calmly drink the precious water to quench our own private thirst. We cannot settle down in security and enjoy in peace the treasures which others have won for us. Noblesse oblige. We are bound as patriotic sons of noble fathers to make their sacrificial gains genuine sacraments of life. We can do this best by risking all that freedom means to us, all that country stands for in our vision, in a brave effort to bring forth and secure for our children a still greater freedom and a still loftier country. Patriotic service is made the truest sacrament when it is devoted to the task of raising patriotism itself to its higher meaning. "The greatest legacy the hero leaves his race is to have been a hero."

Our own religion, born in heroic endeavor and baptized in unstinted suffering, bravely borne, has not seldom been quietly accepted as a way of ease and security. The water brought at such risk has been drunk in shelter and in peace. We have often felt that we were doing enough if we enjoyed our privileges and passed them on, but slightly shrunken, to the next generation. Our ideal has been "preservation." We have aimed to guard and keep, to have and to hold.

It

It will not do. It is a miserable ambition. is time for us to discover the sacramental way of

treating this precious water which our ancestors drew for us. We cannot use it for our private enjoyment, we cannot save it for our children, we cannot treat it as ours, we must pour it out in uncalculating, self-forgetful devotion. It is better that we should lose it than that we should merely succeed in saving it for our own ends. It is too sacred, too red with the life-blood of heroes, to be used in the dull, common way of commonplace men. It must be poured out like the Bethlehem water, like the Bethany perfume, like the life of Christ, poured out without counting the cost or calculating the results, and made a real sacrament of life, a spontaneous bestowal of love for love's sake.

CHAPTER IV

THE THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE

I

THE PLUMB-LINE

ONE of the most vivid pictures in the Old Testament is that which the prophet Amos gives us of the Lord standing in the midst of Israel and holding a plumb-line in his hand.

The popular idea of a prophet conceives him to be a strange-looking man, wild-eyed, highly wrought, given to fanciful visions and, in the main, a mysterious fore-teller of remote events. In real fact he was strikingly unlike that crude sketch. The distinctive prophet was a person of rare sanity and balance, a man who could look straight at facts and with clairvoyant insight could see through them and discover what they involved. He could tell from the lines and curves of movements and events and motives how they would necessarily fulfill themselves as they unfolded with the process of time. In the proper sense of the

word, he was not primarily a fore-teller, he was a revealer of the deeper meaning of present existing conditions. He possessed an unerring sense of the direction in which deeds were carrying on the doer of them, as unerring as the artist's sense of harmony or of beauty. It was this power of moral insight that made the prophets the statesmen of their epochs. They saw and proclaimed the trend and drift of policies. They looked on through and announced in advance where a given course would finally terminate. They were intense patriots, but their supreme loyalty and devotion was to the ideal country, the country as it ought to be, and they judged all policies and expedients in the light of their clear insight.

Amos, a keeper of sheep and a dresser of vineyards, in the country about Tekoa, was the first of the literary prophets and one of the profoundest moral revealers of any age. He was not afraid of "the face of clay." He dared to say before any man, or any group of men, what he actually thought. He understood the movements going on around him as clearly as he understood the habits of his sheep.

"He read each wound, each weakness clear,
He struck his finger on the place;

And said:

Thou ailest here, and here.'"

But the great thing after all which he announces in his plumb-line figure is the fact of an unescapable, inexorable, pervasive law of moral gravitation in the universe. There is no caprice about moral results. You cannot hoodwink the forces which fulfill events. As fire burns your hand, if you play with it carelessly, as gravity will tumble you over the precipice, if you step falsely on the narrow ledge, so, too, the swing of inevitable moral consequences will follow as a doom the deeds of men and of nations. 'By no clever trickery," wrote one of our sound present-day teachers, can profligacy or low living come into possession of the beatitudes." There hangs the plumb-line, dropped as from the hand of God and by it every deed is tested. There is no favoritism, no wheedling, no capricious exception. If the life is unplumb, if the deeds and policies of it swing away from a line of rectitude, nothing can save the structure from collapse-nothing but a rebuilding of it in conformity with the moral laws of gravitation.

This deeper prophecy which lays bare the eternal nature of things and which announces days of judgment as always coming is a characteristic not only of Amos and the other rugged prophets of Israel and Judah, but it is as well an inherent