given to us all to start with; our problem is somehow out of existence to make life. Existence is an entrustment; life is an achievement. Now all human experience is unanimous that real life can come only when a worthy purpose runs down through the center of existence, to give it meaning. This is plain when one tests its truth by the lives of the greatest men. As on raised letters, so on the outstanding characters of history even blind folk can read the truth that a worthy purpose is essential to abundant life. Amid infinite variety in details one attribute is always present when a great man comes: he has centered his existence around some aim concerning which he feels like Paul, "This one thing I do." The one intolerable life from which all high-minded men must shrink, as Matthew Arnold says his father shrank from it, is a frittered existence: "Not without aim to go round Nor is this attitude the peculiarity of the most capacious souls alone. We all may have it. The Mississippi River makes the central plains of the United States a rich and fruitful place. From the Rockies to the Gulf, calling in tributaries from every side, it has organized the life of a continent. What, then, has made the beauty and productiveness of some small valley, whose woods and farms, though quite unheralded, are a benediction to the few who know them? There, too, a stream with tributary rivulets has organized and fructified the valley's life. So a central, serviceable purpose is the secret of abundant living, whether in continental men or in obscure and lowly folk. No man lives at all until he lives for something great. To many, such a purposeful and dedicated life seems stern, forbidding. We want pleasure: "the loose beads with no straight string running through." We cannot wake and sleep and spend the hours between, we say, concentered on a serious aim. But a serviceable purpose does not thus somberly becloud life and exclude its free-hearted happiness. It rather is the one element in life that can put foundation under happiness. When one goes from New York to San Francisco he does not tensely sit through the week, saying with deliberate insistence, I must go to San Francisco. His purpose to reach his destination does not exhaust his thought. He thinks of a thousand other things; his delight in friendship and scenery upon the way is unaffected and spontaneous; no single happy or interesting experience need he miss. But all the same his major purpose controls his action; nothing is allowed to keep him from going on to San Francisco; and when he reaches his destination all that has happened on the way— the pleasant fellowships, the gorgeous scenery—has been but incidental to his dominant desire which brought him to his journey's end. So whatever may be his special calling, through a real Christian's life runs a controlling purpose to be of use. It does not substitute itself for other things; it permeates everything. Its subtle secret influence flows through all the rest. It shuts out no wholesome, happy experience of good report. Rather it includes them all, and irradiates them with significance and worth. Such a man alone is truly happy, for pleasure never lasts when it is made the main business of life. It has abiding quality only when it is founded upon a worthy purpose. As a life that is all vacation knows no vacation, since the very essence of a holiday lies in having hard work upon all sides of it, so a life that is all pleasure-seeking knows no pleasure. For the essence of all abiding pleasure is to be mainly busy about some serviceable task. Too long have the pallid and tubercular figures of saints in medieval cathedrals symbolized the meaning of Christian life! Consider rather a man like Henry Drummond. Few men have been more mastered by a central purpose. He lived to bring men into fellowship with Jesus Christ. The influence of his preaching and his personal interviews upon the student life of Scotland abides long after he has gone. His biographer says that writing the story of his life is "like writing the record of a fragrance." Yet as to the glow and buoyancy of his daily life, let a friend testify: "He fished, he shot, he skated as few can, he played cricket; he would go any distance to see a fire or a football match. He had a new story, a new puzzle, or a new joke every time he met you. Was it on the street? He drew you to watch two message boys meet, grin, knock each other's hats off, lay down their baskets and enjoy a friendly chaffer of marbles. Was it on the train? He had dredged from the bookstall every paper and magazine that was new to him. . . . If it was a rainy afternoon in a country house, he described a new game, and in five minutes everybody was playing it. If it was a children's party, they clamored for his sleight of hand. The name he went by among younger men was The Prince." As brook flows down from the high hills sparkling in the sunlight, gathering itself in friendly pools, playing among the shallows near the shore, or running out into deep places where all is cool and still, so spirits like Drummond's flow among men. But whether they seem serious or happy they are mastered by one thing: the gravitation from the high hills whence they came. Their flow is all one way: a testimony to the fullness and beauty of Christian life and to the sufficiency of the Master from whom it comes. Once more, therefore, losing