perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect shall we have the peace of rest, and the work that shall bring no perplexity, no weariness, no misgivings, but infinite effectiveness, progressiveness, and power forever and forever. In the peace of the journey which despises the sluggish peace which has not yet set out, in the peace of the journey which expects the peace of the end, may we go on in these days, while God keeps us living in this world, to the richer world that is to come!

NOT BEING MIXED WITH FAITH.

HEB. iv. 2.

THERE is always a pathetic interest, made up of sadness and hope together, in the sight of any good thing which fails of power and of its fullest life because it is a fragment, and does not meet the other part which is needed to complete the whole. A seed that lies upon the rock, and finds no ground; an instrument that stands complete in all its mechanism, but with no player's hand to call its music forth; a man who might do brave and useful things under the summons of a friend's enthusiasm, but goes throu h life alone-a nature with fine and noble qualities that need the complement of other qualities which the man lacks to make a fruitful life; a community rich in certain elements of character-as, for instance, energy, hopefulness, self-confidence, but wanting just that profound conscientiousness, that scrupulous integrity which should be the rudder to those broad and eager sails; a church devout without thoughtfulness, or liberal without deep convictions;-where would the long list of illustrations end? Everywhere the most pathetic sights are these in which

possibility and failure meet. Indeed, herein lies the general pathos which belongs to the great human history as a whole and to each man's single life.

Not with the quiet satisfaction with which we look at inanimate nature or at the brutes, not with the sublime delight with which we think of God, can our thoughts rest on man, the meeting-place of such evident power and such no less evident deficiency. The sadness does not disappear, but rather increases, as we lift up our eyes to the men who must be held to have succeeded best. From their heights of success only a new range of unfulfilled possibility is opened. And the hope never wholly dies out even for those who fail the worst -we follow them to their graves, almost looking to see them start from the dead and do the thing which they have always been upon the brink of doing. We dare to dream for them of another life, when these powers which the man has carried so long powerless shall be mixed with the capacity or the motive which they have missed, and the life that never has been lived shall be at last begun.

One of these failures is described in the words of Scripture in the declaration: "The word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it". Truth fails because it does not meet what the Scripture calls faith. This is evidently something more than mere assent, something more than simple acknowledgment that the

truth is true. The essential relations between truth and the nature of man are evidently comprehended in their whole completeness. All that the hearer might have done to truth, all the welcome that he might have extended, all the cordial and manifold relationship into which he might have entered with the word that was preached unto him—all this is in the writer's mind. All this is summed up in the faith which the truth has not found. Faith is simply the full welcome which the human soul can give to anything with which it has essential and natural relationship. It will vary for everything according to that thing's nature, as the hand will shape itself differently according to the different shapes of things it has to grasp. Faith is simply the soul's grasp a larger or a smaller act according to the largeness or smallness of the object grasped of one size for a fact, of another for a friend, or another for a principle; but always the soul's grasp, the entrance of the soul into its true and healthy relationship to the object which is offered to it. It is in the fact that there are such essential relationships between man and the things which fill the world about him that the value and beauty of his existence lies. The application of any object to its faculty, the opening of the faculty to its object that is what makes the richness of all life. In the open faculty the object finds its true mixture, and its highest life begins. You hold a bit of sweet food to the eye, and it finds

no welcome there. It is not "mixed with faith". Only when it touches the tongue it opens its possibilities, and becomes first pleasure and then nourishment. You play sweet music to the taste, and the taste cannot hear it. It makes no entrance. It is not mixed with faith; for faith is welcome, the cordial acceptance of any presence into the inmost chambers of our human nature where that particular presence has a right to go.

How easy it is to carry this up from the physical structure to much higher things. You bring a true rich friend, and set him before a sordid man -a man of selfish ambitions-and how powerless he is! He makes no entrance. He is not mixed with faith. You take a great motive, one that has rung like a bugle in the ears of the noblest men that have ever lived, and you make it sound in the ears of a dull boy who has no ambition to be noble; and why is it that it falls dead? Merely because it is "not mixed with faith ". It finds no answering manhood in this boy with which it may unite and make a noble man. ready for truth meet like They know each other. parable of the sower.

Truth and a soul that is the fuel and the flame. It is only the Lord's The good seed finds the

ground ready, and out of their quick union comes. the plant that, by-and-by, crowns itself with the flower and the fruit. The seed upon the stony ground comes to nothing because it "is not mixed with faith".