not find
satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning. If
the heart be empty the life cannot be filled. The flow must cease at
the faucet if the fountains go dry. The prime, the elemental
necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its
house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor
emaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that
which amounts to nothing.

The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our
blunt senses. We see the shell first. To the undeveloped mind the
material is all there is. But looking deeper into life there comes an
awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the
feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have
nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all
constitute the permanent elements of life.

Because man is a spirit his life never can consist wholly in things; he
must come into his heritage of the soul wealth of all the ages; he must
reach out, though often as in the dark, until across the void there
come voices, the sages and the seers, the prophets, and the poets
speaking the language of the soul. In these he finds his food nor can
his deeper hunger be assuaged until it thus is fed.

Because man is a spirit and gradually is coming into the dominant
spirit life in which things shall count for less and thought and
character for more, he seeks after his own kind. The deeps of life
have their relationships. The spirit of man cries out after the father
of spirits. By whatever name men have called the most high they ever
have sought after Him, the eternal, who would be one with them in soul,
in all that is essential and abiding in being.

Every religion, every philosophy, every endeavour after character and
truth is but the cry of humanity for word with God. Hearing His word
on any lip the heart of man answers with joy. The words of eternal
truth have been the food of the great in all ages. Fainting in the
fight the message from the unseen, the echo of everlasting verities,
has revived their spirits; they have fought the fight that despises
things and seeks truth.

Who would not exchange a mess of pottage for the benediction from a
father's lips? Who is so dead he no longer finds more satisfaction in
truth and love and beauty than in food or furniture? And why are we so
foolish as to seek to satisfy ourselves wi