. He hates the god, but he dares not let his hatred ap- pear; no, he must fawn upon him, praise him, grovel before him. The finish of the poem is fine. A raven flies across Caliban's line of vision and he immediately falls into great fear. To his morbid imagination the raven has been lis- tening, a winged policeman of the god Sete- bos, ajid he cries aloud in terror : There scuds his raven that has told him all ! It was foors play, this prattling! Ha! the wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, And fast invading fires begin! white blaze — A tree's head snaps — and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at him! Lo! 'lieth flat and loveth Setebos! 'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip. Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape! And so through promises of self -punishment THE BACKGROUND OF HUMAN LIFE 9 and self-denial Caliban hopes to deceive Setebos, the god whom he imagines to be altogether such a creature as himself. Now this picture of the poet is very true to life. Through generation after genera- tion, multitudes of men have looked into the clouded mirror of their own consciousness and taken for God a sort of monstrous dis- torted image of themselves. But the God whom the Bible brings to us as the key to the universe is a moral God, who lays a moral claim upon me — a claim not only on my mind and admiration, but upon my heart and my affections. A God not only great and wise, but who sends Jesus Christ to me, wearing my flesh, sharing my grief, tempted in all points like as I am, to teach me to say ^^Our Father, which art in heaven.*' As one of the greatest of English preachers once said : ' * If Christ taught one thing more clear- ly than another, it was that man should be brought face to face with God, and that noth- ing was grand in character except what grew out of the love and fear of God.'' God! — God! — that is the great theme of Jesus Christ. The splendor of God is on every page, in every parable, in every promise; 10 TEE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD and no righteousness that is merely etiquette, social propriety, good-breeding, will stand the test of the final judgment held in the presence of God who created us, who has loved us with infinite love, and given us Christ to reveal God to us, and to save us. from all our sins. Do not misunderstand me. It is a grand thing for a man to be moral, whatever may be the cause or basis of that morality, but the only morality which can be relied upon must be based upon deep and lasting faith in God as the moral Ruler and Father of man- kind. In South Africa they sometimes come across yellow diamonds. Mind you, they are diamonds, and not pebbles. They are really diamonds, but no king would ever put one of them into his crown. And there is many a man and many a woman to-day who is a yellow diamond. Their morality is on the surface. The morality of society, the moral- ity of etiquette, but they have not been trans- formed in the mind and spirit, and they do not walk in the love and fear of God, and, therefore, God will never know them in the day when He makes up His jewels. THE BACKGBOUND OF HUMAN LIFE 11 I long above everything else to arouse you to a keen sense of your own responsibility to God. I would that you could see, with eyes made clear by the Holy Spirit, the real wickedness of your sin against God. It might fill you with terror, it might fill your eyes with tears, but it would be the beginning of joy greater than you have ever known. On that dark night when Peter had denied his Lord, when the cock crew and Peter saw his sin, he went out and wept bitterly, but it was the beginning of nobler and happier things for Peter. Oh, that I might rouse you to that true and real repentance of sin that would cause you, like Peter, to choose for life and death, for time and eternity, to stand for righteousness and for God! that I might awaken you to sing with the poet: If life is always a warfare Between the right and the wrong, And good is fighting with evil For ages and eons long — Fighting with eager cohorts, With banners pierced and torn, Shining with sudden splendor, Wet with the dew of morn, — 12 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD If all the forces of heaven, And all the forces of sin, Are met in the infinite struggle The souls of the world to win, — If God 's is the awful battle Where the darkling legions ride — Hasten to sword and to saddle! Lord, let me fight on Thy sidel A WORLD OF CHAOS "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." — Gen. 1:2. IT is almost impossible to picture the world at this stage in its history. Imagination has little to play upon. It is a world before day. Darkness covers the earth, and there is no luminary to light up its desolation. The mountains with their picturesque forms, and the valleys with their fertile possibilities, had not yet risen into being. The great clock of time, with its dial plate of day and night, marked by sun and moon and stars, had not yet been set up in the hall of the universe. It was a moving world, yet dead. It had life, yet nothing lived. It was a chaotic mass full of infinite possi- bilities, but hopeless save that it was in the hands of the God who created it. If there had been a man at that time with eyes to peer through the darkness on that heaving 13 14 THE WOULD' S CHILDHOOD mass of matter, he could not have dreamed of the world, which was to be developed out of such a begimiing. Only God, all-powerful, all-wise, and infinitely good, could have wrought that divine transformation. Now this chaos of the world before dawn is not unlike the conditions of the sinning soul which has lost the control over the will and become the prey of warring passions and evil habits. Many a man conscious of this chaotic condition in his own heart and life has been ready to cry out in the spirit of Paul's agonizing appeal: ^^0 wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death!'' Many a man try- ing to do right, yet powerless in his own strength, weakened as he is by yielding to sin, has been ready to exclaim: **Why this strange persistent failure? Why this tre- mor at the heart! Why is the hand still put out to pluck that which we know to be forbidden? Why do the feet turn again down the paths which lead to death? Again it is the old cause — the thing that T ought to A WOULD OF CHAOS 15 do, I do not ; the thing that I would not, that I do. Why can not I do what I want? I, who mean well, yet fail in every determina- tion for righteousness! I am somehow guilty, I am the secret of the whole trouble ; I, in my nerveless will, with my perilous im- agination, with my clouded conscience, with my hasty thoughts, I somehow explain the continued failure. Back to myself I turn in an agony of self-detection. My soul is a chaos of conflicting passions and desires. Oh, miserable man that I am ! Oh, my God, it is I that have sinned against Thee and done this evil in Thy sight.'* n There is no hope for this chaos of soul unless there comes order out of chaos through the mercy of God. I have been reading re- cently a very interesting letter from a Japa- nese soldier, who says that about ten years ago, while out walking, hearing the sound of singing, he entered a Christian church in which a number of men and women were singing hymns. He remained and listened to a sermon on God, but he would not believe 16 THE WOBLB'S CHILDHOOD in a foreign god. He went again and again for several years. The sermons had no effect on him, and the missionary was unable to make him understand anything. So he passed those days as a man with no religion, and for two years preceding the war between Japan and Eussia he even ceased going to church. Early in the war he was ordered to the front. He had then about his body twenty charms, receievd from as many shrines, for his protection. He was ordered to join the Port Arthur besieging army, and partici- pated in many battles. In every battle he saw many of his comrades fall, fully proving the worthlessness of the charms they had car- ried. Uneasiness came into his heart. He began to be aware of the foolishness of wor- shiping idols. Many questions arose in his mind. *^If I die, where will my soul goT' '^Will it have to wander about, finding no- where to settle? Or is there some fixt place to which it is destined to go?'' In this way he passed three months in a distrest con- dition of mind. One day he was sent near to the enemy as a sentry. The sun set and a dark night came on. Silence prevailed all around him, only broken by the occasional A WOBLD OF CHAOS 17 reports of guns. Loneliness increased the anxiety of his heart, and he thought of home. Then suddenly, as suddenly as the vision came to Paul on the way to Damascus, at midnight instead of midday, the Holy Spirit brought to this lonely soldier's mind and heart a full interpretation and revelation of all that Christian missionary had preached to him, and he realized that there was a liv- ing and a true God, the Creator of the world, who protects us and is rich in love, and will give us what we need if we ask Him with faith. For the first time in his life, the soldier turned his face upward to heaven and prayed to God. The answer was immediate. He at once regained courage, for he could feel that God was protecting him at all times and wherever he might be. And so order came out of chaos in his heart, and perfect peace reigned. Since then he has been growing wonderfully in a knowledge of Christ and in the graces of the Christian life. The soldier closes his most remarkable letter with this striking paragraph : * ^ I do not covet worldly treasures any more, but those given by Him, which shall neither rust nor be lost. Jesus 18 TBE WOULB'S CHILDHOOD promised us that He would be with us till the end of the world, and so I will not shrink from any duty. I am protected by His hands, and am working for the sake of the Gospel. Jesus is calling to sinners all the time, and it is our duty to make the people know this call. Tho the path is rugged, I shall pass over it with ease when the Lord is with me. I thank God day and night, and have no anxiety nor fear.'' Ill The hope of the chaotic world, and the hope of the sinning soul, is all in the brood- ing Spirit of God seeking to bring order out of chaos, to bring life out of death, light out of darkness, and beauty out of barrenness and ruin. It was God's Spirit brooding over the formless world that put the sun in the heavens, that filled the world with warmth and light, that made the earth green with herbage, that caused forests to grow upon the hillsides, with birds to sing in them, and planted flowers to exhale their perfume A WOULD OF CHAOS 19 in the valleys.