spirit turn away from the sources to which he so confidently carries it for supply, as the lean, travelworn, thirsty camel turns in gaunt despair from the empty well in the desert. We need the principle of devotion to God and others' good. We need the practice of the two great commandments of love to God and man. We need to be humble, need to be patient, need to be meek, to the Father above, and our brethren below. We need these dispositions, not only as paying our debt to them, though they are our debt, but as the indispensable requisites of our own well-being. Our Saviour said no strange, unnatural thing, when, after long abstinence, to his disciples' request that he would "eat," he answered. that he had meat to eat they knew not of, "to do the will of Him that sent him, and to finish his work." For the deepest need of every one of us will not be supplied, till to omit daily prayers, and daily services of good-will, shall be like taking away our daily food. Service, the communication of benefit as a child of the All-bountiful, is indeed the solemn and uncompromising demand that human nature say what we will of that nature, disparage it as we may makes of itself; is what, whenever it truly knows itself, it requires itself to do. Yea

"The poorest poor

Long for some moments in a weary life,

When they can know and feel that they have been

Themselves the fathers and the dealers-out

Of some small blessings; have been kind to such
As needed kindness, for this single cause,

That we have all of us one human heart!"

It is said that the priest and familiar counsellor of

William the Conqueror, when asked by his master respecting the rewards he would have for his advice, in turn asked him, "Dost thou not love fame for the sake of fame?" And the baron replied, "Yes." Then, turning to the minstrel, he asked, "Dost thou not love song for the sake of song ?" And he replied, "Yes." "Wonder not, then," proceeded the religious scholar, "that the student loves knowledge for the sake of knowledge." And not till we love truth and goodness for the sake of truth and goodness, not till we hold them as the breath of our life, live in them as the inspirations of our soul, and pursue them as the very terms of our spiritual existence, shall the great need of our nature be appeased; all its faculties, which God gave and Christ came to satisfy, opened; and our true place vindicated on the scale of being. But then indeed we shall have learned, that the needy are not one particular class, but the whole of God's family; and we shall satisfy the need of the poor and unfortunate, and our own need, by the same generosity of word and act.

274

DISCOURSE XXIV.

OBJECT OF HUMAN LIFE.

Eccles. vi. 12. FOR WHO KNOWETH WHAT IS GOOD FOR MAN IN THIS LIFE?

WHEREFORE am I alive? What is the object or the use of life? This is the problem of our text, and of the whole book in which the text is found. Certainly it is the most interesting of problems, and one that must have occurred to every serious mind. What is the use, the meaning of my life? for what purpose was it given? to what end shall it aim? I can trace uses, adaptations, in other things. One part of the world is suited to another, and the whole world is made to correspond to my senses and organs; but for what were my senses and organs themselves, all my powers of body and mind, bestowed? Is there, above the little tasks and tradings in which I am occupied, any single presiding object, or only a swift succession and blind complication of small, shifting aims and designs? Is life an instrument ministering to some solid purpose, or a fleeting phantasmagoria, that leaves no lasting result? Such, substantially, was the inquiry of the preacher three thousand years

ago, and which demands an answer still from every new generation and living man.

It would seem that the author of the book of Ecclesiastes entertained this inquiry, not so much theoretically as in the way of experiment, making various actual trials for its solution upon his own body and soul. His first essay or exploration is "to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven." Speculative knowledge, intellectual curiosity, storing the mind with all various information, this is his first experiment; and he succeeds in surpassing all others in this kind of enterprise. But he does not seem to himself, after all, thus to have adequately solved his problem. There are many things he perceives done under the sun which it is vanity and vexation of spirit to study, and madness and folly to know. There are crooked things in the world which the student cannot straighten, and "wanting" things which he cannot number. With the width of his survey is the growth of his perplexity. Grief and sorrow come in with the increase of wisdom, and he is forced to conclude that to be a knower and a thinker is not the satisfying end of human life.

The next thing he subjects to the test, tries in the court of his own experience, is pleasure. He proves his heart with mirth and laughter, with wine and music, with houses and vineyards, with gardens and orchards, with silver and gold, with servants and maidens, with men-singers and women-singers, and more things beside than I can now mention. He evidently is one that does nothing by halves; so he

plunges into the stream of outward display and sensual indulgence, keeps not his eyes from whatever they desire, withholds not his heart from any joy. Yet, after tasting the depths of this seductive stream, and having drunk the cup of pleasure to the dregs, with renewed bitterness from the tribunal of his soul, he pronounces upon this trial the sentence of failure and disappointment greater even than in his first experiment.

For awhile he seems now to come to a stand, to despair in his search, and to fancy that there is no one great object of human labor, but the best thing is simply to eat and drink from day to day, and enjoy all he can as he goes along, bearing with what philosophy is at his command the inevitable travail and unrest of his days. He appears even to relapse into fatalism; becomes a stoic before the school of stoics arose; says there is a time appointed for every thing, which man cannot alter or so much as comprehend, but only submit to and endure. But the activity of his own will soon carries him out of this stagnant pool of a dead necessity, to make another adventure for the supreme good, the grand object of existence on earth. Having tried knowledge, the exercise of the mind, and tried pleasure, the gratification of the senses, he tries the moral quality of things, as fitted to the sense of right and justice in his own soul. But lo! here, too, he is balked with a sorer baffling than ever before. For he sees wickedness in the place of judgment, and iniquity in the place of righteousness; all things happening alike to all, or the just perishing and the wicked prospering, and death