to gather some
lingering flowers, but to look for the fruit which has followed the
fallen blossoms.

II. The true test for the past.

The question of our text implies, as we have already suggested, that our
whole lives, with all their various and often opposite experiences, are
yet an ordered whole, having a definite end. There is some purpose
beyond the moment to be served. Our joys and our sorrows, our gains and
our losses, the bright hours and the dark hours, and the hours that are
neither eminently bright nor supremely dark, our failures and our
successes, our hopes disappointed or fulfilled, and all the infinite
variety of condition and environment through which our varying days and
years have led us, co-operate for one end. It is life that makes men;
the infant is a bundle of possibilities, and as the years go on, one
possible avenue of development after another is blocked. The child might
have been almost anything; the man has become hardened and fixed into
one shape.

But all this variety of impulses and complicated experiences need the
co-operation of the man himself if they are to reach their highest
results in him. If he is simply recipient of these external forces
acting upon him, they will shape him indeed, but he will be a poor
creature. Life does not make men unless men take the command of life,
and he who lets circumstances and externals guide him, as the long water
weeds in a river are directed by its current, will, from the highest
point of view, have experienced the variations of a lifetime in vain.

No doubt each of our experiences has its own immediate and lower purpose
to serve, and these purposes are generally accomplished, but beyond
these each has a further aim which is not reached without diligent
carefulness and persistent effort on our parts. If we would be sure of
what it is to suffer life's experiences in vain, we have but to ask
ourselves what life is given us for, and we all know that well enough to
be able to judge how far we have used life to attain the highest ends of
living. We may put these ends in various ways in our investigation of
the results of our manifold experiences. Let us begin with the
lowest--we received life that we might learn truth, then if our
experience has not taught us wisdom it has been in vain. It is
deplorable to have to look round and see how little the multitude of men
are capable of forming anything like an independent and intelligent
opinion, and how th