in the mountain apart, alone. That is the place of worship in a world of work. It is not a refuge from duty, or a shirking of it; it is the renewal of power to meet one's duty and do it. The work of life is not to be well done with a hot, feverish, overwhelmed, and burdened mind; it is to be well done with a mind calmed and fortified by moments of withdrawal; and it is to be best done by one who from time to time pulls himself up in his eager life and permits God to speak to his soul.

And so from week to week, in the midst of this strenuous modern world, we come here, not to interrupt life, but to quiet and enrich and enlarge life. We do not expect on these afternoons great intellectual discussions or instructions; we come to restore the balance of life and to permit the messages of God, which are so often unheard in the whirlwind and the fire of daily activity, to be heard in the still small voice of meditation. We turn to our hurrying life, and how dry and empty and shallow it sometimes looks, as though it were hardly worth all its effort and its pain. It is like a little stream that has emptied itself into the ebbing ocean, until all that is

things that were looked at in a mirror; and the fact that no one could see these things just as they were was precisely what made them such excellent matter for debate. As one of our own preachers once said of such disputes: "I do not know what conclusions they arrived at, nor do I think that it is of any particular consequence whether they arrived at any conclusion. The most desirable thing was that they should come to an end." 1

And yet, as the parable of the mirror goes on to teach, it does not follow that what we thus imperfectly see is false. Because light comes indirectly it is not necessarily deceptive or untrustworthy. What we see in a mirror may be a partial reflection of perfect truth. Sometimes, indeed, one can see truth best in its reflection. There are some things that dazzle when they are looked at, and which have to be seen in a mirror. When, in our observatory, the astronomer wants to study a star, he does not look at the star, but at the reflection of the star in a mirror; and yet he measures and analyzes the star with greater confidence and accuracy than if he observed

1 Henry Van Dyke, Straight Sermons, p. 229.

left of the fresh current is its dry, narrow, unclean bed, a thing on which one does not care to look. And then, by some one of the myriad influences of the life of God, and perhaps, by the grace of God, through some word or thought that shall meet one in one of these half hours of quiet worship, -somehow, mysteriously, quietly, the flood-tide of the Spirit flows in again upon the parched and empty life and fills it with freshness and health once more; and the stream finds itself broad and deep again, and flows calmly out to meet that tidal sea.

8

II

THE PARABLE OF THE MIRROR

Now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face.— I Cor. xiii. 12.

HE contrast is between the imperfect and the perfect life; between knowledge as we now receive it and knowledge as we may hope to receive it in the world of heaven. The difference, the

Apostle says, is like the difference between looking at things reflected in a mirror and looking at things straight in the face. In this world our knowledge must be indirect, reflected, as the Revised Version says, in a mirror, or, as the marginal reading gives it, "in a riddle." In the perfect life we shall see directly, immediately, face to face. Here, we are like people who are working with the light behind them, where indeed it is better so to work; and there, we shall, as it were, come out of this world of reflection, as if outside our door, into the fulness of the direct sunshine, and receive its visitation face to face. Such is the parable of the mirror.