you answer, "A little more prudence would have averted this." And again we reply, "Not always, not always." The actual truth is, that in the presence of failure, of disease, of broken friendships, of desolated homes, reason is baffled. No doubt there is a sufficient explanation in the nature of things; but we are not large enough to grasp it. In theory grief looks to us all wrong; and any kind of real loss just so much needless deduction from the sum of our happiness. But to go on with no explanation is wellnigh intolerable; and it is hardly satisfying merely to admit that the whole experience is in a stronger and presumably wiser hand than ours. The sufficient explanation never comes, until we coin our self-denials and sacrifices, our great pains and bitter partings, into better Christian characters, - that is, until we win beauty from ashes. We say Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was. I often ponder these words and the facts behind the words. I say to myself, "Could Jesus have been the master of souls he was and is, without such an experience? Could he have known as he did what was in man? Could he have felt all his tender charity towards human weakness? Could he have given himself up to the truth with such absolute selfsurrender, unless he had fathomed by practical experience the meaning of those mystic words, beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garments of praise for the spirit of heaviness'?" Reverently I answer, "He could not." The Scriptures mean something when they declare that he was made perfect through suffering. And Paul could not have been Paul, or Luther Luther, or Channing Channing, or any great and good man what he is, if there were no burdens to 6 bear, if all the obstacles were swept away, as we sweep the leaves of autumn from our well kept paths. "Beauty for ashes." That is truth in the natural kingdom. All the verdure with which the world clothes itself the upspringing grass, the opening wealth of foliage, the gorgeousness of blossom, the bounty of fruitage comes in some sort from the dust and ashes of each last year's growth. That is truth in the spiritual kingdom. Every leaf which drops from the tree of our prosperity, every bough that moulders, feeds, or should feed, the rising fortunes of the soul, and make the soul a tree of righteousness planted by the Lord. THE TONGS OF PURE GOLD. SEPTEMBER 17, 1893. And the tongs thereof... shall be of pure gold. HESE words occur in the description of the sacred objects contained in the most Holy Place. What thought, if any, do they suggest? This: that there are stages in man's development when he has to worship God through rich material forms. He can do no otherwise. A few, indeed, in every age can find expression for their devout feelings in fitly chosen words. Some even rise higher, and learn that the best way to serve the Eternal Goodness is by a life which to the core is true, pure, and kindly. As for the rest, they require something striking, gorgeous, appealing to eye and ear, and stimulating to the imagination. This clearly was the state of the Jew in the earlier periods of his history. His worship was a spectacle. Every object on which the eye rested gleamed with gold, - the altar, the mercy seat, the table of testimony. The priests were clad in purple and fine linen, and glistened with jewels. Thus all the appointments, though to our taste somewhat barbaric, were as superb and impressive as the means and art of the tribes could make them. We cannot doubt that they were adapted to the time and people, and that they did do something-much-to lift these out of the coarseness and narrowness of their ordinary thought to some dim perception of their relation to Him whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity. The natural, and, as the history of all ancient races shows, the necessary result of what we may call external and sensuous worship is richness, cost. These poor folks might not be able to clothe devotions in appropriate language. Their lives might not be a very good and acceptable offering. At any rate, they would not bring to their God that which cost them nothing. We may go a step farther. Not only did the costliness of the gift in some sort measure the zeal of the givers; but that zeal was most clearly manifested in the things that were humblest, least perceptible, and least dignified in uses. The altar, which stood in the sight of all the people, must be enriched with gold. That of course. The mercy seat,-mystic type of the ever present and ever gracious Lord,-nothing that wealth or art could give could be too much for that. But that the insignificant things, the things which had no majestic part to play, should be of pure gold, this more than the greater things shows how worshipful after their light these people were. As I read the account I am impressed as a friend was when he visited a celebrated cathedral. The massive tower, the tall spire, the graceful pinnacles, the clustered pillars, the lofty arches, the many-hued windows, - all, he said, filled him with admiration. But when, peering in dark nooks and corners, he found lovely carvings, which perhaps not one visitor in ten thousand ever saw, he understood what love, what zeal, what religious fidelity, had been put into the work. We have passed largely out of the era of sensuous worship. Not indeed that external rites and forms have passed away. For so long as man is a complex being, made up of body and soul, of the seen and the unseen, and so long as what we see and hear travels by untraceable roads to the invisible within us,- we cannot altogether dispense with external religion. But more and more we are recognizing that the purpose of all religion worthy the name is to shape the man, to make his real self true, pure, and full of love; that is, to fulfil in the most genuine way the purpose of God in bringing him into being. Admit this. All the same we must have the tongs of pure gold. Or, to state it in the language of prose, we must see to it that the small acts of our life quite as much as the large ones conform to highest spiritual standards. For one obvious reason. The great mass of men have little else to which they can apply moral and spiritual principles, little else by which they can manifest a disposition to serve God and to be faithful to the truth. Constantly recurring acts of toil with no greatness either of dimension or quality, - little obligations, so limited in scope that they neither stir the blood nor inspire the soul, all this levelness, all this monotony, all this cutting up of life into petty fragments, with little or no admixture of heroic or even striking elements, is what makes up the account of myriads of lives. Certainly this is altogether true of the lot of what we call the unfavored classes. Probably to a far greater degree than we appreciate, it is true also of the lot of what we so grandly term the favored classes. Take the day laborers, on the land, in shops and factories. How is their life made up? Of constant acts of toil, stroke upon stroke, week in, week out, illumined now and then by gleams of pleasure, and made sweet and pure by homely |