^ So God's Spirit broods over the heart of man that has fallen into darkness and chaos through sin. As a mother broods over her child, so the Spirit of God broods over the soul that has sinned, seeking to dispel the darkness and to bring back again life and light and beauty. When the Spirit of God brooded over the world of chaos, no human eye, had there been one to look upon it, could have seen anything beau- tiful or lovable in it. But God saw the pos- sibilities that were there, when once there had been lavished upon it His infinite skill and loving care. So in the poor sinning soul, which seems all ugly and repulsive to the human eye, God sees that which His love and skill can bring forth, and continues to brood over the wrecked and broken man, oftentimes when all others have lost hope. Dr. W. J. Dawson said in one of his recent sermons that there is a buried magnificence in many a man of whom you think ill, and have reason to think ill, just as yonder, out in the vast desert of the East, but a little way down beneath the dust, the blown sand, the drift of centuries, there often lies a city with all its temples, its palaces, its marbles. 20 TEE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD and its paintings, perfect and complete. For centuries many men rode to and fro across the desert, and the great caravans passed from East to West, and no one saw anything more than the desert and the drifted sand there. Yet all the time there is the hidden city; and some day there comes one who knows, and he begins to dig, and there comes to light a poem that was hidden, a picture that was covered up. So in many a man there is a hidden poem, there is a hidden picture, there is buried splendor. Indeed, we ought not to say in many a man — it is in every man — and the brooding Spirit of God is seeking to uncover it and bring it forth to life and power. IV Now, my friends, it is possible for a man or a woman to thwart the Spirit of God. We are not merely soil. Tho God broods over us ever so tenderly, and Christ comes seek- ing admission into our hearts that He may execute the gracious mission of the Holy A WORLD OF CHAOS 21 Spirit, He will not break down the door into our souls. When Sir Noel Paton painted his great picture of Christ wearing the crown of thorns, standing outside the door, knocking, he invited a very dear friend to come to his studio and look at the picture before it was put on exhibition. His friend gazed for a few moments on the beautiful figure of the Christ at the rude door, and then exclaimed in amazement, * * Paton, you have made a ter- rible mistake here.'* **What mistake have I mader* said the artist. '*Why, you have painted a door without a handle. ' ' * * That is not a mistake,'' replied Paton. **That door has no handle on the outside. It is inside." I am sure there are some of you here who need to learn that lesson now. You have been waiting, it may be, for some tidal wave of sentiment or emotion, something you could not resist, to sweep you off your feet and into the kingdom of God. Salvation will never come to you in that way. The door- knob is on the inside of your heart. ** Whoso- ever will" may open the door and give wel- come to the Savior. Christ stands there knocking. How strongly Harriet Beecher Stowe has drawn the picture in her poem : THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD Knocking, knocking, ever knocking! Who is there? 'Tis a pilgrim, strange and kingly, Never such was seen before. Ah, sweet soul, for such a wonder Undo the door. No, that door is hard to open, Hinges rusty, latch is broken; Bid Him go! Wherefore, with that knocking dreary. Scare the sleep from one so weary, Say Him, ''No/' Knocking, knocking, ever knocking! What, still there? Oh, sweet soul, but once behold Him, With the glory-crowned hair; And those eyes so strange and tender. Waiting there. Open, open, once behold Him — Him, so fair. Ah, that door! Why wilt Thou vex me. Coming ever to perplex me? For the key is stiffly rusty, And the bolt is clogged and dusty. Many-fingered ivy-vine Seals it fast with twist and twine; Weeds of years and years before Choke the passage of that door. A WORLD OF CHAOS 23 Knocking, knocking! What, still knocking! He still there? What's the hour? The night is waning, In my heart a drear complaining, And a chilly, sad unrest. Ah! His knocking! It disturbs me, Scares my sleep with dreams unblest! Give me rest. Rest, ah rest! Rest, dear soul, He longs to give thee; Thou hast only dreamed of pleasure, Dreamed of gifts and golden treasure Dreamed of jewels in thy keeping. Waked to weariness and weeping. Open to thy soul's one Lover, And thy night of dreams is over; The true gifts He brings have seeming More than all thy faded dreaming ! Did she open? Doth she? Will she? So, as wondering we behold, Grows the picture to a sign, Prest upon your soul and mine; For in every heart that liveth Is that strange mysterious door; Tho forsaken and betangled, Ivy-gnarled and weed be-tangled, Dusty, rusty, and forgotten, 24 TEE WORLD* S CHILDHOOD There the pierced hand still knocketh, And with ever-patient watching, With the sad eyes true and tender, With the glory-crowned hair, Still a God is waiting there. THE CEEATION OF LIGHT *'And the Lord said, let there be light; and there was light. * ' — Genesis 1:3. ^ MILTON, in his immortal poem, ** Paradise Lost,*' represents Adam as asking Eaphael to relate to him why and how the world was created. And Raphael goes on to tell him, in the poem, how God, after the ex- pulsion of Satan and his angels from heaven, because of their pride and rebellion, declared his purpose to create another world, peopled with other creatures, and sent His Son with a great retinue of angels to perform the work of creation. When they visited the world of chaos the divine voice exclaimed: * * Silence, ye troubled waves ! and thou deep, peace ! Your discord end ! ' * Kor stayed ; but on the wings of cherubim Uplifted, in paternal glory rode Far into Chaos, and the world unborn; For Chaos heard his voice: him all his train * Followed in bright procession, to behold Creation, and the wonders of his might. They stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand 25 26 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things; One foot he centered and the other turn 'd Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, ^^Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds. This be thy just circumference, world!" Thus God the heaven created, thus the earth. ' ' Let there be light, ' ' said God , and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure. Sprung from the deep; and from her native east To journey through the airy gloom began. Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun Was not. I Scientific research in our own day is bring- ing science into far greater harmony with the Bible account of creation than was true in earlier times. It used to be asked in all seriousness by science, **How could light ex- ist before the sun?'' All such perplexity has disappeared. Modern science has discovered that light is not conditioned by perfected luminous bodies, but that light bodies are conditions of a preceding luminous element; THE CBEATION OF LIGHT 27 that is, that light could exist before the sun was created. A century ago materialism was both fash- ionable and scientific. Men were boasting, ^^Give me the least bit of bioplasm and I will construct a universe. Everything is spontaneously generated from some other thing. Mind and matter come from the same primordial cell.*' In those days men were making tremendous attempts to get something out of nothing. Science was try- ing to get effects without causes. No repu- table scientist talks that way to-day. Prof. John Fiske, one of the greatest of the mod- ern scientists, tells us that **The impetus of modern scientific thought tends with over- whelming force toward the conception of a single First Cause, or Prime Mover, perpet- ually manifested from moment to moment in the changes that make up the universe. '* God is no longer thought of as far off, but immanent, revealing Himself in all the phe- nomena of the universe which He has created. The presence of God encompasses us about and illuminates all our existence. So it is true that David, writing his Psalm on the skin of some wild animal, perhaps, 28 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD and it may be in some mountain cave, nearly three thousand years ago, was in perfect agreement with modem science when he said: ^^Thou compassest my path and my lying down and art acquainted with all my ways. . . . Thou hast beset me behind and before. . . . Whither shall I go from thy Spirit ? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven thou art there: If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say. Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee." II No other figure is used so frequently in the Bible to present the goodness and glory of God as the light. David describes God as ** clothed with light as a garment.'' And again he exclaims, **The Lord is my light THE C BE AT ION OF LIGHT 29 and my salvation." St. John in his first epistle makes the wonderful declaration that *^God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." The same figure is used to represent to us the glorious personality of Jesus. He Himself makes the bold declaration, *^I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness." Malachi, looking down through the centuries, saw the Christ rising on the world as '^The Sun of Eighteousness, with healing in His wings." And about the time of the birth of Jesus it was declared that those who lived in the val- ley of darkness had seen a great light. Christ declares that those who follow Him and become His disciples also become the *4ight of the world." Paul describes Chris- tians as *Hhe children of the light and of the day." In his letter to the Philippians he declares that Christians ought, in the midst of a crooked and perverse age, to hold forth the word of life as a bright torch. John said that Christians should **walk in the light as children of the light." And our Savior has given the splendid promise that the day shall come when the righteous shall ** shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." 