esprit de corps-that is wise, and may be turned to account, yet the pride and vanity of men tend always to spoil everything, and the advantages go but little way, and soon give place to disadvantages which are. most harmful, most hurtful. For no profession has so many claims upon a man as mankind has. No man can afford to live for his profession, and in his profession. No man can afford, by the side of the sounding sea, to build his hut on a little rivulet that runs into it, and never go down to wet his feet in the flood, or try its depths. Good as any profession is, you will be obliged, in the order of business, to live in it as much as is useful. Ministers ought not to be too much with ministers. They should go out among other men. Lawyers ought not to consort only with lawyers. They should go beyond their own class. Soldiers should seek civil society. Teachers, dealers in ideas, should dwell more with men that deal in wares; and men that deal in wares should aspire to the company of men that deal in ideas. Men need mixing. Men need to feel a sympathy with the whole of human life.

Therefore, remember that you are not to be educated out from among your fellow men, but for them. No man belongs to those who are below him, so much as the refined, educated and powerful. By as much. as you surpass a man, you become his servant. "He that would be chief among you, let him be the slave of all," said the apostle.

But the time is already sped, and I will bring speedily to a close these remarks, by which I would fain urge you to a larger, a purer, a sweeter, and a nobler manhood. Delivering you from the temptations that are in the flcsh; delivering you from the temptations that are in your own dispositions; delivering you from the temptations that inhere in the thrall of labor and the bondage of business in life, and from the temptations which are special to classes and professions, I fain would incite in your minds a higher conception of manhood as it is in Christ Jesus. Especially have you such temptations, because in some sense there is a work given you as soldiers which is given to no others. You ought to be nobler than most men, because your work is vicarious. You labor for the Government. You stand for the country. It is for you to be the right hand, the executive hand, of the Government of your land. You need not be cruel because you are warriors; for war may be but discipline. It is the symbol of justice, of law, of liberty itself. We have but just passed through a war which, with all its atrocities, and its incidental cruelties, and the horror of its details, will be looked back upon, when we have drifted so far that we can see them in perspective, as a sublime war for unity, liberty, and human happiness. And all its blooddrops, all its tears, and all its wrecks and desolations will pass out

of view; and no man can measure the abundance of that good which will spring up in consequence of it.

You are a part of the Government; and it behooves you to represent to men something better than common men do. It is yours to guard our flag, which has now more to tell the world than any other flag. Now, thank God, it is clean. Once there was blood on it. Not a drop now. Once the stars that were on it were stars with a background of barbaric slavery, feebly shining out of midnight. Now they are the stars of hope, the world over. And those stripes that are upon the flag are no longer stripes of cruelty, to shed blood. They are the auroral light that plays upon it; for, as you bear it round and round the globe, upon the land or on the sea, that flag means intelligence and liberty. And it is a blessed thing to be a guardian of it. You belong to a profession that is honored. I mean not abroad, though it is honored there; but already in our own land we have those-and those too, happily, that have sprung from the loins of this venerable school-upon whose names rest glory and immortality, for their skill, for their endurance, for their wise victories, and yet more for their humanity, their moderation, and their unambitious patriotism. Nor are any of the stories of battles and sieges and marches so sweet and musical to me as is the story of the five chiefest men whom this war has lifted into conspicuity, not one of whom is not the brother of the others. Without rivalry, with hands firmly clasped, unenvious they stand, to show men what an American man and an American officer should be. While Napolcon could scarcely hold his army together from the envies and jealousies of his marshals, behold how we are twined together like a cord, by the firm friendships of our chiefest men that the war has brought forth, and that this school has bred.

My young friends-you that abide-I beg of you, take aim higher than merely the aim of this school. Enlarge your conceptions of life. Ask inspirations above the text, and above the teacher, that God may give you a conception of what it is to live for a truer manhood than any that you have hitherto followed.

And ye that go forth, what can I ask better for you, than that your hopes may be larger, your ambitions purer, your aims truer, than those which, in your best hours, when you stood on the very mountain-top, you framed for yourselves? May the blessing of Almighty God go with you; and may the blessings of Christ and the Holy Ghost never depart. from you. Wherever you are, in burdens, in trials, in wounds, in sickness, in death itself; whether among friends, or in the wilderness far away, and among savage foes, or departing in the thunder of the earnest battle, may you never lack company. May He who loved your father

and your mother, may He who has guided your steps in all the days of your lives, never forsake you in the hour of anguish and trial. And from an earthly manhood, growing more large and resplendent, may there be reached out to you that manhood in Christ Jesus which shall be perfected only in the heavenly land.

§ 88

IS IT I?

By Phillips Brooks

"And as they did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I?"--MATT. xxvi. 21, 22.

It was a moment of dismay among the disciples of Jesus. Their Master, sitting with them at the supper, had just declared that one of them should commit an act of the basest treachery and betray Him to His enemies. There could be no deed more contemptible. Every obligation of duty and affection was violated by it. One who stood by, in the rude upper chamber where they ate the supper, might well have watched with curiosity to see how these plain men would take the words of Jesus. Will they break out in indignant remonstrance? Will they fall to accusing one another? Will each draw back from his brother apostle in horror at the thought that possibly that brother apostle is the man who is to do this dreadful thing? Instead of these, there is a different result from either, and one that certainly surprises us. Each man's anxiety seems to be turned, not towards his brother, but towards himself, and you hear them asking, one after another, "Lord, is it I?" "Lord, is it I?" Peter, Bartholomew, John, James, Thomas, each speaks for himself, and the quick questions come pouring in out of their simple hearts, "Lord, is it I?" "Lord, is it I?"

