ame text represents the spirit of our whole university life. What we
call the elective system is a method of invitation and persuasion. It
multiplies opportunities. It does not compel the allegiance of the
indifferent. He that is lazy, let him be lazy still. {106} The
university sets before the mind of youth its open door.

And this, indeed, is what one asks of life. What should a free state
in this modern world guarantee to all its citizens? Not that equality
of condition for which many in our days plead, the dead level of
insured and effortless comfort, but equality of opportunity, a free and
fair chance for every man to be and to do his best. That land is best
governed where the door of opportunity stands wide open to the humblest
of its citizens, so that no man can shut it.

And what is the relation of religion to the life of man, if it be not
of this same enlarging and emancipating kind? Here we are, all shut in
by our routine of business and study and preoccupation, and religion
simply opens the door outward from this narrowness of life into a
larger and a purer world. It is as if you were bending some evening
over your books in the exhausted air of your little room, and as if you
should rise from your task, and pass out into the night, and the open
door should deliver you from your weariness and your self-absorption,
as you stood in the serene companionship of the infinite heavens and
the myriad of stars.

{107}

XLIII

BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK

_Revelation_ iii. 20.

To the church at Philadelphia it was promised that the door should be
opened; but here was a church at Laodicea which had deliberately shut
its door on the higher life. It was a church that was neither cold nor
hot, a lukewarm, indifferent, spiritless people, and to such a people,
willfully barring out the revelations of God, comes the Christ in this
wonderful figure, standing at the door like a weary traveller, asking
to be let in. Such a picture just reverses the common view which one
is apt to take of the religious life. We commonly think of truth as
hiding itself within its closed door and of ourselves as trying to get
in to it. We speak of finding Christ, or proving God, or getting
religion, as if all these things were mysteries to be explored, hidden
behind doors which must be unlocked; as if, in the relation between man
and God, man did all the searching, and God was a hidden God.

{108}

But the f