30 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD III As the natural light illumines the world, so the spiritual light seen in God's Word, in the life of Jesus, and shining in our hearts and consciences, convicts us of sin and re- veals to us the way of salvation. During the life of Jesus one of the most frequent mira- cles He wrought was to open the eyes of the blind and give them sight. And His miracles were not confined to the opening of the physical eye, but extended to the eye of the soul as well. Many whom He met were like Zacchasus, with no outlook beyond his money bags, with no soul above the gather- ing of worldly goods. But after ZacchaBUS had met with Jesus, had looked into His eyes and listened to His conversation, a great light shone about him and within him, and he realized that money was not everything. In his shame and penitence he declared that he would give back four- fold where he had gotten money wrong- fully, and half the balance he would give to the poor. Peter was proud of himself and had a great deal of self-righteousness, but one THE CREATION OF LIGHT 31 day when he was with Jesus the light shone into his heart and so revealed his real self to him that he fell at the feet of the Master and cried aloud, ** Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord." Then there was that poor lost woman who had been going her way of sin, indifferent and hard- ened, until she met Jesus. But when she looked into His face, and the light of His eyes showed her the sin of her own heart, she melted under that gaze, and you remem- ber how she came to the rich man^s house, when He was at dinner, with her ala- baster box of costly perfume, and poured it upon His head, and how in her sense of gratitude and unworthiness she washed His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head, and heard the words of Jesus, which were like sunshine after rain to her soul, telling her that all her sins were forgiven. She sat and wept beside His feet, the weight Of sin opprest her heart, for all the blame And the poor malice of the worldly shame To her was past, extinct, and out of date, Only the sin remained, the leprous state; 32 TEE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD She would be melted by the heart of love, By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate. She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair She wiped the feet she was so blest to touch, And He wiped off the soiling of despair From ber sweet soul because she loved so much. I am a sinner full of doubts and fears. Make me a humble thinj? of love and tears. IV As the natural light illumines the outer world of sight and sound, so the spiritual light illumines our relation to our fellow men. Jesus Christ has shown us in the light of His words and life that there is as much hope for one class of men as for another, and that there are the possibilities for the worst and the possibilities for the best in every human being. As we come to know Jesus and live in the light of His countenance we know that we are not '* Egyptian snakes in a basket," as Thomas Carlyle said, each trying to get his head above another, but that we are brothers. When the people said of Jesus, ''This man THE CBEATION OF LIGHT 33 receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,'' tho they did not understand it, they had discovered the key-note of His life and gospel. The most degraded and neglected man was, and is now, dear to Jesus. A fellow minister tells us how he was walk- ing down the street one day when he saw a woman, good and pure, refined and cul- tured, walking with a man whose face was red with drink, whose form and look and manners bore the marks of deepest dissi- pation. He stept to her side and said, *^ Madam, why are you with this manT' She little heeded him at first as she sup- ported her disreputable companion's un- steady steps. ** Madam," the minister said, *^why do you not hand him over to the police!" She drew herself up and with a righteously indignant anger mingled with pathos, said: *^SirI I am his mother. I am his mother." So Jesus Christ says of each lost man, **I am his brother!" And of every poor sinning woman, **I am her brother!" We must learn this lesson from Jesus. The light of heaven which has shined in our hearts is not for our- selves alone, but for our brothers and sisters U THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD about us. Shakespeare, in '* Measure for Measure,'' says: Heaven doth with us as we with torches do. Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues. The Apostle Paul was of the same mind when he said, '^I am debtor both to the Greeks and the barbarians.'' He felt that, having received the grace of God in the forgiveness of his sins, he owed the Gospel to every other man in the world who did not have it. I would that God would put the same feeling heavily upon every one of our hearts. The sinners in this wicked city would soon be won to Christ if all Christians felt as they ought their obligation to share with others their faith in Jesus. The more we have received, the richer our own ex- perience of the love of God, the more in- tense should be our sense of obligation to carry its helpfulness to those who need it most. Jesus said that even 'Hhe Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," and Whittier, his heart THE CBEATION OF LTCrHT . 35 warmed with the same thought, beautifully says : Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord, What may Thy service be? Not name, nor form, nor ritual word, But only following Thee. We bring no ghastly holocaust, We pile no graven stone, He serves the best who loves the most, His brothers and Thy own. GOODNESS AND LIGHT "God saw the light, that it was good/^ — Gen. 1: 4. THIS is a declaration that in the sight of God light is good in itself. There was as yet nothing beautiful for it to shine upon. The mountains had not yet lifted themselves from above the waste of waters. There were no forests, no valleys, no wide- reaching plains, no birds, no beauty of any kind except the beauty which is inherent in light itself. But God declares that the light is good, whatever it may shine upon. Light is God's chariot, which conveys heat and purifies and cleanses all upon which it shines. All that was to be good and beauti- ful in the world was to be helped into being by the light. And so it is that all goodness in the hearts and lives of men has this inti- mate and dependent relation upon light. 36 GOODNESS AND LIGHT 37 Goodness loves the light, having nothing to fear; while evil seeks the darkness, wishing to hide. Christ brings this out very clearly in His talk with Nicodemus, when He says: **And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved dark- ness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.'' The man that is doing right is full of courage. He has nothing to fear. God is his Heavenly Father, and with a feeling of childlike bold- ness, conscious of that fatherly love, he finds his refuge in God who is light and in whom there is no darkness at all. The man who has no secrets from God, who is conscious of his sincerity and genuineness, feels sure of his reception in God's presence. The poet has given us a beautful description of 38 TEE WOMLD'S CHILDHOOD the human father, feeling the joy of his child in his arms: Beat upon mine, little heart, Beat, beat, beat. Beat, upon mine, you are all my own From 3'our dear deep eyes to your feet. You are mine, all mine, my sweet, My own little sweet. Sleep in my arms, my child, my bliss, And I give you this, and I give you this. And I close your eyes with a kiss upon kiss. My son, my own. Father, indeed, will watch you grow, And gather you roses wherever you go, And find you white heather wherever it blow, My own, my son. So, beat, beat upon mine, little heart. Beat, beat, beat, upon mine. You are all my own, from your deep blue eyes to your feet, You are mine, all mine, my sweet, My own little sweet. So the man or the woman who feels that the heart is true and sincere in God's sight, delights to rest on the bosom of God, assured that he or she is armored and sheltered in the light of God. GOODNESS AND LIGHT II If we live in the light, we shall reflect the light of heaven in our lives. You may- have witnessed some of the wonders of that rare and marvelous metal known as radium. A little particle, hardly bigger than a pin^s head, if placed behind a screen of florescent metal, may be seen to be sending out a stream of sparks. These sparks give light and heat, yet the marvel is that the radium itself loses no whit of its energy. It is like the miracle of the burning bush. It emits light and heat at no apparent cost to itself. It is imconsumed, tho it is forever pouring out chemical and electrical energies. When placed in the coldness of an atmosphere of liquid air, even when placed in the intense frigidity of liquid hydrogen, it still pours out more light and heat. Now the spiritual light which pours forth from a genuinely good man or a pure and holy woman is like that. If we have Christ in us, the hope of glory; if God dwells in our hearts by faith, then it makes no difference what adversities and trials may chill the circumstances in 40 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD which we live, we shall pour forth this spiritual light and warmth. The scientist will take a common bit of glass and put it near to a bit of radium, and after being there a little