Man also needs a chart to tell him which way to steer, what he ought to do and to be. God has given him this chart in his reason, the light which lightens every man who cometh into the world. When we are quiet, and listen to its voice, it teaches us. We are often too busy to listen to it, too much immersed in daily cares and anxieties to stop and hear it. So we need other teachers, outward guides to lead us.

to man.

This is why prophets and teachers are necessary His freedom and his conscience are not enough. They do not inform him of his duties, his dangers, his hopes. They do not show him the object of life, the needs of the soul, the purposes of God concerning it. The Bible is the record of the revelations made to such teachers. The Bible is not the rudder; the rudder is freedom. It is not the compass; the compass is conscience. But it is the chart, it is the map; it is to be consulted every day in order to show us what there is around us, and what before us, in time and in eternity. Because the sailor has a rudder and a compass; because he has the sight of the glorious sun and the unchanging stars; because he has scientific instruments by which he can take observations of the heavenly bodies to find his latitude and longitude; because he carries a chronometer to give him the true time at Greenwich, can he therefore do without his charts? No; these are necessary as well as the others. Both are necessary; he cannot dispense

with either. So, because we have in us noble instincts and great powers, because we have achieved great advances in science, does it follow that we can dispense with the intuitions of past prophets, the wisdom of sages, and the inspired lives of apostles? No!

It is easy to point out the errors in the Bible. It is not infallible; no human thing is infallible, and the Bible is intensely human. Therein is its power. Your friend, noble and generous, the man you love the most, whose life brings you comfort, warning, strength, courage, on whom you lean every day, to whom you go for advice and sympathy, he is not infallible; he may make mistakes. But will you give him up on that account, sneer at him, ridicule him? Moses made mistakes, in geology and astronomy, the mistakes of his time; for God did not send him to teach astronomy or geology. But Moses said: "There is one God," when men worshipped a thousand gods. He said: "Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not even covet thy neighbor's goods; thou shalt be hospitable to the stranger; thou shalt be kind to thy cattle." And by these commands he lifted man to a higher plane of being. It is very easy for a man living in the nineteenth century to point out the mistakes of Moses in matters of science. Any school-girl in Boston can correct the mistakes of Plato, Bacon, and Shakspeare. But Shakspeare, Plato, and Bacon are still great lights to us, as they were to their own day. So

the Bible continues to be our guide and inspiration in morals and religion, as it has been for three thousand years. We can find nothing tenderer than the Psalms. In our sorrow and loss we borrow the language of David; in our loftier moods we turn to the prophets; in our bereavement we come to him who said, "I will give you rest." In our sins we find no one who can bring to us the sense of God's pardon as it is given through Jesus Christ. Let the mousing critic gnaw at the letter of the Bible; the honest and seeking soul will ever find in it treasures of comfort and of light.

The great utterances born in the highest moments of life, born out of the deepest experiences of heroes, saints, and martyrs, the lofty moral teachings which have come from pure souls,

these

enter into our common life, and lift us up to a higher plane of conviction. Why is it that every man's standard of right is higher than his conduct, higher than his habits of thinking, feeling, and acting? We all have a standard of duty higher than anything we have yet attained. How did we get it? It is a divine gift, coming down to us from higher life and purer thoughts than our own. These cold, pure waters of life flow down from the uplands, from the mountains, and refresh the lower valleys with their crystal drops. But we all have something in us which answers to such words. When those high chords are struck, some string vibrates in unison in every bosom. Even the com

mon crowd in a theatre will instinctively applaud every noble, generous sentiment uttered on the stage, showing that man never loses his sense of what is right and good.

Man's tendency is to rise. Aspiration belongs to human nature. Even Milton's devils had not lost

their aspiration, their tendency upward.

said to each other in hell:

"By our proper motion we ascend

Up to our native heights. Descent and fall
To us is adverse."

They

Man is never satisfied when he is not making progress. He tries to seem satisfied, to persuade himself that he is satisfied, but he is not. We all long to be better than we are, and that is the proof that God means to make us better. When God made us he made us for himself, and he will not allow any of us to fail of accomplishing his purpose.

One more comparison must be made between man and the vessel. Even the rudder and compass and charts are of no use unless something else is added. What is that something else? A motive power. The vessel spreads its sails to the wind, and the wind fills the sails. The sailor cannot create the wind; all he can do is to spread his sail to it. He cannot tell beforehand which way the wind will blow, but he goes out of the port in confidence that the wind will be sent to him.

There is also a power from above man which moves man. We do not move ourselves. We are moved by the spirit of God. What is prayer but spreading our sails to catch the wind? Man does not create the wind. He does not know whence it cometh or whither it goeth. He simply raises his sails and is driven by it.

A religious man is one who believes in a power above himself, which can add motive to his life, and who therefore spreads his sails to catch that divine breeze. When I am sad, I raise the sails of prayer to catch a breeze of comfort; when I am weak, I spread the sails of faith to receive the wind which shall bear me on; when I am sinful, I lift my sails to welcome the pardoning breath of God's love. Amid the sorrows and disappointments of time I open my heart to my heavenly friend and am comforted. Strange that men should believe in the invisible wind, and not in the unseen breath of God's love.

Or, let us change the image, and suppose the ship to be, not a sailing vessel, but a great seagoing steamer, with a raging, fiery furnace in its heart, which beats with steady pulsation day and night, like the heart of a man, driving the great piston up and down, and moving the enormous shafts of steel, which turn with steady force the great wheels. The ship plunges on through the breaking waves, driven by this inward fire. It is now not wind which moves it, but fire.