sticking a brown tree in the foreground. We have all got our 'brown
trees,' which we think we can do well, and these limit our ambition to
secure other gifts which God is ready to bestow upon us. So 'forget the
things that are behind.' Cultivate a wise obliviousness of past sorrows,
past joys, past failures, past gifts, past achievements, in so far as
these might limit the audacity of our hopes and the energy of our
efforts.

IV. So, lastly, pursue the aim with a wise, eager reaching forward.

The Apostle employs a very graphic word here, which is only very
partially expressed by that 'reaching forth.' It contains a condensed
picture which it is scarcely possible to put into any one expression.
'Reaching out over' is the full though clumsy rendering of the word, and
it gives us the picture of the runner with his whole body thrown
forward, his hand extended, and his eye reaching even further than his
hand, in eager anticipation of the mark and the prize. So we are to
live, with continual reaching out of confidence, clear recognition, and
eager desire to make our own the unattained.

What is that which gives an element of nobleness to the lives of great
idealists, whether they be poets, artists, students, thinkers, or what
not? Only this, that they see the unattained burning ever so clearly
before them that all the attained seems as nothing in their eyes. And
so life is saved from commonplace, is happily stung into fresh effort,
is redeemed from flagging, monotony, and weariness.

The measure of our attainments may be fairly estimated by the extent to
which the unattained is clear in our sight. A man down in the valley
sees the nearer shoulder of the hill, and he thinks it the top. The man
up on the shoulder sees all the heights that lie beyond rising above
him. Endeavour is better than success. It is more to see the Alpine
heights unscaled than it is to have risen so far as we have done. They
who thus have a boundless future before them have an endless source of
inspiration, of energy, of buoyancy granted to them.

No man has such an absolutely boundless vision of the future which may
be his as we have, if we are Christian people, as we ought to be. We
only can thus look forward. For all others a blank wall stretches at the
end of life, against which hopes, when they strike, fall back stunned
and dead. But for us the wall may be overleaped, and, living by the
energy of a boundless hope, we, and only we, can lay ours