while it will re- ceive from the radium what the scientist calls '^emanation,** and for a while after- ward this glass will give out the same sort of light, heat, and energy that radium does. Of course, it does not last. It passes off, but not for some time. It never comes back unless the glass is placed again where the radium can influence it. The scientist can keep the glass radio-active if he puts it near the radium every now and then. Otherwise it backslides into just a common bit of glass, with no powers of radiance at all. How suggestive this is in the spiritual world. There are many radio-active Chris- tians whose radio-activity wears off very quickly in the midst of the worldliness sur- rounding them, and sometimes it is never renewed. We are the ^ Might of the world" only as we keep near to Christ and receive the divine light, the holy emanation. It is a terrible thing for us to go with darkened lives in a world which needs light so much, GOODNESS AND LIGHT 41 when we may shine with the very light of God by living in close touch with Him III Our theme should teach us that the greatest danger that can come to any man or woman is to have in the heart and life secret sins. The Word says, ** Whoso covereth his sins shall not prosper/* and the whole history of mankind shows us that there is nothing so sure to work disaster as a hidden sin. A hunter not long ago saw an eagle rise from the brow of a hill, winging its way with bold, strong flight, circle on circle, into the depths of the sky. He watched it until it had become but a mere speck in the far-off upper air, when sud- denly, to his great amazement, the great bird grew larger and dropt down, down, down, until it crashed on the rocks at his side. He ran to it, and on examining the bruised and battered body, he found that under the wing of the eagle a little poisonous 42 TEE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD viper had fastened itself. Eesting at noon- day, this small but terrible enemy had taken refuge under its wing, and had hissed death through its veins. It was only a little viper, but it put an end to that bold flight and was the cause of that terrible fall. Friends, beware of little sins! Be- ware of secret sins that fasten to your life! You may think you can trifle and dally with them, but in their bite there is poison and in their fang there is death. We need to pray with the psalmist, ^^ Cleanse thou me from secret faults ; keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me.'' But perhaps some one says, out of a troubled heart, ^^Such advice would have been good once, but I have already been bitten by the viper. Sin has already poisoned my blood. The clutches of an evil habit are already upon me. How shall I escape from sin and be able to stand again in the presence of God in innocence and courage r' I would to God that every one who is conscious of sin would awaken to ask that question in all genuineness and sincerity. For unless there be such an GOODNESS AND LIGHT 43 awakening there is a terrible reckoning coming. Let me presmne, as God's mes- senger, to speak plainly to your inner soul concerning that secret sin which is gnawing at your vitals. You would not have your acquaintances know about it for the world. **If God's right hand were to fling wide the door that guards that., secret chamber, you would be despised by those who speak your name with honor and regard. Oh! the destruction wrought by secret sins, which no physician sees, nor surgeon probes, nor medicine cures ; they eat on and on until we die, and then we find that, tho we may have hidden them from men, God saw them. ' ' Are you carrying the burden of a secret sin? Does fear sit on your pillow when you lie down at night, and whisper of detection in your sleeping ear, so that you dream in agony, and wake with shuddering cries upon your lips? My friend, God sees it all, and that sin so carefully hidden must face the judgment day and the light of the great white throne. But, thank God, there is one way you can deal with it, and that is yourself to bring your sin to judgment at Jesus' feet, and have it cleansed from your soul. 44 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD Only the atoning blood of Jesus Christ can cleanse the heart of its hidden sins. At the Parliament of Eeligions, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, some years ago, where were gathered the repre- sentatives of every religion on the earth. Dr. Joseph Cook, speaking of the certainties of religion, said, '^Lady Macbeth hath blood- stains on her hands,'' and he asked the representatives of each religion what they could do to remove those stains. He waited for an answer, but all were silent. After waiting until the hush was like the house of death he solemnly exclaimed, ** Nothing but the blood of Jesus!'' Solemn as the occasion was, the audience broke out in applause, agreeing that there is nothing that can remove the stain of a guilty conscience except the blood of Jesus Christ. Christ conquered on that open platform. Mozoom- dar, the leader of the new dispensation in India, bowed his head and said over and over again, **The gentle Jesus." Every religious teacher there bowed before Him, and the choir of a thousand trained voices sang the Hallelujah Chorus, and the eyes of the great audience of reverent men and women GOODNESS AND LIGHT 45 were turned toward heaven, as tho they could see the hallelujahs going up to His throne, and watched to see them caught up by the angels on high. All glory to Christ, who has the power to cleanse the sin from the darkened soul of man and fill it with the glorious light of goodness! IV It is here that we find the hope of the world. We look about us and are often tempted to discouragement. There is so much darkness, so much misery and sin in the world. And then we come back to God's Book and we find hope. Our hope is in the blest promise of God that the true light is to shine on until the whole world is il- luminated. The noblest privilege any man or woman can have is to share in the battle going on among men for a bright and pure world. When I ask you to become a Christian I am calling upon you to become a soldier in that glorious struggle. We are not discouraged by the outlook of to- day or to-morrow, but in the strength and 46 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD light of God we see the day of triumph coming. The fog that is on the world to-day, It will be on the world to-morrow; Not all the strength of the sun can drive His bright spear's furrow. Yesterday and to-day Have been heavy with care and sorrow, I should faint if I did not see The day that is after to-morrow. Hope in to-day there is none, Nor from yesterday can I borrow. But I think that I feel the wind Of the dawn that is after to-morrow. The cause of the people I serve to-day In impatience and sorrow, Once again is defeated, but yet 'twill be won In the day that is after to-morrow. And for me with spirit elate, The fire and the fog I press through. For heaven shines under the cloud Of the day that is after to-morrow. DAEKNESS AND LIGHT '*And God divided the light from the darkness." — Gen. 1 :-4. AND that is what God is trying to do all the while in this world. He is seeking to bring the whole world into the light, and crowd back ignorance and sin and sorrow into *Hhe outer darkness.'' That is the mission of Christianity upon the earth, and nothing that has ever existed on the earth has been such a tremendous suc- cess. We have always lived with so much of the light of Christ about us that many are misled and fail to appreciate how dark the world would be without Christ. Dr. Young J. Allen, a missionary to China for the last forty years, in a recent address at Birmingham, Alabama, said that he had never understood the Gospel until he went to China, and he proceeded to say that in seeking for some way whereby he might il- lustrate and measure the Gospel to our 47 48 TEE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD American comprehension he selected this illustration: He had often passed in sight of Pike's Peak. Pike's Peak is something more than fourteen thousand feet high, but it is not fourteen thousand feet high as we see it. It appears to be about six thousand or seven thousand feet high. Why? Be- cause it is on a great plateau or tableland which is itself from six to eight thousand feet high. Well, how are you going to measure, how are you going to see this Pike's Peak fourteen thousand feet high? You can not do it. It makes no such im- pression on you. You go by and say, ' ' That is Pike's Peak, and they say it is fourteen thousand feet high; and the imagination looks up, but the mind does not and will not go up fourteen thousand feet. You can not reach up there. It is not there. What is the matter? It is because of this great plateau that swallows it up. Now, Dr. Allen says if we go from Pike's Peak to San Francisco, and on to Japan, we see another mountain, one of the most impressive in the world, called Fujiyama. There it stands. There is no plateau. It begins down at sea- level, the waves of the sea lap its very DARKNESS AND LIGHT 49 foundation; but it towers and towers and towers until its top literally kisses the sky, and is seen one hundred and fifty miles at sea. Sea-captains say that sometimes they see it gilded by the sun, and then it seems like a giant chrysanthemum, away up there in the sky. There it stands, grand and glorious in its form and coloring. The Japanese worship it; and travelers where- ever they go can not take their eyes from it, and are always searching for it if they lose it. Now there is a mountain that repre- sents the thing from the bottom to the top, and you see it all. The missionary took these two mountains to represent Chris- tianity — the one as we see it over here, the other as they see it over there in the midst of the darkness of heathenism. We who were born in a Christian country have always lived on this high table-land. We have always lived on this high general level of Christian civilization, and we have no conception of how high it is. We have no idea of the pit out of which our race has been