Certainly there is something that is strange in this. These men were genuine. There could not be any affectation in their question. A real live fear came over them at Jesus's prophecy. And it was a good sign,

PHILLIPS BROOKS. Born at Boston, Mass., December 13, 1835; died at Boston, Mass., January 23, 1893; educated at Harvard University and at the Episcopal Theological Seminary at Alexandria, Va.; ordained Deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1859, and advanced to the priesthood a year or two later; from 1859 to 1862 he was rector of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia; from 1862 to 1869 rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Philadelphia; rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Mass., 1869-1891; Bishop of Massachusetts, 1891

no doubt, that the first thought of each of them was about the possibility of his own sin. When a man foresees a great temptation that is coming, it is always better that, instead of turning to his neighbors and saying, as he searches their faces, "I wonder who will do this wicked thing," he should turn to himself and say, "Is it possible that I am the man who will do it?" When the wind is rising it is good for each ship at sea to look to its own ropes and sails, and not stand gazing to see how ready the other ships are to meet it. We all feel that we would rather hear a man asking about himself anxiously than to see him so sure of himself that the question never occurred to him. We should be surer of his standing firm if we saw that he knew he was in danger of a fall. Now, all this is illustrated in Christ's disciples. It must have been that their life with Him had deepened the sense of the mystery of their lives. They had seen themselves, in their intercourse with Him, as capable of much more profound and various spiritual experience than they had thought possible before. And this possible life, this possible experience, had run in both directions, up and down. They had recognized a before unknown capacity for holiness, and they had seen also a before unknown power of wickedness. Their sluggishness had been broken up, and they had seen that they were capable of divine things. Their selfsatisfied pride had been broken up, and they had seen that they were capable of brutal things. Heaven and hell had opened above their heads and under their feet. They had not thought it incredible when Christ said, "I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and receive you to myself," and now they did not think it incredible when He said, "One of you shall betray me." The life with Christ had melted. the ice in which they had been frozen, and they felt it in them either to rise to the sky or to sink into the depths. That was and that always is Christ's revelation of the possibilities of life. To one who really lives with Him the heights above and the depths below both grow more profound. A new goodness and a new badness become possible. He makes men know that they are the children of God, and that as God's children they have a chance to be far better or far worse than they could be when they thought themselves only His slaves. All this Christ did for those first disciples and the same change of life, the same deepening of its possibilities, has come to all who have really lived with Him since then.

There are times in the lives of all of us, I think, when that comes to us which came here to Christ's disciples. Of such times and their position in our lives and their effect upon our lives let us speak this morning. Beneath us as beneath them the worse possibilities of our nature sometimes reveal themselves. There are times when it seems to us not

impossible that we should commit very great sins. Just as there are some times when we catch sight of the possibility of holiness which lies above us, and comprehend with rapturous hope how good it is in our power to become; so there are these other times when the mysteriousness of our nature opens its other side, and the crimes and vices, at which we and all men tremble, seem to be not wholly impossible to us. Such times are not our worst times certainly. Often they are times which, by their very sense of danger, are the safest and strongest of our lives. But they are often moments that dismay us. They come in upon our self-complacency and shock it with their ominous presence, these moments when we suspect ourselves and see that inevitably to the power of being very good if we will, is linked the other power of being very bad if we will, too. Let us consider what some of the times are which waken this darker self-consciousness, this sense of our own possibilities of sin.

One of them is the time when we see deep and flagrant sin in some other man. When some great crime is done, when through the community there runs the story of some frightful cruelty, or dreadful fraud, I think that almost all of us are conscious of a strange mixture of two emotions, one of horror and the other of a terrible familiarity. The act is repugnant to all our conscientiousness, but the powers that did the act, and the motives that persuaded the doing of it, are powers which we possess and motives which we have felt. They are human powers and human motives. It is a human act. If we could watch the sinning of another race with a wholly different nature, I think that it would stir no such self-consciousness. If we could stand by and see the wickedness of fiends or fallen angels, it might excite our hatred, our disgust, but it would make no such deep questionings as come when we recognize our own humanity in the sinning man, and find our nature bearing witness that it has in it the same powers by which he has been so wicked. A being of a higher race might see our sin and sorrow with pity, with pain, with wonder; but the pain would be all free from self-reproach, and the wonder would all exhaust itself outside of him. It would be the innocent bewilderment with which I remember, in a picture by Domenichino at Bologna, an angel stands at the foot of the empty cross, and tries with his finger one of the sharp points in the crown of thorns which the Saviour had worn during His passion. It is all a sad inexplicable wonder to him. It appeals to no experience of wickedness and woe in his pure and angelic nature. But when you or I take the crown of thorns into our hands we know in our own hearts the meanness, the jealousy, the hatred which it represents. The possible Jew, the possible enemy of righteousness and crucifier of the Savior, stirs to self-con