furnish the
cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed
biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food. The
higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but
it is just this that is most precious and significant--all of which shows
His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all that went
before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present. God
before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still preparing all; God in
all is profoundly evident.' Yes, profoundly evident to profound minds,
and experimentally and sweetly evident to religious minds, and to renewed
and loving and holy hearts.

2. For fame and for state a palace, while for strength it might be
called a castle. In sufficiently ancient times the king's palace was
always a castle also. David's palace on Mount Zion was as much a
military fortress as a royal residence; and King Priam's palace was the
protection both of itself and of the whole of the country around. In
those wild times great men built their houses on high places, and then
the weak and endangered people gathered around the strongholds of the
powerful, as we see in our own city. Our own steep and towering rock
invited to its top the castle-builder of a remote age, and then the
exposed country around began to gather itself together under the shelter
of the bourg. And thus it is that the military engineering of the _Holy
War_ makes that old allegorical book most excellent to read, not only for
common men like you and me, who are bent on the fortification and the
defence of our own hearts, but for the military historians of those old
times also, for the experts of to-day also, and for all good students of
fortification. And the New Testament of the Divine peace itself, as well
as the Old Testament so full of the wars of the Lord--they both support
and serve as an encouragement and an example to our spiritual author in
the elaboration of his military allegory. Every good soldier of Jesus
Christ has by heart the noble paradox of Paul to the Philippians--that
the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep their hearts
and minds through Christ Jesus. Let God's peace, he says, be your man of
war. Let His surpassing peace do both the work of war and the work of
peace also in your hearts and in your minds. Let that peace both fortify
with walls, and garrison with soldiers, and watch ever