right. When the madness of men passes into sincerity, there is nothing left the gods but to destroy them. That is the most fearful consequence of an unholy love, that we are transformed into it.

This man is resolved to find faults in his neighbor. He will find what he seeks; we all do. He will note and remember only his faults, which for a time are balanced by a certain amount of good which he believes his neighbor possesses; but by and by he gets to believe in the faults only, and then he can see no good; then every man who knows any evil of the neighbor will add it to his stock of evidence, and at last he is completely given over to believe a lie. Or one thinks meanly of mankind; he notes evidence of human folly; others will fill his ears and eyes with the same facts and illustrations, and at last he believes meanly of man, and in his own person adds another illustration of it.

And then, advancing but a step further, the same law which makes the body, and the society, and the circumstances of a man like his heart-thought, will give its own hue to all the fair creation, and all things are repetitions of this inner madness.

But now see how beautiful is the help of this law to one who loves God and truth, and who strives to fix the heart upon holiness. The body becomes beautiful by that love. It shows itself in all that pertains to the personal life. The eye, the voice, the lips, the emotions, all have something about them which seems to say the inner life is holy. Underneath all external gayety or frivolity you see the same clear light; omissions of duty or occasional transgressions are at once repudiated by the nobler meaning of the whole body, and you feel that the heart is essentially true to a

lofty purpose. No deformity or lack of culture can conceal the essential sweetness and charm of the spirit. Then how quickly this love of the heart becomes woven into a beautiful fortune of environments.

Those who have a like love will find out such a one, and come to him and expect him to show his fairest side, and be disappointed if he does not. Some one said to Emerson, "When you enter the room, I straightway think how I shall make humanity appear beautiful to you." How can such help but think nobly of man? All that is hopeful even in sinful souls comes out to sun itself in their presence. Fair hopes and good resolves and brighter aspirations start up at their approach as flowers in the footsteps of Spring. If I heard of a marked instance of real worth under a rough garb of external manners and uncouth ways, I would take pains to tell it to Freeman Clarke, because I know he loves to hope noble things of rough and even of wicked men. Hundreds would do the same. Thus all things become tributary to this grand love of the heart. It gets embodied in the lives of others, and it becomes a heavenly atmosphere in which heavenly things are luminous, and attract the eye and encourage the heart. I was once reading the story of the transfiguration to a dying girl; she said in a bright, penetrating way, "How strange! The disciples must have dreamed it; for it says they were asleep!" I wrote at once to Dr. Furness, and gave him an account of it, because I knew that such was his theory, and thought that this would confirm his own intuition. And so it proved. Starr King loved, passionately loved, the White Hills. I heard his friends propose to send them on canvas to him in his distant home-a gift of friendship and a tribute also to a true lover of God; so that this joy of his

heart might also become a part of the outward symbols of this inner blessedness, and keep it ever alive. I name these instances only to show how sure is the working of this law, by which a man becomes more and more like the thought of his heart.

And how earnestly does every view of the case plead with us to love the highest and best-God with all our hearts, and our neighbor as ourselves. How small do other successes appear beside this of a pure heart which sees God? How easily we may see all else fade and die if we have found that wonderful charnı which calls into being an environment of pure, loving, hopeful souls, and makes heaven wherever it goes. If there is any beauty in life, such will find it. If there is any goodness, such will meet it. If there is any truth, such will possess it. They may pass through many changes; what seems to them rock to-day may prove sand to-morrow; but they will grow through all changes into nearer likeness to that which they seek.

O friends! choose ye this day, I entreat you, that thought of the heart into which you are willing to grow; which you would wear on your foreheads; which you would write in your friendships; which you would hope and believe of man; which you would exalt to the infinite and call your Father in heaven; yea, which you would see rise into a mansion not built with hands, eternal in the heavens, the everlasting home of your souls.

IV.

THE PROMISES OF GOD.

"It was impossible for God to lie."-HEB. 6: 18.

THIS text fixes a limit to the activities of God. The schoolmen said that the Deity could do all things. This man says that there is at least one thing that even he can not do―he can not lie. It means simply that God can not be and not be at the same time. An infinite being who could lie would not be God; for lying implies contradiction, and that implies finiteness. This text is important, because it is a bold judgment of a finite being passed upon an infinite being. Think how bold it was. Think what is implied in such a judgment. How could this man know what God can not do? He had not considered the infinite attributes; he did not know from personal experiment what the divine being is capable of; he had not entered into the treasury of his thought, nor measured all his ways. He had no system of empiricism which piled fact upon fact until he could climb upon it to the height of the possibilities of God. How then could he pronounce this universal negative and fix this positive limit to infinite power?

He had just one standard of judgment, and that belonged to him as a man, and not as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews: it was the witness of God in every heart; the conviction born in men that God is all perfection, and

that perfection is consistent with itself; that all diversity resulting from this consistency has its unity, all discord its harmony, all falsehood its truth, and all wrong its right. This Hebrew writer, looking out upon the creation through windows which the Creator had opened in his soul, saw that the true object of this inner religious want could not lie; he knew that the best hopes of pure souls must in some deep way run side by side with the whole plan of creation.

Many things are implied in this judgment which have important bearings upon our life-problem. It implies, first of all, the capacity in man to judge not only of Bible, and creed, and church, and ritual, but of God. It implies a capacity of submitting all things to the test of this inner witness. It warrants us in saying that the book, the creed, the church, the form that attributes to God what is contradictory, discordant, untrue to the human ideal, is a lie.

It implies, further, that the inner life is the great reality, and by it the reality of all other things must be tested; that nothing can be so certain to a man as his inner life of emotion, thought, resolution, intuition. That which is external to himself becomes reality to him only as it harmonizes with that which is internal. It is not matter which gives reality to spirit, not the material object which verifies the spiritual subject, but the spirit-or the life of man-goes on affirming forever that the laws which are stamped on the soul are laws which exist everywhere, and if any thing exists by other laws than these, it can not be known by man. The inner craving is the only door which opens outward upon the object of its hunger.

It is true that man is weak and feeble, yet in all his weakness he will affirm that what is not beautiful to him is