dug. If we would know, we must go back into history. If you want to see Pike's Peak, you must dig it out, and dig out its 50 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD roots and find the sea-level, and then stand and look at it; it would be a glorious object, and it would stand for all that is claimed for it. If you want to get at Christianity and know its towering height, on whose base and on whose bosom you rest, you must go back into history and dig it out. When you take that backward trail, hunt- ing the backward track of your own race, our own ancestors, you will go back and back and back until you come to a slave-market in Rome. And one day St. Augustine came around to look at the slaves in the market, and he had enough of the light of Christ in his heart to cause him to see in these north- ern slaves, these painted savages, men and women for whom Christ died, and he longed to have a part in their salvation. As he looked upon them he declared that he could see ^^the angel in them,'' and so the Christians in Rome sent missionaries up into that Saxon land, and our ancestors were converted to Christ. It is out of a darkness like that that we were lifted up into the light and glory of our modern civilization. DABKNESS AND LIGHT 51 II Now, what God is seeking to do for the world, He is seeking to do for every man and woman among us as individuals. No man need walk a dark path in this world. Jesus says: **I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in dark- ness, but shall have the light of life.'' In his poem, *^ Merlin and the Gleam,'' Tennyson is supposed to have written out of his heart a comment on his own life. It recalls his youth, his manhood, his early poems, the great work which employed his thoughts in maturer years, and then turns toward the future and finds that the ideal which has lighted him from the start is still lighting him to the finish. From youth to old age he has followed the Gleam, and he is now following it home to heaven. There is in the poem something more than an autobiography of Tennyson. There is in it light upon all life and upon every struggle for the highest and best things. There are young men who hear me, and young women, too, whose hearts have been 52 THE WOELD'S CHILDHOOD stirred with noble longings and holy dreams to hold themselves to the highest living and the truest ambitions, who might well sing with the poet: Mighty the Wizard Who found me at sunrise Sleeping, and woke me And learned me Magic ! Great the Master, And sweet the Magic, When over the valley. In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me. Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam. So you remember when your Master, the divine Christ, awoke in you a longing for holy living, for beautiful thoughts and achievements, for generous self-sacrifice and fellowship, and with a new joy and a thrill of holy ambition unknown before you fol- lowed the gleam of this blest Light out to the struggle of life. But there came days of shadow and of trial, and out of your own experience you DABKNESS AND LIOET 53 might still join with the poet when he sings: Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it, A barbarous people, Blind to the magic And deaf to the melody. Snarl 'd at and curst me, A demon vext me, The light retreated, The landskip darken 'd. The melody deaden 'd The Master whispered, '^Follow the Gleam.'' And if yon harkened to that whisper of the Master, you followed the gleam of the heavenly light through temptations and trials, and are all the stronger for them to- day. But if you closed your ears to the whisper of the Master, and lost sight of the divine Gleam, then your heart is heavy and sad. If you are in such a place now, I beg you harken to the whisper of the Christ, and no matter how many demons snarl or tempt, follow the Gleam, and you shall walk safely. One of the worst lies the devil ever tells us when we are in the midst of some dark place of temptation, is 64 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD that the Christian life is all like that, that it is always gloomy and heavy* and sad. Nothing can be more false. In spite of the struggles against evil and sin, in or- der to maintain the Christian character, the Christian life is the sweetest and hap- piest life in the world. See how the poet portrays it in his own experience: Then to the melody, Over a wilderness Gliding, and glancing at Elf of the woodland, Gnome of the cavern. Griffin and Giant, And dancing of Fairies In desolate hollows, And wraiths of the mountain. And rolling of dragons By warble of water, Or cataract music. Of falling torrents, Flitted the Gleam. « Down from the mountain And over the level, And streaming and shining on Silent river. Silvery willow, Pasture and plowland, DARKNESS AND LIGHT 55 Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner. And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labor, Slided the Gleam. And so it may be with you. For every experience with awakening ravens and demons of temptation and trial, there shall be multiplied experiences when the path shall be by the shining river, through the fragrant orchards and gardens, and in joyous fellowship with the good and true. And he who follows the heavenly light finds that even the dark valley and the shadow of death are illuminated and glorified by it. How splendidly Tennyson says; And broader and brighter The Gleam flying onward. Wed to the melody. Sang thro^ the world; And slower and fainter, Old and weary, But eager to follow, I saw, whenever In passing it glanced upon 56 TEE WORLD'S CUILVHOOD Hamlet or city, That under the Crosses The dead man's garden, The mortal hillock, Would break into blossom; And so to the land's Last limit I came. I can no longer, But die rejoicing, For thro ' the Magic Of Him the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood, There on the border Of boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven Hovers the Gleam. I went one day to see a white-haired old man who had followed the Gleam for many years, and was only waiting for his transfer to the world beyond, and I found in him the same precious hope and faith. There was no shadow on his brow; there was no fear in his heart. He felt that he was walking in. the valley of death, but the heavenly Gleam lighted it up, and he did not walk in dark- ness. But I must not fail in my message to you DARKNESS AND LIGHT 57 who have not get given yourself over to the divine Guide. Christ, who is **the Light of the world,'' will be, if you will open your heart and life to Him, the inspiration, the comfort, and the guide to your personal life. No earthly wisdom is sufficient to guide the immortal soul. Only the heavenly light, only the heart of our divine Lord, is tender enough and wise enough to give us the inspiration and the direction that each of us needs. Listen again to the poet as he concludes his song with this inspiring word of exhortation. If it had been written personally for your ear and your eye, it could not have been more truly fitted to the needs of your soul : Not of the sunlight, Not of the moonlight, Not of the starlight ! O young Mariner, Down to the haven. Call your companions, Launch your vessel And crowd your canvas, And, ere it vanishes Over the margin, After it, follow it. Follow the Gleam. 68 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD The Christ gleam falls across your path now, and there is light enough if you will fol- low it to lead you to forgiveness and peace. Nothing else can save you from the darkness which comes to all who have sinned. Not long ago, in New York, a man died the death of a suicide, who had in his possession up to the time of his death many millions of dollars. He made his money in a shame- ful way, and he could not bear the public censure. He had traded his soul for his wealth, and after he got it had no peace with it, because in getting it he had lost his soul. If that man could have ex- changed all his millions for a light, cheerful heart, that looked into the future with gladness, what a wonderful bargain it would have been. But he had sinned against his own soul. He had turned his face away from the light and there could only be one ending, and that was the impenetrable gloom of the ^^ outer darkness.'^ God save any one of you from such a tragedy ! I give you the blest invitation of Christ to come to the light, and in the sweet light that shines upon the mercy seat find the forgiveness of your sins and the hope of eternal life. MAN'S GLORIOUS DAY "And God called the light day."— Gen. 1:5. THERE is nothing more glorious in the universe than the day. No other miracle is so marvelous as this. God uses it as a challenge against unbelief in spiritual things. Through the mouth of Jeremiah He says, **Thus saith the Lord: If ye can break my covenant of the day . . . . Then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant.'' Did you ever stop to think what a miracle it is to make the day, and cause its return at the appropriate time through the centuries ! George Lansing Taylor once made a study of the mechanical enginery that would be necessary to make the day, and he discovered that to run this massive sphere, eight thousand miles in diameter, by the ratio of size of shaft to size of paddle-wheel on a large steamboat, the earth must be slung on a steel shaft two hundred and fifty miles in diameter and ten thousand miles long. It must be driven by an engine whose cylinder should measure twelve hundred miles bore and two thousand 59 60 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD miles stroke, having a piston-rod one hun- dred miles thick, and two thousand five hundred miles long, working by a con- necting-rod three thousand miles long on a crank of one thousand miles arm, with a wrist two hundred miles long and fifty- miles thick. The piston of this engine will make but one revolution daily; but to do that it will travel four thousand miles, at an average velocity of nearly three miles a minute. The working capacity of this engine will be about fourteen thousand million horse- power. It must be controlled by an auto- matic governor of