rying on to the
Manchester Exchange on Tuesday? What are they but men who are dreaming
that they are at work, but are only at work on dreams which will vanish
when the eyes are opened? Practical men, who are busy and absorbed with
affairs and with the things of this present, curl their lips about
'idealists' of all sorts, be they idealists of thought, or of art, or of
benevolence, or of religion, and call them dreamers. The boot is on the
other leg. It is the idealists that are awake, and it is you people that
live for to-day, and have not learned that to-day is a little fragment
and sliver of eternity--it is you who are dreamers, and all these things
round about us--the solid-seeming realities--are illusions, and

'Like the bubbles on a river,
Sparkling, bursting, borne away,'

they will disappear. There is only one reality, and that is God, and the
only lives that lay hold of the substance are those which grasp Him. The
rest of you are shadows hunting for shadows.

The two metaphors of my text coincide in suggesting another thing, and
that is the awful contrast in the average life between what is in a man
and what comes out of him. 'Dormant power,' we talk about. Ah, how
tragically the true man is dormant in all the work of worldly hearts!
God has made a great mistake in making you what you are, if there is no
place for you to exercise your powers in but this present world, and
nothing to exercise them on except the things that pass and perish.
Travellers in lands where civilisation used to be, and barbarism now is,
find sculptured stones from temples turned into fences for cattle-sheds
and walls round pigstyes. And that is something like what men do with
the faculties that God has given them. Why, the best part of you,
brother, if you are not a Christian, and living a Christian life--the
best part of you is asleep, and it is only the lower nature of you that
is awake! Sometimes the sleepers stir uneasily. It used to be said that
earthquakes were caused by a giant rolling himself from side to side in
his troubled slumber. And there are earthquakes in your heart and
spirit caused by the half-waking of the dormant self, the true man, who
is immersed and embruted in sense and the things of time. Some of you by
earthly lusts, some of you by over-indulgence in fleshly appetites,
eating and drinking and the like; some of you by absorption in the mere
externals of trade and profession and occupation to the entire