of people, and can detect their vanities, and meannesses, and
laughable conceits. If you employ this gift to correct a bad habit, or
expose a falsehood, it is well enough. But if it induces you to look
upon things merely with the skill of a satirist, then let me say, there
is no "ludicrous side" to life; there is nothing in human conduct that
is simply absurd. The least transaction has a moral cast, and every word
and act reveals spiritual relations. The interest of man can never be
thrown into insignificance by his conditions; these draw interest from
him. And, whatever his post in the world, however limited or broad his
sphere of observation, for _him_ life is real, and has intense
relations. We must not stand so far apart from the crowd as to occupy
the position of mere spectators, and regard these men and women as so
many mechanical figures in a panorama. We must look through the depths
of their experience into their own souls, and through the depths of that
experience again upon the world, beholding it as it appears to the
beggar, and the lonely woman, and the child of vice and crime, and the
hero, and the saint, and as it falls with intense yet diverse
refractions upon all these multiform angles of personality. So shall we
learn to cherish a solemn and tender interest in the dear humanity
around us, and feel the arteries of sympathy which connect it, in all
its conditions, with our own hearts. And, as we return homeward from our
study of the street, it may be with our irritation, and prejudice, and
selfishness softened down; with a larger love flowing out towards the
least, and even the worst; realizing the spiritual ties that make us
one, and the Infinite Fatherhood that encircles us all; perhaps
suggestions will come to us that have been best expressed in the words
of the poet--

"Let us move slowly through the street,
Filled with an ever-shifting train,
Amid the sound of steps that beat
The murmuring walks like autumn rain.

"How fast the flitting figures come!
The mild, the fierce, the stony face;
Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some
Where secret tears have left their trace.

* * * * *

"Each, where his tasks or pleasures call
They pass, and heed each other not.
There is, Who heeds, Who holds them all,
In His large love and boundless thought.

"These struggling tides of life that seem,
In way