infallible accuracy, and supplied with inexhaustible fuel and oil; and so run on day and night, never starting a bolt, nor heating a journal, nor wearing out a box, century after century. The iron bed-frame for this machine must be ten thousand miles square and four thousand miles high, and not tremble a hair under the stroke that drives the equatorial rim of this flying-wheel globe up to a steady velocity of seventeen and one-half miles a minute, twenty times the velocity of a flying express-train! Who will take the contract to build and run this engine? MAN'S GLORIOUS DAY 61 Who'll furnish a place where it may stand? Who'll build the masonry underpinning for that vast bed-frame? But it can have no underpinning. The vast mass must fly through space in the earth's orbit around the sun, with a velocity of more than eleven hundred miles a minute. The Armstrong one-hundred-ton steel rifle sends its two- thousand-pound steel projectile at the rate of sixteen hundred feet per second clean through a solid wrought-iron plate twenty- two inches thick. But God fires this globe, eight thousand miles in diameter, through space with sixty and one-half times the velocity of the monster projectile, and two thousand times the velocity of an express- train. And our engine that gives it its day- and-night rotation must fly with it at that speed, and never lose a stroke! Now, it was our God who built this flying- machine, and set it at work revolving out our day and night, and flashing the rosy miracle of sunrise and sunset around the world! And it was that same God who also framed the plan of our redemption through Jesus Christ, and set up His kingdom on the earth; and He says to the caviler to-day: 62 TEE WOULD 'S CHILDHOOD ^^When you can stop the one, you can stop the other! Just try your hand on my day- and-night engine first, and then see about Christianity. ' ' Our life in this world has been very commonly compared to the natural day. There is an old common-law proverb which says that, ^^ Every man has his day in court.'' So each of us is granted his day of human life, and where our lives run the normal, natural course the figure of the day is very striking. Our birth is like the sunrise. Childhood is our morning, and in youth the sun climbs high in the heavens. High-noon is middle age. As we grow older the sun descends toward the West, and death is the sunset of man's brief but splendid day. This illustration ought to be full of teaching for every one of us. The thought of life as a day should be to us an inspiration to activity. It is swiftly passing. On John Euskin's desk he kept a paper-weight made of a beautiful block of chalcedony. Carved upon it was the word MAN'S GLOEIOUS DAY 63 '^ To-day.'^ In Euskin^s thought every day was a king and should be obeyed to the ut- most limit while it lasted. So Christ's com- mand comes to us, ^^Son, go work to-day in my vineyard.'' There is nothing said about to-morrow. To-day is the all-important hour of duty for every one of us. The question that should come to us every evening is not what we are dreaming about doing in some future time, but what have we accomplished to-day. There are many people who excuse themselves for present failures because of vague and hazy dreams of what they ex- pect to do in some indefinite future. Nothing is more insidious than such a habit as that. Some of you are picturing to yourselves how when you are old you are going to be a noble, benevolent, gentle-hearted Christian man, or you are going to be a sweet-spirited, pure- souled Christian woman. You think of the noblest man or woman you know, one that fascinates you and charms you by the chastened beauty and Christlikeness of personality, and you dream that you are going to be like that. But to-day you are not a Christian. To-day you are living without God, and with but little care of 64 THE WOBLB'S CHILDHOOD your spirit or for the culture of your soul. Do not be deceived. If' the future is to be beautiful and splendid, to-day must be pre- paring for it. Some one sings of just such a danger as yours : We shall do much in the years to come, But what have we done to-day? We shall give our gold in a princely sum, But what did we give to-day? We shall lift the heart and dry the tear, We shall plant a hope in the place of fear, We shall speak the words of love and cheer, But what did we speak to-day? We shall be so kind in the after while, But what have we been to-day? We shall bring to each lonely life a smile, But what have we brought to-day? We shall give to truth a grander birth, And to steadfast faith a deeper worth, We shall feed the hungering souls of earth ; But wjiom have we fed to-day? We shall reap such joys in the by and by, But what have we sown to-day? We shall build us mansions in the sky, But what have we built to-day? 'Tis sweet in idle dreams to bask, But here and now, do we our task? Yes, this is the thing our souls must ask. What have we done to-day? MAN'S GLORIOUS DAY 65 II The thought of life as a day ought to be a constant warning against carelessness of life. We can not go back over the course. You never can go back from eleven o^clock in the morning to nine o'clock and accept any privilege or perform any duty that be- longs exclusively to that earlier hour. We never can go back and come again over the course of childhood or youth or middle age after once we have passed it. The doors are forever swinging shut behind us as we pro- ceed. If we could keep in our hearts and minds a clear perception of this great fact, it would often give us pause. The careless word that wounded the heart of a friend ; the unkind criticism that made the burden heavier to some weary shoulder; the blunt speech that was like a blow in the face to a man or a woman already discouraged; the harsh refusal that disheartened the budding hope of a child, how differently we would have spoken if we could have remembered clearly that we never could take it back, never could go back and change it, but 66 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD must always let it stand there, impossible to redeem. Friend, you can only go this way but once. Let us be careful what we do. How well I remember a man, whom many other people envied, saying to me one day, with the scalding tears running down his cheeks: ^'I would give half the years that are still left to me, even tho it were God's will I should live to be a hundred, if I could go back and change just one year of my life and make the record different !'' But he could not go back. The day of life went steadily on toward the sunset. I ''There is a nest of thrushes in the glen; V, When we come back we '11 see the glad young things, ' ' He said. We came not by that way again; And time and thrushes fare on eager wings ! ''Yon rose,^^ she smiled. "But no; when we return, I '11 pluck it then. ' ' 'Twas on a summer day. The ashes of the rose in autumn's urn Lie hidden well. We came not back that way. We do not pass the selfsame way again, Or, passing by that way, no thing we find As it before had been; but dearth or stain Hath come upon it, or the wasteful wind. MAN'S GLORIOUS DAT 87 The very earth is envious, and her arms Reach for the beauty that detained our eyes; Yea, it is lost beyond the aid of charms If, once within our grasp, we leave the prize. Thou traveler to the unknown ocean^s brink. Through life's fair fields, say not, ^* Another day This joy I'll prove"; for never, as I think. Never shall we come this selfsame way. Ill Our theme should teach us that there is no room for despair in the sorrows and trials of life provided we trust God, and are seeking to do His will, since the day is constantly passing and with it all the hard experiences which trouble us and try us. Some of you are carrying heavy loads. Your hearts are tender with grief. You can not see the way out, but the clouds will pass with the fleeting hour. They are not for always. Some of you are having a con- stant struggle in your wilderness of tempta- tion, trying to be good. Do not lose heart. Trust God! It is not forever. It is all in the day's work. It will pass, and as the 68 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD angels came and comforted Jesus after His temptation, so they will comfort you. I re- member an old story told in song which interested me in my boyhood, crystallizing around the sentence **Even this shall pass away/' The story- telling poet says; Once in Persia reigned a king Who upon his signet-ring Graved a maxim true and wise, Which, if held before his eyes, Gave him counsel at a glance Fit for every change and chance, Solemn words, and these are they: **Even this shall pass away.*' Trains of camels through the sand Brought him gems from Samarcand ; Fleets of galleys through the seas Brought him pearls to match with these. But he counted not his gain Treasures of the mine or main; ''What is wealth?'