e,--there is discernible a significance which grows more impressive,
more solemn, more inspiring, just as we learn to read it intelligently.
What a wonderful drama is this play of human lives,--this perpetual
tragedy and comedy, of which some slight and faint transcript finds
expression in the pages of poet and novelist! We needs must continually
see and feel something of it, but we are apt to miss its best
significance. What fastens our attention most in our experience, or in
what we sympathetically watch in others, is the element of enjoyment or
suffering. Pain and pleasure are so very, very real! We ache, and we
are sorry for another's ache; we are joyous, and glad in another's joy.
And there it often stops with us. But all the while something is working
under the pain and pleasure. Character is being made or marred. Yonder
man bleeds, and you sigh for him,--ah! but a hero is being moulded there.
And here one thrives and prospers, expands and radiates,--but a spiritual
bankruptcy is approaching.

When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,--whether at this
ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic
course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the
drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and
sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,--do we
not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty,
Love? Are not these the very presence of Deity?

"But," you say, "there is also confusion to be seen,--what does that
signify?" Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds that
what seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order. You say, "We
see ugliness as well as beauty,--what does that mean?" Ugliness serves
its purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty. Beauty,
and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it,
is but an incident and means. You say, "We see wickedness,--what of
that?" May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind's
upward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet?

The instinct that the shadow is the servant of the light, that seeming
disorder, ugliness, sin are but veiled instruments of good,--this seems
one of the truths which flash upon mankind in gleams, and which as the
race rises actually into nobler life tend to become clear and steadfast
conviction.

It is the vast