and claw, to find their daily food. Under her tender care they flourish till their callow days are gone and the time has come when they must fly and forage for themselves on the wide plain below. But every attempt on the part of the mother bird to induce them to leave their nest is unavailing. The cliff is so high, the plain is so far below, the air is so wide and empty, the ledge is so safe, and their wings are not yet tried. You can see the mother eagle thrusting them out from the nest, but they only flutter about here and there and hurry back to the shelter of their cosy home. And then the eagle does a strange and what seems a cruel thing. She deliberately wrecks her nest, tearing it to pieces with her claws and scattering its ruins out in the abyss below till the fledglings are left without a shelter on the lofty height. They are driven off the ledge. But the mother bird hovers over them. She guides them in their flight. By her own example she teaches them to use their wings. If one of them should weary and begin to fall, she swoops beneath it and bears it up on her strong pinions, but when its wings are rested and its fear is gone, she swoops from beneath it again, and tosses it out once more upon the empty air. And thus the young birds are forced to venture into that great space in which for all the future they must live and move and have their being. So they are compelled to use their wings, to develop their strength, to measure their latent energies against the forces of Nature until their pinions are trained, their eye is keen, the beak and claw grow strong, and the stout young eagle goes out to the enjoyment of his native element with the full use of every tested power. It was in the terms of that stern symbolism that Moses viewed the severity and tenderness of the Divine love, and also interpreted the secret of the nation's history. He was looking back, near the close of life, upon the dealings of Jehovah with His chosen people, dealings not always easy to understand. But a gleam of light came through the picture of the eagle and her nest. What if God were the great mother eagle of the race? Indeed, had not Jehovah said, "You know what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you unto Myself." Through the ages, therefore, one increasing purpose runs. It was God, then, who shook them out of their shelters in Egypt. It was the Lord who broke up the stagnation of their life. It was Jehovah who shattered their homes in Goshen, where they were content to remain in debasing slavery. It was God who forced them through the discipline of the wilderness, who sent them out into the venture of the desert, where their powers were awakened, their nationhood trained, where they were fitted for their place in history and prepared to step into the great scheme of redemption to which they were so vitally important in the purposes of God. You will instantly recognize that here is uncovered one of those primitive and fundamental principles lying at the basis of all lifea principle that holds good not only in the natural world, in the training of eagles, but in the supernatural world, in the training of human life. THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE And before I pass on to speak of the one theme that is uppermost in all our minds to-day, let me try your patience a moment while we note the bearing of this principle on the individual. The truth is simply this that every human life, to come to its best and highest, to be fitted for and reach the goal for which it was intended, will find its nest shattered, and must be prepared to confront those upheavals that break up our shelters and cast us out on the wide spaces of the new and the untried. We need not go beyond our own lives to know how prone we all are to settle down into the snug and complacent nest that our circumstances may afford, refusing to face the new and the unknown. Ah, then it is the part of God's wisdom and love to allow the shattering of the nest, that in the consequent discipline our powers may be developed and our faith in Him increased. Such a principle lies at the basis of all intellectual growth. Change is a prime condition of all apprehension and intelligence. The mind dies under stagnation. It only expands as it is compelled to venture into the hitherto unexplored. As James Martineau says: "Dipped for ever in the same scene, plunged in the one color, filled with one monotone, no perception would be startled into birth; the glance of attention sleeps till the moment of transition; it leaps out at the edges of light and darkness, of sound and silence, and in crossing the line first learns the realms on either side." Much more is such an upheaval the condition of all moral and spiritual progress. The most earnest souls have welcomed the day when their nest was shattered, when they were pushed off their comfortable ledge to test their wings in the unknown spaces of life. You recall that prayer of Robert Louis Stevenson, which he calls "The Celestial Surgeon," offered when he feared the loss of the keen appreciation of life's common joys: If I have faltered more or less, |