sing of unhappy kings and weeping queens long enough to write in his will, "the last notes Shakespeare struck within the hearing of this world":"I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." When Shakespeare gives his soul back to God, stained through and through by the Saviourhood of Jesus Christ, is it not time for all souls to surrender to the outstretched arms of Heaven's pitying mercy and whitening grace, as they voice Augustine's souldeep lament: "Too late I loved Thee, O Thou Beauty of Ancient Days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee?" For it is incontestably true that—

"The man who hearkens all day long
To the sea's cosmic-thoughted song

Comes with purged ears to lesser speech,
And something of the skyey reach
Greatens the gaze that feeds on space;
The starlight writes upon his face
That bathes in starlight, and the morn
Chrisms with dew, when day is born,
The eyes that drink the holy light
Welling from the deep springs of night."

III

When our Saviour said, "I am the light of the world," He intimated the inexhaustibleness of His nature and resources. Considering the amazing

abundance of light, thinkers ask: Where does the sun get its vast supplies of fuel? What stokes the fires of the sun? The answer now accepted is that given by Helmholtz. He says that the sun's bulk is gradually contracting, the energy thus caused being turned into heat. It is estimated that an annual contraction of 150 feet of the sun's radius would produce its enormous volume of heat and light. But such contraction would not be noticeable by the greatest telescopes for 10,000 years; and then this contraction would have to continue for ten million years more before the sun would be too dead to sustain life throughout its solar empire. Professor Simon Newcomb estimated that the heat thrown off by the sun every hour is equal to the burning of a quantity of coal that would cover the sun's entire surface to a depth of twenty feet.

Now, this boundlessness of sun-energy is a noble symbol, surely, of Christ's inexhaustibleness. The physical sun may ultimately fail, indeed it is doomed to extinction; but the Light of the World simply cannot fail; neither cosmic winds nor infernal cyclones can quench His light, because His is the vitality of Godhead, the genius of Eternity. Can the unbeginning God have an ending? Having power to lay down His life, He had power to take it again. Forever abroad in the worlds and the centuries, He goes conqueringly on from epoch to epoch. The planets may get untuned, but He remains King of Death and Hades, Alpha and Omega,

undestroyed because indestructible, undying because deathless.

Some very practical thoughts arise out of this great truth of Christ's unfailingness. One is this: The height of life to which earth-pilgrims of ancient and modern years have attained in the Land that has no need of sun or moon. "At what price," Socrates asked of his judges, who had condemned him to death, “would you not estimate a conference with Orpheus and Musæus, Hesiod and Homer? I indeed should be willing to die again, if this should be true." Well, it must be true, even though to our thing-cursed era, groaning under its weight of iron and stone and stubble, such a thought may be deemed impractical and quite out of place. Yet it is hard to believe that any normal soul can repress a thrill of joy as he thinks of the spiritual stature of the noble dead who have for ages been growing more and more alive. How intensely alive they must be today! Think of that trinity of the old dispensation-Moses, Elijah, and Elisha. Two of them were glad to vacate Heaven long enough to meet with Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration. Unto what majestic proportions of manhood all must have attained under the tutelage of the Master in Glory! Dante said that the dying Stephen "made his eyes gates to behold the skies." If under that deadly rain of stones, Stephen's face took on an angelic brightness, how could average mortals dare to look at that face, now that it has been gazing

so long into the fountains of beauty flowing from the Christ? Stephen's face must be like a ruby smitten by the sun, or, as the old song suggests, there must be more than a garden in his face; something of the ultimate beauty, born of the very life of God, must have passed into his countenance. Ruskin called Dante the central man of all the world; and Carlyle held that " Dante is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep." But there are those who think that Dante's world-greatness is due neither to his worldwideness nor to his world-deepness, but to his heaven-highness. A kind of supernatural loftiness, a strain of celestial sublimity, characterizes this man who gave voice to ten dumb centuries. But do you not think that that august man has grown tremendously during his six hundred years' absence from the earth? Who shall say what grander dimensions are his, with his nearer, clearer vision of that Love which moves "the sun in Heaven and all the stars?"

A further consideration is the encouragement which Christ's fathomless Saviourhood gives to men and women now on the earth, right here in the thick of things, when the planet seems staggering under its weight of woe and sin and injustice. Emerson once said that the man never lived who could feed us ever. And he is grandly right-no mere man can be the Bread of Life to the souls of Some of these ages, those belated thinkers,

men.

professing to be advanced, will wake up to the fact that they are some centuries behind the times. We are only truly up with the times as we are livingly in with the eternities. No-a thousand times nono mere man can feed us; but God manifest in the flesh; God strengthening our weakness; God stooping to our lowliness and lifting us to the high, still places in Christ-such a God verily feeds all who will have His food. Imparting to blind mortal eyes the loveliness that is immortal, He makes life suddenly sweet by opening it to His unsearchable riches. In His presence hunger and thirst vanish utterly away, save as they make the soul more capacious for His food and drink. Giving to men a distinct heavenliness of temper, He makes them assuredly aware that, however dark the night, the shadowdraped hills but conceal a brighter dawn. "I am the light of the world"—the light of all worlds; the light that never goes out, but burns glowingly on and on, until Heaven's light and earth's darkness shall kiss each other in the white radiance of Eternity. What a glorious commentary on this passage is Mrs. Alice Meynell's poem, "Christ in the Universe," than which Albert Cock, in the British Review, said a greater poem had not been written in the last one hundred years:

"With the ambiguous earth

His dealings have been told us; these abide;
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the Young Man crucified.