the smaller self in a larger self, organized around a serious desire to serve mankind, is selfrenunciation indeed, but it is self-fulfilment, too. The man who achieves it possesses an expansive personality which is the secret of abiding joy. Even when disasters fall, he is not undone as selfish men must be, for his smallest self is not the whole of himself, and what happens to his smallest self leaves still the larger areas of his life untouched. Like soldiers who fall wounded upon the battlefield, he himself may suffer, but still rejoice exceedingly to see his cause advanced. Paradoxical as it may seem, therefore, the Master was speaking from a rich and real experience of fact when he said, "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister, and whosoever will be chief among you let him be your servant." To be sure, the natural grain of the human wood runs another way altogether. Whosoever would be great among you, let him conquer or rule or gain wealth; let him be served by multitudes of slaves, by millions of subjects, by the labor of the poor-such is the idea which underlies the larger part of human history. The Master turned topsy-turvy this inveterate conviction that a man's glory consists in service received. He substituted in its place the amazing proposition that man's glory consists in the extent and quality and unselfishness of service rendered. And none who ever dared to live upon the Master's principle has denied its truth. The way of the Cross is the way of overflowing life. "He that will take that crabbit tree, and will carry it cannily," said Samuel Rutherford, "will yet find it to be such a burden as wings are to a bird and sails to a boat." CHAPTER V Self-Denial DAILY READINGS Our study during the last week centered about the Master's principle that in the expenditure of life lies the saving of it. There are times, however, when this truth is anything but obvious. A mountain's summit may glisten in the sunlight, while its lower altitudes are all beclouded. So this ideal of finding life through losing it may shine in its loftiest exhibitions, as in the character of Christ, while, on our common levels, it is obscure and difficult of access. Self-denial at times seems not to be glorious and life-giving at all. We shall try, this week, to deal with the meaning of such selfdenial. Let us in our daily readings deal with the fact of it. Fifth Week, First Day And if thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body go into hell.-Matt. 5: 29, 30. One elemental form of self-denial, demanded by a life of Christian service, is the resolute rejection of positive evils that mar character and therefore hurt usefulness. "There never was a bad man," said Edmund Burke, "that had ability for good service." How much this kind of self-denial costs, anyone who has ever seriously tried it knows. We must continually resist the down-drag of popular habits, to the practice of which the majority of folk consent. For the majority, however we must commit to it the arbitrament of political affairs, is almost sure to be wrong about any matter that requires fine discrimination. Put to popular vote the preference between ragtime and Chopin's nocturnes, the cinema and Shakespeare, cheap love-stories and the English classics, and is there any question what the majority would decide? So to be a good Christian is an achievement, won only by resistance to the pull of popular tastes and common practices. It costs to be among those whose characters lift up against the gravitation of commonly accepted evil. “The world is upheld," said Emerson, "by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome." My Father, may the world not mould me today, but may I be so strong as to help to mould the world! Amen.-John Henry Jowett. Fifth Week, Second Day The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in the field; which a man found, and hid; and in his joy he goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls: and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it.-Matt. 13: 44-46. Christian service plainly demands this second form of selfdenial: the abandonment of scattered loyalty for a life of dominant interest in the Kingdom of God on earth. To be a Christian is not negative absence of outbreaking sin, as some seem to suppose. "I have known men," said Henry Ward Beecher, "who thought the object of conversion was to clean them, as a garment is cleaned, and that when they were converted they were to be hung up in the Lord's wardrobe, the door of which was to be shut so that no dust could get at them. A coat that is not used the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted-the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that." Rather, a Christian life is one of positive, single-hearted devotion to the welfare of man, to the service of the lowliest and lost, to the support of all good causes, to the hope of the Kingdom. But a life so centrally dedicated costs its price. Sometimes a man, as Jesus said, must give up for it all that he has. Under any circumstances, a life that cares, suffers. So when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, a great New Englander wrote: "There is infamy in the air. I have a new experience. I wake in the morning with a painful sensation, which I carry about all day, and which, when traced home, is the odious remembrance of the |