compel deep breathing. No one can question this. It is even so mentally, morally, spiritually. No one can have respectable thinking-power who does not sometimes wrestle with a great thinker. No one can have moral resoluteness who does not vigorously fight the propensity in himself to loaf and let evil have its way. No one can be spiritually open-eyed who does not steadfastly and continuously put himself in the presence of great objective truths and forces and persons. We are made for activity not idleness. Without work we can never come to our best. In our day there is too much busy idleness. It counts for nothing. Many of us need the lesson of Robert Herrick's novel, The Common Lot. Helen, wise woman, addresses her husband thus: "We are all trying to get out of the ranks, to leave the common work to be done by others, to be leadWe think it a disgrace to stay in the ranks, to work for work's sake, to bear the common lot, which is to live simply and labor. ers. Don't let us struggle that way any longer, dear! It is wrong. It is a curse. It will never give us happiness never!" And she was right. If every man had a wife like that, the country would not need so many insane asylums. But what has this to do with our subject? Where is the application? Here: Every doctrine of the New Testament has to become action of some kind before we can feel it or understand it. In a word, it has to become incarnate. It has to become a living man or woman. Men and women and children are reading you and me every day. What are they reading? Are they perfectly sure that we are loving men and women? sympathetic men and women? considerate men and women? helpful men and women? forgiving men and women? self-controlled men and women? or are they reading in us pride, selfishness, hardness, unbrotherliness, unsisterliness and so on? In a word-are we living the great truth of the Incarnation? And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Gen. 2:8. I can believe that an intelligent child reading this narrative of Eden would be intensely delighted with it. There is something about it which captivates the imagination. It is all vivid and concrete. There is nothing abstract. It is not a record of virtues and qualities, but of man and woman, of animals, birds, trees, rivers, landscape, and so on. It has about it those concrete features which make Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as interesting to a child as to a man. Now it is possible so to interpret Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as to make it ridiculous and even disgusting. You have only to get a dry-as-dust mind, mathematical, logical, literal, matter-of-fact, no poetical quality in it, no imagination, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress would appear silly and absurd. It is a work of genius of a very high order. From a literary point of view, it is remarkable for its crisp, clear Saxon speech. But this dry-as-dust mind sees nothing in it but a silly story of a fool of a man who left his home on a wild-goose chase for an imaginary Utopia. Precisely so is it with these earliest Hebrew narratives when they do not accomplish what they were intended to do- to |