* the king would say; ' ' Even this shall pass away. ' ' In the revels of his court, At the zenith of the sport. When the palms of all his guests Burned with clapping at his jests. MAN'S GLORIOUS DAY He, amid his figs and wine, Cried, **0h, loving friends of mine! Pleasures come, but not to stay; *Even this shall pass away.' " Fighting on a furious field. Once a javelin pierced his shield, Soldiers, with a loud lament, Bore him bleeding to his tent. Groaning from his tortured side, ^*Pain is hard to bear,'* he cried, *^But with patience, day by day, *Even this shall pass away.' " Towering in the public square. Twenty cubits in the air. Rose his statue carved in stone. Then the king, disguised, unknown. Stood before his sculptured name. Musing meekly, ^'What is fame? Fame is but a slow decay — *Even this shall pass away.' " Struck with palsy, sere and old. Waiting at the Gates of Gold, Said he with his dying breath, **Life is done, but what is death?" Then, in answer to the king. Fell a sunbeam on his ring, Showing, by a heavenly ray, '*Even this shall pass away." THE TEEASURES OF NIGHT '*And the darkness He called Night." — Gen. 1: 5. IN all languages night is the symbol for gloom and suffering. An allegory in the old Jewish Talmud teaches that the demons are all children of four daughters of Night — Lilith, Naama, Agrath, and Mahalath. Their assembling-place was on Mount Nish- pah, the Mount of Twilight toward the north. King Solomon ruled them all and made them do his pleasure. These four daughters of the night, the mothers of the demons, and sources of all the vices that degrade and devastate the nature of man, were described as follows: Lilith is ig- norance, the mortal foe of childhood and of all instruction. Naama is false pleasure, the mortal foe of all self-discipline, the demon- mother of the wide-spread shame and horri- ble misery caused by every form of drink and impurity. Agrath is she who fills the world with foul fiction and every form of corrupting literature. Mahalath is the 70 THE TREASURES OF NIGHT 71 mortal foe of pure religion and undefiled, the demon-mother of superstition and phar- isaism, and of every form of false religion. The offspring of these demon-mothers meet on the dark and dreary mountains and go to the far north — that is, to the region of death and ruin. But Solomon can subdue them and make them serve his will. Canon Farrar says that Christianity with the help of God's grace can overcome these daughters of the night; can expel the curse of Lilith, or Ignorance, by a large and loving Christian education; it can make Naama, or Pleasure, the handmaid not of pollution, but of innocence and noble self- control ; it can make Agrath, Literature and Art, the minister to purity and holiness; it can purge Mahalath, or False Religion, from formalism and hollowness and help her to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit which grow on the tree of life in the Paradise of God. It can destroy the offspring of night and fill the world with the ** children of the day." But there is another view in regard to night, and upon that path I wish to lead our thoughts at this time. The purpose of the 72 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD night is as benevolent and loving on the part of God as that of the day. I think it will do us good to study the treasures of the night. David found that * * Night unto night showeth knowledge.'* And I think we shall find that to be true. Night recalls us to a keen sense of the individuality of our own souls, and their responsibility to God, In these days more than ever we live in a crowd. In the rush and stress of life, when the street is full of noise, and the telephone-bell rings in your ear, or messengers call you here and there, it is easy to forget the solemn responsibility which is on you for your own personality. We come to feel that somehow we are a part of the town, a part of a class, a part of civilization, and we count ourselves in with the great crowd; but night singles us out from the crowd, and in that is a great bless- ing. Cecil Wright well says that a place in life must be kept for intervals of quiet, stolen from the noise of life, otherwise THE TBEASUUES OF NIGHT 73 spirituality can not thrive. For spiritual things to be real a man must live in the midst of them. We grow skeptical of the existence of that which does not touch us. It is a well-known fact that by excessive devotion to one subject we lose the power to appreciate another. Charles Darwin once wrote: ^*Up to the age of thirty all poetry gave me pleasure; Shakespeare was my de- light; painting also, and music. Now for some years past I can not endure reading a line of poetry ; Shakespeare bores and dis- gusts me; I have lost my taste for painting and for music.'' The explanation was that the great naturalist had concentrated himself completely on the earth-worm and the monkey. With lifelong persistency he gave his heart and brain to certain studies. His every faculty was absorbed and his every power riveted on those studies. And all the while the poetic faculties of the man were becoming more and more atrophied, benumbed, blunted. He had no quarrel with Shakespeare, or Beethoven, but all un- wittingly he had closed the door against them. It is so still. Men are so absorbed in the narrow and noisy present that they 74 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD blink when you talk to them of the other world. None of us appreciate how much the night with its power to recall us to our in- dividuality and our personal responsibility to God saves us from being still more terri- bly influenced by the secular and material influences which so absorb the busy hours of the day. The sad side of it is that such multitudes turn the night into day for sensual and giddy pleasure even more dis- tracting than the hours of business. But he or she is wise who permits the voice of the night to speak of the deeper things of the soul. II The night is rich in teaching the lesson of our dependence upon God. If man could work on forever, or a limited forever, with- out recuperation, he would become utterly indifferent to the fact that he gets all his strength from God. In prosperity men often become proud and self-sufficient, and are only brought to wisdom and humility and proper thoughts of God by disasters which reveal to them their own weakness and re- TEE TBEASUBES OF NIOHT 75 call them to a sense of dependence upon God for all the blessings of life. Horace Bushnell, in his book on the *^ Moral Uses of Dark Things/' brings out very strikingly this lesson in regard to night and sleep. He shows that if a man were always fresh and strong, incapable of exhaustion as the spring of a watch, moral ideas would seldom get near enough to be felt. But after twelve or sixteen hours the man who rose in the morning full of might, as if a young eternity were in him, begins to flag; his nervous energy is spent; his limbs are heavy; his motions want spirit and pre- cision. If he tries, for some particular reason, to hold on over whole days, his hands grow weaker, his eyelids more heavy, till, at length, he is obliged to resign himself to his fate, and drops, a merely unconscious lump, on the couch of the sleeper. Every day this lesson of frailty is given him. The grass which is cut down by the mower's scythe does not sooner wither and dry up than the strength of the mower himself. We take our very capacity thus in little loans of only a few hours, and when the time has gone, night calls us back into God's 76 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD bosom again to be recruited* It is strange that the miracle of every night does not reclaim men from sin altogether, but were it not for this wise and morally beautiful ar- rangement men would become like devils. The philosopher reasons that having only this short run of power, we are humbled to a softer key. We do not feel or act as we should if we could rush on our way and have our sin as a law of ceaseless momentum for the whole period of our life. We are like an engine that is started off on the track by itself; the fuel and water will soon be exhausted, and then it must stop. But if it could go on without fuel and water, it would whirl itself across a continent and pitch itself into the sea. So, if, being loose in evil, we could rush interminably on, never to be spent or recruited by night or sleep, our bad momentum would itself drive us to eternal ruin. In our self-will we should be hard beyond conception; our very ambitions and purposes would fly, bullet- wise, at their mark; consideration, concilia- tion, candor, patience, would all be driven 4 out of the world by the remorseless per- sistency of our habit. We have great rea- TEE TBEASUBES OF NIGHT 77 son to thank God that it is not so. Night intervenes every few honrs and brings us to nothingness, saving us from becoming demons, and keeping us men and women that have to go to sleep as children do. In this way we are softened and gentled in feeling. Night makes it impossible that we shall not sometimes be tender. Eeason will some- times get a chance to speak. God's Spirit will have His opportunity of whispering to the soul. The tremendous passion for gain, bad as it is, would be infinitely worse if it were not that the spell it works is broken every few hours by the counter-spell of night and sleep. God has set the sun and the moon and the stars running as a mill against that dangerous worldliness which drowns men in perdition. He buries the world in darkness that we may not see it. He takes the soul off into a world of un- consciousness to break up its bad enchant- ment. He palsies the hand to make it let go, palsies even the brain to stifle its in- fatuation. In the same way God seeks to stifle jealousy and envy and hatred, and to destroy every wicked passion. If it were not for 78 TEE WOELD'S CHILDHOOD this, our malignities would burn us up. But night comes on like the truce of God. No hatred burns in the sleeping man who is given over to the spell of night. ^^No re- venge or jealousy lowers on his face in that soft hour of oblivion. If he went to bed heated by an ugly conversation, if he was severe and bitter in his judgments, if all charities were scorched away by his fierce de- nunciations, he will rise in the morning cool and sweet, and the gentle cheer of his voice will show that he is clear of his bad mood and likes to have it known. A man must be next to a devil who wakes angry. So it is that God is seeking by the blest ministries of the night to soften our hearts, to curb our evil passions, to give us a chance to think concerning the deeper things of life, to show us Himself, and awaken within us sorrow for sin, desire for goodness, and prayer for divine help. So the night comes to be a minister who preaches you a sermon every twenty-four hours — a sermon more solemn and majestic and splendid than any that I can preach to you. God forbid that these daily sermons should all pass un- heeded and fail in their holy purpose ! THE TREASURES OF NIGHT 79 III The night is typical of deaths which closes our earthly life, ^* Night is the shepherd, which brings all things home/' Scattered through the day — the father at his work in the shop, or the office, or the mill; the children at school, or in various places of toil — ^night is the shepherd which brings them all home. So that other night which men call Death is^ the shepherd that