Man, then, is not inexorable to God. He listens to that great heart-moving prayer which is syllabled in the majestic order of the world. Beholding as in a glass this order, he is changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord, the spirit. He has his choice to do this or suffer and be broken on the wheel he will not use to turn his mill and grind his wheat and corn. The burnt child dreads the

They dread They cleave And thus they And still the

fire. Men are but children of a larger growth. the various things that hurt and hinder them. to those that give them help and speed. come to find an ordered beauty in their lives. wonder is that, where the voice of the divine beseeching is so sweet and strong, men do not always listen to its prayer, that they so often disobey the laws which are already known, and are so indifferent to the discovery of those which, if discovered and obeyed, would bring them an assured felicity and an abiding peace.

Another prayer of God to men is that whose words are, to a wide extent, the same words that resound in that great prayer of the divine order which is continually making its appeal to men. The words are the same; but they are differently arranged, and so the meaning is different,— beauty, and not order. It is observation and analysis that attune the ear to the beseeching of the world as it is conceived by science in the harmony of its laws and adaptations; but the apprehension of beauty is synthetic. It is a flash, a revelation. Science has beauties of its own; but neither the telescope nor the microscope has anything in its field so beautiful as that which almost every night hangs over us, the beauty of the heavens as it strikes the naked eye, nothing so beautiful as the unanalyzed woods and waters, the grasses and the flowers, the clouds that make the morning and the evening fair, and sketch on the celestial blue a beauty rarer than its own. Is it not in all these things as if God did beseech us to co-operate with him, to resolve not to be satisfied with mere passive appropriation of the original beauty of the world, but go to work to make something

beautiful with our own hands, with our own brains, with our own shaping spirit of imagination? And to this prayer of the Eternal, as well as to the other, the answer has been often rich and full and grand. We call this answer art, and, like the divine commandment, it is exceedingly broad; for it includes painting, architecture, sculpture, poetry, and music. There are those who imagine that some of these are superfluous. What painting of the artist is as beautiful as the living, breathing beauty that we know in woods and fields, in skies and waters, in faces fair enough "to slay all a man's hoarded prudence at a blow"? Ah! but we want the beauty of the woods and fields to come and stay with us. We want to be reminded of these things when we are far away from them here in the city's loud and stunning tide of various care and crime, to know that they will wait for us until we come again. And, as for the beauty of fair faces, men are not privileged to look at more than one or two in any satisfying way. I know that there are portraits, too, so personal, so intimate, that, if we look at them too long, they seem to look at us with injured modesty and soft reproach. And, still, there is a difference between the painted and the real flame. Then, too, it should be said, the painter, the sculptor, never dreams that he is making something better than the living form or face. Only he wants to be a fellow-work' man with God, to renew the ancient rapture of the Almighty in the creative act; and it must not be forgotten that there are forms of art wherein there is, as it were, some elongation of the Almighty's arm, something achieved which he cannot achieve without the human help.

What is there in nature corresponding to the melodies and harmonies of Mozart and Mendelssohn and Beethoven and Wagner? Those who are wise in such things tell us that not even Shelley's lark or Keats's nightingale could sing one single chord, only a succession of notes, these certainly of a most rare and penetrating sweetness. And this mention of Shelley and Keats reminds us that the poet's art, as well as the musician's, is a distinct addition to the range of

natural beauty. Granted that not even Wordsworth could report half the beauty of the natural world; that no dream of fair women Tennyson might dream could equal the reality which daily walks abroad; that Shakspere's men and women have their match and shame in living Hamlets and Othellos, Portias and Cordelias. And, still, as all our sensuous perceptions of the outward universe are, as the psychologists assure us, non-resembling signs,— a truth which our own observation easily confirms,― so are the forms the poets use to express their fancy and imagination so many non-resembling signs; and one, without irreverence or impiety, may conceive the conscious God as finding a new pleasure in the creations of his poets, as, in a less degree, in a fine show of rhododendrons or chrysanthemums, such as you and I have often seen. And once they stirred my heart in such a way that I broke out into a little sonnet-song about them after this fashion:

