some unfathomed Power. We are led, we are carried. We feel, we know not whence nor how, a peace that passeth understanding and a love that casteth out fear.

This is the substance of that religious experience in which throughout the ages the heart of man has found its deepest support and encouragement. The experience has clothed itself to the imagination in the garb of this or that creed or climate. It is liable to debasements and counterfeits, but no more liable than all other noble emotions and experiences. Sometimes there is the culmination of a moral struggle, and the whole course of life receives a new direction. Sometimes there is an illumination and joy and peace. It is an exaltation of the soul in which gladness blends with moral energy. No chapter of human life is written in deeper letters than those which tell of victory over temptation, strength out of weakness, radiance beside the grave, through this divine uplift.

There is another experience, more common, less dependent on individual constitution, which bears an inward message of soberer tone but of like import. It is the peace which attends the consciousness of right-doing. Wordsworth personifies it as the approval of Duty, "stern daughter of the voice of God:

"Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear

The Godhead's most benignant grace;

Nor know we anything more fair

Than is the smile upon thy face."

The faithful child of duty, whatever his creed, whatever his temperament, is naturally the possessor of a steady, calm assurance. Somehow, he feels, it is well.

Reasonings about immortality lead to little result. Convinced or unconvinced, we profit little by a mere opinion. We speculate, doubt, reject, or hope; and in either case the moral conduct of life is, perhaps, not much affected. But there come hours when to love and aspiration the heavenly vision opens, and the sense of its own eternity thrills the soul.

The crying need of the heart is always a present need. No promise of a far-away satisfaction is sufficient for it. And answering to just that need is the experience, sometimes given, that the human love once ours is ours still in its fullness, some richer fullness even than that of days gone by. There are hours in which the heart's voice is,

"Though mixed with God and Nature thou,

I seem to love thee more and more."

His energy feels His desires rest

All that is

The highest state of consciousness to which we attain is expressed by the old phrase that man feels himself a child of God. back of it an infinite energy. peacefully in some all-sufficing good. highest and purest in him mingles with its divine source. He sees new and higher interpretations of his own life and other lives. All the human love he has ever experienced he holds as an abiding

possession. There comes to him not so much the premonition of a future state as the consciousness of some state in which past, present, and future blend. He is free from illusions, and serene. It does not disturb him even to know that the vision will pass, and he will return to earth's level. He sees the truth, he feels the divine reality; and the certainty and the gladness are such that not even the prevision of his own relapse into dimmer perception can depress him. The hour speaks with command to the hours that are to follow; it bids them to fidelity, to love, to highest courage.

When turning from contemplation we throw ourselves into the work and the battle, a pulse of divine energy blends with our noblest effort, touches our joy with an ineffable sweetness, and hushes our sorrow like a child folded in its mother's arms.

The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselves unreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know, "with fidelity to the right as God gives us to see the right.” So it is that we may find ourselves

"Wedded to this goodly universe

In love and holy passion."

III

A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK

A TOURIST who roams for a brief while through some great country like England or Russia may jot down a few of the impressions which come home to him, making no pretense at completeness or symmetry of description. So, one who has journeyed like a hasty traveler over some passages in that vast tract of years which we describe as the classic and Christian civilizations, notes down in the following pages a few of the salient features that have impressed him. He has already prefaced this with a sort of outline map, drawn largely from familiar authorities, under the title "Our Spiritual Ancestry;" and has further ventured to interpret some phases of our own time, as "The Ideal of To-Day." Now he goes on to group a few observations on some special phases of the historical survey, disclaiming any attempt at exact proportion and perspective, but lingering where the prospect has pleased his fancy, or at points which seemed to yield some necessary clew or fruitful suggestion.

When, in the poems bearing the name of Homer, the curtain rises on the drama of man as it was acted in Greece, after the immeasurable prehis

toric space, we are amazed at the sudden brilliance. The men and deeds brought before us are various in character and worth,- savage, heroic, repulsive, beautiful, by turns. But the ever-present charm is man seeing the world about him. It is the vividness with which every object is seen in its distinctive form and spirit, and conveyed by the fit word and phrase. So seen and spoken, the commonest object becomes a thing of delight. The highroofed house, the brazen threshold, the polished chest, the silver-studded sword, the purple robes, the tawny oxen, the hollow ships, the tapering oars, the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn, the gold-throned morning,- Hector of the nodding plume, the white-armed Nausicaa, so in long procession moves the spectacle. A like distinctness invests all the actions and emotions of the story with charm. To us, as to the poet, the world becomes enchanted simply in being seen.

And presently we discover a strange transfiguration that is being wrought. Experiences which were painful or grievous to the actors and sufferers become in the representation the source of keen pleasure to the hearers or readers. The Iliad is mainly a story of men destroying one another. The Odyssey depicts a long strife with hardship and danger. The men who heard those songs were themselves familiar with the fight, with the wounds and terrors mixed with its energies and elations ; they had tasted the perils of shipwreck and of pirates. But as they listened, the rehearsal of trials the counterpart of their own filled them