ers with sympathy. We give our
moral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by the
tremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense of
life as intensely significant.

The feeling of communion with Christ, with angels and saints,--its
natural basis is the reverence and love for great souls. As such
reverence and love is deep, and as death removes the objects, the sense
of a continued communion arises spontaneously. No form of our
consciousness is more vivid and profound than this. It has a
background of mystery,--mystery scarcely deeper or other than that
which envelops the earthly love. _What_ do I love in the friend whom
here I see? Is it the individuality, or that higher power of which it
transmits a ray?

The sense of this blending of the human and divine does not weaken or
perplex our affection for the friend we see; it intensifies and
sublimates it. So, in the sense of communion with the unseen friend,
it disturbs us not that we cannot say how much is there of the
remembered personality, how much of the one eternal deity. The essence
of what we loved and love is sure and undying.

The creature succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to its
environment. Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment.
To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile or
indifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him from
doing right; he is like a creature in a watery world with
half-developed fins. But as a man becomes morally developed he finds
moral opportunity everywhere,--finds occasion for service, for
admiration, gratitude, reverence, hope. This moral development
includes the whole man: he needs a good body; he needs much that only
inheritance can supply. His own effort is one factor, not the sum of
factors. We must be patient with ourselves,--accept our inevitable
imperfections as part of the grand plan, and find a joy in what is
above and beyond ourselves.

Man first solves the problem of his own life,--finds the key in
devotion to the highest ideal of character,--finds the answer in moral
growth following his effort, forgiveness meeting his repentance, human
love answering his love, beauty meeting his desire, truth opening to
his search, a support and assurance found in emergency.

Then, and only then, he can rightly study the world. For he must first
have the standard of values in human life; he must have, too, the