O you great beauties, who can never know
How passing fair you are to look upon!
I, 'mid your glories slowly wandering on,
And almost faint with joy that you can glow
With hues so rich and varied, row on row,

A corner in my heart for him alone

Must keep who hath in your fair petals shown
Such things to us as never had been so
But for his loving patience, sweet and long;
Ay, and no less to the clear eye of God,
Who never yet in all his endless years,
Till you out-bloomed in colors pure as song,
Had seen such fairness springing from the sod
As this which fills our eyes with happy tears.

Well, so it happens that God's prayer of beauty has not gone unheeded altogether,— nay, but has had a large and wide response; and yet, when we remind ourselves what a prayer it is, full of what strong entreaty, pulsing through time and space for countless centuries, the answer to it has not been I think you will agree with me so very gener

ous or remarkable. To go about our city streets, to look into our Christmas windows, is to wonder whether men do not prefer ugliness to beauty, after all. That is, the most of them. They go on making ugly things,- ugly houses, ugly furniture, ugly clothes,— when they might make things beautiful and lovely with less trouble and expense.

But, you may say, all are not artists born, and very few are made. As with the poet of the proverb, so with all the rest. True, very true; and what then? Is there no answer

that those who are neither born artists nor made artists can make to the beseeching beauty of the world? Do not believe it.

"I saw the beauty of the world
Before me like a flag unfurled,—
The splendor of the morning sky
And all the stars in company.

I thought, How wonderful it is!

My soul said, There is more than this."

It is

And there is more,- the beauty of the inner life. true, as Milton said, that that also ought to be a true poem. Yes, a true picture and a statue white and pure; a temple, too, broad-based upon the earth, but lifting up a spire like Salisbury's into the heavenly blue; a piece of music full of wandering melodies, with a great harmony pervading all. It is true that there are such lives,- that they outnumber far the pictures and the poems, the symphonies and sonatas, the statues and cathedrals. It would go hard with us if they did not. And they are everywhere. "Even in a palace life may be well led." Even in a palace! It was an emperor who said it, and he said but what he knew. Even in a hovel, too. Even in the most ordinary slices of our city brick and stone, houses tipped up on end, like the micaceous slate and other strata of our New England hills. So, then, if we cannot make pictures and poems, why not do this better thing which is possible for you and me? As if God did beseech you, shine the stars of heaven, and the earth puts on her beauty ever fresh and new. Why make our

lives a blot, a stain, a smirch, on this beseeching loveliness? Why not take up the song of Whittier, and sing,

"Parcel and part of all,

I keep the festival."

And why not do more,-not merely sing as Whittier sang, but do as Whittier did? Why not?

But time would fail me if I should endeavor to enumerate the hundredth part of all the prayers which the beseeching God sends up to us from out the glorious meaning and the splendid pageant of the world. In the fore part of my sermon I spoke as if the new translation of my text, as though God were entreating by us," were something less suggestive and impressive than the former rendering, "as if God did beseech you." But now it comes to me that the new rendering goes back into the old, and carries it a step beyond, or, rather, furnishes it with a new and striking illustration. "As though God were entreating by us." That is the significance of all the great and good who have made the course of history beautiful and noble with their high examples and their holy trust.

"Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;

At bed and table they lord it o'er us
With looks of beauty and words of good."

In the traditional theology it is said that we have a mediator, an intercessor, with God. That is a doctrine which need not be examined at this present time. Meanwhile, how many mediators, how many intercessors, God has with us! all heavenly and mundane things, and then — immeasurable addition! — all human things as well.

"God's doors are men; the Pariah hind
Admits thee to the perfect mind.”

Yes, and admits the perfect mind to us. And, if the lowest, how much more the higher and the highest in their various