religion, no matter how uncouth and
strange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the
infinite.

What a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it
has seen, what strength it has given to their realization. It is the
great tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has
carried us on towards God. We cannot but believe it is born of him.
It does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him
from sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours. It
ever holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a
perfect world.

No wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst. Literal
appetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for
physical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or
more forceful than those of the soul. But for hunger and thirst man
would have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as
he found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have
been.

Man is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these
cravings. So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our
salvation. To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live.
Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous
climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as
they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise
on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart. This is the life that
Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with
passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with
His Father. Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own
struggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied. No
ideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for
the right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the
supreme good.

THE SOLE SATISFACTION

Through the ages men have waited for voices to speak from out the great
unknown. Answering to this universal longing for larger light, to this
search for truth, there has been the conviction that, where our own
scanty knowledge ended, there something akin to revelation would give
us light. We have been listening for voices that would speak with an
authority transcending that given to our fellows.

Cold reason may mock at revelation, but the soul struggling in
darkness, baffled by its proble