produce it in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it then. Up! Up!" No mere "truth-hunting," no speculation, no high emotions, no dreams, no raptures, no thrills, no beatific vision, no transcendental revelation of the divine, no tasting God, being drunk with God, or absorption in God (as the old mystics variously put it) will avail anything, if they do not mean better character, shown in more active service. They all need active valuable expression. The biblical vision is always an appeal-"What doest thou here, Elijah?" And it calls for an answer, "Here am I; send me." There is no transfiguration scene that allows a tarrying in the mount. This holds, once again, not only for character, but, because of our very constitution, for the highest happiness and influence as well.

It is quite in harmony with the psychological emphasis we are now considering, that perhaps the most notable thing in Carl Hilty's Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life, should be a like insistence upon the need of useful work, and suggestions concerning it. "The whole nature of man," he says, "is created for activity, and Nature revenges herself bitterly on him who would rashly defy this

law." "The happiest workmen are those who can absolutely lose themselves in their work." And so he urges upon young men: "Do your work from a sense of duty, or for love of what you are doing, or for love of certain definite persons; attach yourself to some great interest of human life." And he significantly adds later: "Only one must guard against making of work an idol, instead of serving God through one's work."1

One of the profoundest needs of our nature, thus, is work—work great enough and significant enough to call out our full powers and to absorb us. No man can afford to spare the joy of noble work, or the character and influence that are wrought out in complete self-forgetfulness in work. Surely that man will count most as a leader in a great cause, who shows that he has forgotten himself in the cause. "Get work," the great apostle of work said; "blessed is the man who has found his work, let him ask no other blessedness." "The best way to live well," Granville says, "is to work well."

In the moral development of the race, it should be noticed, the conception of work has greatly changed, until, as Wundt says, Hilty, Happiness. Translated by Francis G. Peabody, pp. 6,9, 13, 92.

"the highest form of human activity is now not simply an agreeable exercise of the bodily and mental powers, but-like the humblest work that ministers to the necessities of life-conscientious fulfilment of duty. But it has not, therefore, lost the pleasurable effect that constituted its old - world attraction. On the contrary, it has communicated something of its own attractiveness to the lower forms of labor, in direct proportion as these have grown to be free manifestations of men's powers, instead of the grudging outcome of fear and coercion." 1 "Man grows with greatness of

his purposes."

The need of work in which one can forget himself, thus, does not mean a dissatisfied romantic longing for some work which we count great, but from which the Divine Providence has shut us out. "Men let slip their own birthright," another has wisely said, "while they are staring enviously at their neighbor's. By a perverse ingenuity they persist in placing their ideal outside their own possibilities." Our work, the great work for us, is exactly that task given us of God -the working out of the full possibilities of our nature and of that situation in

1 Op. cit., p. 208.

which we are placed. There can be no "blue-rose melancholy" here. To no man is given a greater work than simply to do the will of God. To take up our situation and our work as given us of God is to make both great. This is the sphere of the highest heroism. Not the size of the task, but the spirit shown in the task, is the measure of the man. Tolstoi and Stevenson and Kipling, and many another, have given us great revelations of the heroism hidden under common toil. "It was left," Wundt says, "for the present age to spread the glamour of poetry little by little over all departments of life. Modern art has found a moral and æsthetic value in every form of earnest discharge of duty, and, itself the result of a changed view of life, has thus helped on its part to extend and establish the new order."1

This is a natural part of the Christian. possibility. Every spiritual leader must be a seer of the value of the common. We all need the lesson of Robert Herrick's novel, The Common Lot, as he voices it in Helen's words to her husband, who had been intoxicated with the ambition for a false suc

1 Op. cit., p. 213.

cess: "We are all trying to get out of the ranks, to leave the common work to be done by others, to be leaders. We think it a disgrace to stay in the ranks, to work for the work's sake, to bear the common lot, which is to live humbly and labor! Don't let us struggle that way any longer, dear. It is wrong-it is a curse. It will never give us happiness

never."

The common task this is the work which we are to find great enough to lose ourselves in it, and this is our greatest educator under God. Gannett has put this so strongly in his famous sermon, "Blessed be Drudgery," that one is almost forced to quote him. "It is because we have to go, and go, morning after morning, through rain, through shine, through toothache, headache, heartache, to the appointed spot, and do the appointed work; because, and only because, we have to stick to that work through the eight or ten hours, long after rest would be so sweet; because the schoolboy's lesson must be learned at nine o'clock and learned without a slip; because the accounts on the ledger must square to a cent; because the goods must tally exactly with the invoice; because good temper must