shall bring all of us home. As night falls, and the day's work must be left with its record made up, which it is too late to change, so with the nightfall of death our life-record must go before the Judge of all the earth. There is no magic power in the night that will change the record of our day's work, and there is no magic power in death to change the record of our lives. Eobert Buchanan wrote a poem which he called the * ' Ballad of Judas Iscariot. " I do not agree, of course, with the implication of after- death repentance which might be found in the poem, but the thought of the poet is this : Judas, the poor broken victim of his own sin, by which he sought to profit through 80 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD the betrayal of his Master, wanders in the darkness through the desert waste of eternity, till, seeing but one light, he draws toward that. The Bridegroom shaded his eyes and looked, And his face was bright to see ; ''What dost thou here at the Lord's Supper, With thy body's sins?" said He. 'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot Stood black and sad and bare; '*I have wandered many nights and days; There is no light elsewhere" 'Twas the Bridegroom stood at the open door, And beckoned, smiling sweet; 'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot Stole in, and fell at His feet. The supper wine is poured at last, The lights burn bright and fair, Iscariot washes the Bridegroom's feet, And dries them with his hair. My dear friends, we shall never escape from God by leaping into the arms of death. There is no power in death to cleanse our sins or to change an impure heart. There is no light anywhere but in Jesus Christ that welcomes a sinful soul. And so, while the J}EE TREASURES OF NIGHT 81 day lasts, ere the night of death cometh, I call you to Christ, the Savior of sinners, who will welcome you with tenderness and forgiveness. You need not delay to try in some way to make yourself better; the power and the mercy and the love are all in Jesus. You can only come, saying humbly: Savior, I have naught to plead On earth beneath or heaven above But just my own exceeding need, And Thine exceeding love. LIGHT AND SHADOW **And the evening and the morning were the first day.''— Gen. 1:5. YOU will notice that in our text, describ- ing the evolution of the day, evening comes before morning. The day begins with the night. This is just the opposite of our usual method of recording history. When we tell the story of any historical event, we are likely to begin with the morning and end with the evening. Dr. L. W. Bacon says that history, as told in literature, is a tragedy, and ends with a death. So human history is ever looking backward; and the morning and the evening make the day. But it is not so that God writes history. The annals of mankind in the Bible begin in the darkness of apostasy, but the dark- ness is shot through with gleams of hope, the first rays of the dawn. The sentence of death is illuminated with the promise of a Savior. There is night again when the flood comes down, and the civilization and 82 LIGHT AND SHADOW 83 the wickedness of the primeval world are whelmed beneath it. But the flood clears off with a rainbow, and it is proved to have been the clearing of the earth for a better progress, for the rearing of a godly race, of whom by and by the Christ shall come according to the flesh. In all our thinking we should follow God's order. We do so in our thoughts about the physical day. We recognize that a restful night pre- pares for vigorous work in the day to fol- low. This ought to suggest to us that the night of sickness or sorrow, or adversity of any kind, is often a preparation for a better and a nobler epoch of success. There could be no greater blunder than for us to imagine that the dark times in human life are an in- dication that God has forgotten us, or that He is angry with us, or are in any sense a punishment for what is past. Instead, we may be sure that to them that love God times of darkness are always meant as a discipline and preparation for what is com- ing in the future. They are the evening before the day. There are many such ex- periences in every life — times when all that we can do is to sit still and wait; trying 84 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD experiences, when a man^s business is heavy and stagnant, or meets strong currents of opposition; times of sickness, and depres- sion; times of grief and doubt and sorrow. These are the even-times of life; and at such times we are not to look back and try to remember how much brighter it was in some other epoch of the past, but to look forward toward the dawn of the morning. It is folly in such an experience to say, *^What have I done, that this sorrow or trial should come upon mef What we ought to say is, '^What is God preparing for me, and for what is He preparing me, that He should thus lovingly chasten and instruct me in this night of trial f It is not the night after the day that you are in ; it is the night before the day; and if with faithful heart you seek to learn God's purpose, and humbly submit yourself to His hand, the bright day shall dawn upon you in a glory of grander joy and happiness than you have ever known. We may find a beautiful illustration of this great truth in the crucifixion of Jesus. When Christ died upon the cross, men said, **It is the end.'' His disciples forsook Him LIGHT AND SHADOW 85 and fled. But it was not the end. It was not the evening after Christ's day, it was the evening before. Easter morning was soon to come, and fill the world with the glory of immortal hope. Any of you who are in sorrow should get the comfort of our theme. You should learn that it takes both light and shadow, both evening and morning, to make the day of our human life. The shadows are as necessary as the light. Clouds are as important as sunshine. A land of perpetual sunshine, where the clouds never softened its glare, and the skies never wept in sympathetic tears upon the thirsty fields, would be an unfruitful desert. Great fertility can only come with clouds and storms as well as sunshine and heat. So, great fruitfulness and sweetness of character, which make a man or a woman like an orchard tree hanging full of juicy blessings for all who come in contact with it, are only possible where the shadows have fallen as well as the light. If I speak to any over whom the clouds hang darkly, who is passing through an epoch which is dark with shadow, let me comfort your soul with the great truth that 89 THE WOBLD'S CHILDHOOD the clouds are as much God^s messengers as the sunshine, that the evening as well as the morning is a part of God's benevolent and loving purpose. In the Gospel record we are told that on the Mount of Transfiguration, when Christ was transfigured before His dis- ciples, after they had seen the glory of their Lord, a cloud overshadowed them, and it is written: **They feared as they entered the cloud." Matthew tells us that it was a '^bright , cloud,*' and this was true in more senses than one. Its brightness was not only ex- ternal, but spiritual also, for **out of the cloud there came a voice," which brought to them a wealth of blessing and inner light. We read that when they first saw the glory Peter said: **Let us make three taberna- cles," but it is added, ^^not knowing what he said." In the ecstasy of the vision the human voice was heard, a voice of folly; in the shadow of the cloud, it was the voice of God; and it would seem from the after-rec- ords of Peter and James and John that nothing made a greater impression on them amid all the glories of the scene than the voice which spoke to them in the midst of the cloud that they had feared to enter. LIGHT AND SHADOW 87 It is often so with us ; many of us, to hear the voice of God, have to enter into the cloud and the darkness of the evening. When all is bright and sunny we are apt to be filled with the joy of our own emotion, and to speak out of the enthusiasm and exuber- ance of our own spirits ; but when the even- ing of trial and sorrow and misfortune comes upon us, and we feel our own helpless- ness and need, we become conscious of our dependence upon God, and we bow our hearts and open our ears to catch the words that come to us from heaven. Many men have heard messages in the midnight to which they were deaf at high noon. Despair not be- cause it is evening, for the morning cometh! There is room here for an earnest word of warning. Some of you are enjoying the sun- shine of a great and beautiful prosperity. Your health is strong, your business is profit- able, your friends are kind, and heaven seems to smile upon you. I would not say one word to darken or lessen your joy, but I would utter a word of wisdom given me from God's truth and speaking out of our theme at this time, and that is, that for you as well as others the sunshine will not always be for 88 THE WORLD'S CHILDHOOD the best. You should not permit the pros- perity and the happiness which you now en- joy to make you proud, or indifferent to spiritual things, or stubborn in seeking to have your own way. You should remember that all these things come to you from God, and that humility and gratitude are your proper attitude in the sunshine of your life. For you, too, clouds will come. You, too, will know the darkness of tears, the agony of heartache, and the strain of burden-bear- ing. Your life would be barren if this were not so. Do not enjoy your day the less be- cause of this, but seek through humility and gratitude and sympathy and fruitfulness of life to make day a preparation for night and darkness. Both for the light and the shadows of life trustfulness in the divine love is our one source of peace. Some unknown poet brings this out in a song which, characteriz- ing many epochs of Christian experience, finds that trust in Jesus fits one as well as another. He sings : Trust in Jesus, trembling Christian, Strength you need beyond your own; Trust not in your feeble efforts, He can help, and He alone. LIGHT AND SHADOW 89 Trust in Jesus, doubting Christian, Has He ever failed you yet? Is there not for you a promise, *