call. And faith in the call shall change drudgery to

delight.

Another function of value is that such strong positive convictions give the steadiness of purpose which is a chief element in every high human career. Men live

for the day. They see only what is just here. The young student has no controlling sense of the future, and therefore he trifles away the present on which it hangs. The young professional man cannot toil patiently till his opportunity comes; and so, when it comes, it goes. Here and there the man of intense and masterful convictions labors and waits, and takes his prize sometimes against all probabilities, as when the young adventurer Disraeli struck for a hearing in Parliament and the premiership of Britain. But it is with the fixedness of such convictions and with such consequent steadiness of purpose that the scholar, the artist, the discoverer, the professionalist, and, above all, the Christian toiler, have achieved their highest successes. Heyne delving at his classics with but two nights' sleep a week; Mendelssohn nine years. perfecting his Elijah; Webster lavishing time and money on some blacksmith's case for a fifteen-dollar fee; Schliemann, from the age of seven seeing the ruins of Troy beneath the dust of ages, and struggling towards it forty years; Kepler willing to wait two hundred years, if need be, for the acceptance of his discoveries; the Plymouth Pilgrims silently harboring "a great hope and inward zeal of laying a foundation. for the kingdom of Christ in these remote parts, though

they should be but as stepping-stones unto others for performing so great a work," these are the men. And naturally enough it is in the sphere of religion that faith, Christian faith, has shown its marvelous power of steady perseverance; and the bright catalogue would contain volumes of names, from Paul to Livingstone.

Such men can work and pray - and wait. It is sad to hear the true cause of temperance pushed by false arguments. It was a pitiful thing that some of the men who a generation ago made valiant fight against American slavery must needs grow so impatient as to wage war upon the Bible and the Church because these were not fast enough for their fiery ardor. And most melancholy was it on the Fourth of July, 1842, to hear in the Methodist church in Andover, William Lloyd Garrison even petulantly wish that the lightnings of heaven might blast Bunker Hill monument. But his voice is silent; the Bible speaks; the Church lives; the monument stands; and slavery is dead. Faith in God can use God's appointed methods and await his time.

It is for the want of clear convictions, alike high and dominant, worthy of being called faith, that so many a gifted man has proved a wretched failure. Benjamin Constant, one of the brightest minds of France, yet avowedly without faith in virtue or honor, earned the name of "Constant the inconstant," made his life a wail, and his end a conscious failure. The world is full of such failures, partial or total. While

we recognize the brilliant achievements of such men as Poe, Byron, Burns, Mirabeau, we cannot forget how each of them burned out his life with passion and vice before he reached his proper prime; and, strikingly enough, it is Carlyle who avers that the radical lack of Burns was "religion," and says of Byron that "Satan was the hero of his poetry and apparently the model of his conduct."

See, once more, how the positive faith brings repose and quietude of spirit. Men rejoice to be well anchored. In proportion as doubts run deep and high, is the heavy groundswell of unrest. Paradoxically but truly has the vacuum of the heart been called "an aching void." And one might almost say,

'Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,

So might 1, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

Hume said he was "appalled at the forlorn solitude in which he was placed by his philosophy." Miss Martineau, while boasting of her "freedom from old superstition," cannot but speak in the same breath of "all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy." A late atheist writer1 avowed the great "pang" with which he cut loose from the moorings of Christianity. Later still, Vernon Lee, by the mouth of Vére,2 confesses that his

1 Candid Examination of Theism.
2 Contemporary Review, May, 1883.

settled materialism is "bitter and abominable, arid and icy to our hearts." And there are few sadder or more "haggard" things than the last days of John Sterling, when having once for all said, "Adieu, O church, in God's name adieu," three years later, in the last stages of consumption, he wrote to his nearest friend, — whom he would not see,-"On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread the common road into the great darkness. Certainty, indeed, I have none." For when one who has deliberately parted with all the consoling hopes of the gospel looks through the high cliffs that part this sea of life from the great unknown ocean of eternity, he may well sing with a deeper pathos than the poet's :

"Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me."

The firm and positive faith, rationally formed, carries rest. We see a semblance of it even in the "Kismet " of the Moslem, the "fortunes" of Cæsar, and the "destiny" of Napoleon; but the reality in the “ good Providence" of the trusting child of God. The sailors on the Mediterranean were amazed by John Howard's perfect calmness under the pirate's attack; and equally amazing was the coolness with which at the end of the voyage he shut himself up in a plague hospital at Venice. He was on his high errand of mercy; and the secret of his calmness may be read in his journal:

"O God, my heart is fixed, trusting in thee." "Where," said the pope's legate to Luther at the beginning of his stormy career, "where will you find a resting place?" "Under heaven," said Martin Luther. From the vortex of the tempest in its fury he exclaimed: "O crafty Satan! But Christ is abler than thou." And two days before the end of all he wrote: "Grace and peace in the Lord, dear Catherine. I have one that takes care of me better than thou, or any of the angels could, one who is seated at the right hand of God Almighty." He had marched through life to his own hymn, Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott.

In recent and peaceful times there have been few nobler exhibitions than the composure of Thomas Arnold, under the tremendous storm of public and private obloquy that for four years beat mercilessly around his head, till "even his personal acquaintances," says Dean Stanley, "began to look upon him with alarm, some dropped their intercourse altogether, hardly any were able fully to sympathize with him, and almost all remonstrated. He himself was startled," continues Stanley, "but not moved." He bore all in silence, adhered to his principles, and held on his way. The clew to his composure may be read in his journal, ten years later, written on that last night before his sudden death: "Above all, let me mind my own personal work to keep myself pure and zealous, and believing." And the issue of that personal work, the English world now knows by heart. Priceless is the value of such a faith in God and the right.