hearts burn with his presence, which is as indubitable a reality as is the rock-ribbed earth upon which we tread. What he needs is better organs to reveal himself through, richer, truer, holier lives to show his love through, more finely organized personalities for his grace to break through into the world. He cannot do his work without us. He cannot preach without our lips, comfort without our help, heal without our hands, carry the truth without our feet, remove the shadow without our faith and effort. The invisible works through the visible, the unseen and eternal operates through little instruments like us!

III

THE WORLD WE FORM WITHIN

We have had many illustrations in these solemn months of the momentous character of responsible decisions. Many lives hang upon one man's judgment concerning a course of action, and even the fate of a nation is involved in the conclusion to which a single individual arrives. If the responsible man blunders, dire consequences follow; if he is wise, large advantages accrue. National disasters are generally no accidents.

They attach to inadequate planning or to inefficient management of affairs.

What is true of the large outer world is true also inevitably true in the smaller inner world which the schoolmen used to call the microcosm, that is, in the soul of man. Here also a person blunders at his peril. Here, too, consequences attach to decisions and deeds, and the quality of the reaping is determined by the character of the sowing. This is a profound and fundamental feature of Christ's teaching. Always and everywhere in his message the beyond is within, destiny is bound up with inner attitudes, with heart and mind and will. The secret of heaven and hell has not yet been fully explored. We have added little, in these later years of excessive question-asking, to our scanty knowledge of the regions beyond the margin of this life. "We should listen," as a wise man has told us, on our knees to any one who by stricter obedience had brought his thoughts into parallelism with celestial currents and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstances of the newly parted soul."

But while our ignorance about the Great Beyond is still as vast as that of Europe was about the western hemisphere before Columbus sailed

in the Pinta, we have been making steady progress in our explorations of this inner world of ours this microcosm. We know much about that viewless realm we call the soul. And the mor we know about it the more wonderful do the words of Christ appear concerning this strange world within. John was surely right when he said, "He knew what was in man!"

One of the most fruitful of all our modern discoveries is that which for the want of a better term we call the "subconscious," the submerged life below the threshold of consciousness. Some wild things have been said and written about this inside underworld, and the abnormal phenomena of the subliminal have perhaps come too much to the front, but the fact remains that the normal processes of the world below the threshold are as important for the microcosm as the battlefields of Europe are for the great world. It is in here that destiny is settled and the hereafter is built.

We all begin life with certain instinctive functions which are admirably adapted to ends. These instincts carry the tiny individual unerringly forward. They build his future and make his wider career possible. How he got them and came by them he never asks. They are so much a part of himself that he never thinks to investi

gate the mystery. they are the inherited deposit of racial experience and habit, the contribution of practical wisdom which the immemorial past makes to the present. The slow gains of the ages are woven into the fiber of the newcomer and he pushes safely out for his venturous voyage on the accumulated inheritance which was piled up before he arrived.

It turns out, however, that

Not less momentous and important are the accumulations of his own growing emotions and thoughts and decisions. He is forever weaving, for better or for worse, the indestructible stuff of his inner subconscious life, which, at a later time, without any thought about it on his part, will steer and direct him as certainly as his inherited instincts did in the baby stage. Every effort of will, every struggle of attention, every battle with temptation leaves its slender trace in the structure of the subconscious world which he is building, and it will be heard from again in some day of crisis or in some emergency of action. Nothing is lost, nothing is uncounted, nothing is negligible. The tiny becomes big with importance and the indiscernibly little grows into the immense. Every feat of skill is the product of patient practice, every case of unerring judgment has behind it a multitude of careful decisions,

every revelation of grace in manner or disposition is the slow fruit of pains and effort. The saint is no accidental mutation. Moral dexterity of soul and beauty of character are the result of human effort and of coöperation with God, as surely as physical health is the result of correspondence with the conditions of life.

An ancient psalmist prayed for truth in his inward parts. It is a beautiful aspiration. But the way to get truth in the inward parts is to practice truth-telling as an unvarying habit. If one tells the truth and thinks the truth yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, hates falsehood, abhors lying, and sincerely conforms to reality - he need not worry about the outcome. Truth is thus woven into the structure of the soul. The subconscious life is builded toward truth-telling and truth-living, and the inward self inclines to truth as streams flow to the sea. It is no accident that at last when Christ's servants see his face his name shall be on their foreheads. There is no caprice about that; for, after all, the heavenly life is the life formed by the transformation of our poor, feeble, limited, imperfect, sin-defiled selves into something approaching a likeness of that holy, perfect life of his. How it comes we cannot altogether tell. There are mystery and miracle in it. But