t invested the subject of God's relation to creation. His
ablest essay is the treatise on Language; the most literary is that on
'Work and Play'; the most penetrating in its insight is 'Our Gospel a
Gift to the Imagination'; the most personal and characteristic is 'The
Age of Homespun.' His best sermon is always the one last read; and they
are perhaps his most representative work. The sermon is not usually
ranked as belonging to literature, but no canon excludes those preached
by this great man. They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their
diction, commanding in their moral tone, penetrating in their
spirituality, and pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not
one--the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and
crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners, no
petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption, no
logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of truth,
coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God.

Language was to him "the sanctuary of thought," and these sermons are
the uttered worship in that temple where reason and devotion are one.

[Illustration: Signature: T. T. Munger]

WORK AND PLAY

From 'Work and Play'

Let me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my audience: not
a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but a man of large meditation,
one who is accustomed to observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities
of a living heart, to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the
humblest things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval
of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and certainly
unimposing scene,--his children and a kitten playing on the floor
together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him suggestions more
fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning himself and his race, than
the announcement of a new-discovered planet or the revolution of an
empire would incite. He surveys with a meditative feeling this beautiful
scene of muscular play,--the unconscious activity, the exuberant life,
the spirit of glee,--and there rises in his heart the conception that
possibly he is here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher
kind of play, which is the noblest exercise and last end of man himself.
Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh that the unconscious
joy of motion here displayed is spent in himself, and that now he is
effectua