hich I am imprest. I stand in awed amazement before its
vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities. Said an old villager
to me concerning the air of his elevated hamlet, "Ay, sir, it's a fine
air is this westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having traveled
from the distant fields of the Atlantic!" And here is the Apostle
Paul, with the quickening wind of redemption blowing about him in
loosening, vitalizing, strengthening influence, and to him, in all his
thinking, it had its birth in the distant fields of eternity! To
the apostle redemption was not a small device, an afterthought, a
patched-up expedient to meet an unforseen emergency. The redemptive
purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities, and in a spirit of
reverent questioning the apostle sent his trembling thoughts into
those lone and silent fields. He emerged with, whispered secrets such
as these: "fore-knew," "fore-ordained," "chosen in him before the
foundation of the world," "eternal life promised before times
eternal," "the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our
Lord."

Brethren, does our common thought of redemptive glory reach back
into this august and awful presence? Does the thought of the modern
disciple journey in this distant pilgrimage? Or do we now regard it as
unpractical and irrelevant? There is no more insidious peril in modern
religious life than the debasement of our conception of the practical.
If we divorce the practical from the sublime, the practical will
become the superficial, and will degenerate into a very lean and
forceless thing. When Paul went on this lonely pilgrimage his spirit
acquired the posture of a finely sensitive reverence. People who
live and move beneath great domes acquire a certain calm and stately
dignity. It is in companionship with the sublimities that awkwardness
and coarseness are destroyed. We lose our reverence when we desert the
august. But has reverence no relationship to the practical? Shall we
discard it as an irrelevant factor in the purposes of common life?
Why, reverence is the very clue to fruitful, practical living.
Reverence is creative of hope; nay, a more definite emphasis can be
given to the assertion; reverence is a constituent of hope.
Annihilate reverence, and life loses its fine sensitiveness, and when
sensitiveness goes out of a life the hope that remains is only a
flippant rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, the careless onrush of
the kine, and not a firm, assure