For all that, it has risen to practical life and has struggled ever for an outward expression. Feeling that the empire of God is over all of life, man must submit his mind to the divine sway. Hence it follows that the man who is intellectually lazy, as well as the man who is intellectually dishonest, is a sinner. This statement may shock those who have a surplus of caution; but these may reassure themselves with the conviction that any theory may be fearlessly accepted if it brings man face to face with God at any point of man's total life. The religious denominations that have evaded their responsibility for education have been the fading and dwindling forces of God's work. The God of wisdom is evermore against the promoters of ignorance. Given the right of way, the Bible is the sure and steadfast friend of a proper education. By the examples of its great characters and its Supreme Figure, and by the assertion of its inclusive theory of responsibility and consecration it has opened the doors of countless schools and has bidden the children of men to enter the portals of learning with the assurance that all truth is of God.

Santhighen
KHughes.

ART. VIII.-SOME PRESENT-DAY OPPORTUNITIES

ONE of the chiefest of present-day opportunities is the opportunity of the ordinary, the regular, and the non-spectacular. A tendency of our time is in the direction of the abnormal and the showy. We are prone to deal with masses and great combinations. The unusual and the extraordinary capture the imagination. In our special exploiting of the unusual, in church work, we have too much depreciated the ordinary and the regular. Long since it has been shown that the divine method in nature is not cataclysmic, or by way of spectacular catastrophe. Now and then, it is true, Vesuvius belches forth and changes the landscape, once in centuries some unusual faulting process destroys a noble city, but the general order of land and sea sculpture is by the quiet and unnoticed method of rain and river, wind and weather. The Gorge of Niagara, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Garden of the Gods, have been worn out by the slow process of the centuries, and the mighty monuments of the natural world are the outcome of the regular and ordinary laws of cosmic development. The same is true in the moral and spiritual realm. Arthur's Knights wandered far afield to find the Holy Grail, but Arthur's words to them as they started were surely true:

"Yet-for ye know the cries of all my realm

Pass through this hall-how often, O my Knights,
Your places being vacant at my side,

This chance of noble deeds will come and go
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires
Lost in the quagmire! Many of you, yea, most,
Return no more."

In the over-emphasis of revival and reformatory methods we have somewhat forgotten or overlooked the equally important work of Christian nurture and character formation. A crying defect of modern journalism-secular and sacred-is the publicity of the abnormal and extraordinary, the craze for the striking and

bizarre. One begins to long for a type of writing that evinces ability to go beneath the surface and that will lay hold of the heart and substance of things. It is eternally true that the things that are seen, that can be estimated, numbered and labeled, are transitory and vanishing; the things that are not seen, that must be discovered, if at all, through clearness and keenness of spiritual vision, these things are eternal. We are frequently told in these days, and told reproachfully, that the greatest growth of the church is coming from the Sunday schools, as if that were an evidence of spiritual feebleness. When, I ask, since the organization of Sunday schools, was it otherwise? The church has always received its largest accessions from the ranks of childhood and early youth. The statistics of religious experience amply verify this statement. It is perfectly safe to say that four fifths of the spiritual leaders of the ages were moved Godward in childhood. In a recent speech Dr. Cadman said, "Every dollar spent in formation of character equals one hundred dollars spent in reformation." And he added that if he "had to make choice between winning to Christ one thousand children, or one thousand men at forty, he would unhesitatingly take the children." And yet we still find men characterizing their accessions to the church in the phrase "mostly adults," or, mostly "heads of families," as if that were something specially praiseworthy, and as if the bringing of children into the service of the church were a matter of minor importance. It is a well-attested fact that in rescue work the great hope is with men and women who in childhood have had religious training in home or Sunday school. If one has been impressed in childhood with spiritual things then, though he fall, there is chance of his uprising. Brierley in one of his essays points to the frequent recurrence in art galleries of Mother and Child, and then adds, "Genius, with its fine intuition, offers us here the highest religion as centered in a birth. It is strange that, with such an object lesson before us, the world, and especially the religious world, should have failed so signally in recognizing the spiritual significance of childhood." When Guthrie was dying he asked the watchers to "sing a bairn's hymn." It is to the child in us that religion must appeal. Jesus's estimate of childhood

goes to the heart of the whole matter. And Wordsworth catches the truth when he sings:

"Not in entire forgetfulness

And not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

Now I have emphasized this opportunity of Christian nurture, of the training and developing of character, through the ordinary, everyday, unheralded methods of the church, not because I desire to decry true revivals, but because I believe this phase of our work is too largely neglected, or at least, if not neglected by pastors, it is not put by our leaders in the forefront, and does not receive the attention due so vitally important a part of Christian work. All through our connection are men whose names are never mentioned, who never can be written down for anything great, but who by wise and faithful training and teaching of youth are laying sure and strong the foundation on which the church of to-morrow must surely rest. Rescue work, the salvage of derelicts, the finding of the lost, the reclaiming of the fallen has its place. Thank God for the workmen and workshops fitted for this work! But we can not all be such workmen, nor ought we so to be. In its very nature such work is exceptional and extraordinary, and at best a makeshift. The work, the true full work, of the church begins with the training of the child, continues in the culture and safeguarding of the youth, the utilizing of the powers and capacities of the virile and vital man, until in the evening of life this trained, cultured, and active personality shall enrich the church militant with counsel and wisdom until he passes to the fellowship of the Church Triumphant. It is doubtless true that one who gives himself to these things will not be rewarded with page-long panegyrics in the press-secular or sacred-but he will at least have the consciousness that he is doing the thing that in our day most needs to be done: laying deep and strong the foundations on which the Christian character and achievement of the future must surely rise. The highest work of God is not a man rescued in mid-career from squalor, vice, and

crime, but a child, touched and tuned to high things, greatening in strength of will and loftiness of purpose; clear of mind and clean of hand and heart through years of active life and service; whose hoary head is a crown of glory because found in the way of righteousness through all the years, and who goes to his reward at last like a shock of corn fully ripe:

"And, doubtless, unto such is given

A life that bears immortal fruit

In those great offices that suit

The full-grown energies of Heaven."

One who listens to much preaching will, I am sure, soon become conscious of a note of despondency, perhaps of deep pessimism, in the utterances of moral and spiritual teachers. One of the best opportunities of our time is that which makes for a sane and wholesome outlook upon the world of nature and of human nature. There is a sort of conventional pulpit talk about the world that I am quite sure is misunderstood by many people, and makes them think that the world and the things of it are essentially evil. Our use of words is not wise and discriminating, and hence it comes that much of our preaching makes people think that the world of nature and life is hurtful to the development of the highest type of spiritual character. Some of our singing has fostered this foolish notion. When Isaac Watts was disappointed in an affair of the affections he sat down and wrote:

"How vain are all things here below!

How false, and yet how fair!

Each pleasure hath its poison too,

And every sweet a snare."

Just why healthy-minded men and women, fortunate in their loves and sensible in their outlook upon life, should be forever singing Watts's melancholy and morbid refrain is not quite clear. And those other lines

"Is this vile world a friend to grace,

To help me on to God?"

Now the truth is, that the world is not vile, and, rightly conceived and used, it is a friend to grace and does help us on to God. To believe otherwise is the rankest atheism. God is in his world and reveals himself through his laws. The laws of the world make for