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There is nothing so unlovely as a selfish, isolated life, because it is the fundamental necessity of our social being that we should help each other. man who does not yield himself to this necessity makes himself a wart, a wen, a hideous crescence on the face of human life.

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Let us then not be afraid of caring overmuch for beauty. Let us cleave fast to it wherever we behold it. Let us see to it, if possible, that it looks out upon us from our walls, and spreads itself upon our floors. Let us hearken to it in the voice of mighty poets and in the great tone-masters' glorious harmonies, but God forbid that any of these things should be a refuge from the paltriness and meanness and frivolity of our habitual life, but let them first of all remind us that we should make our lives picture and music, eloquence and song. We should, and, if we will, we can. I care not who you are, however humble your position, however commonplace your tasks, if you will but persistently obey those laws of truth and righteousness which are not far from any one of you, and which forever wait on your desire to know their secret, and which grow more clear with every day's obedience; if you will but obey those laws, your daily life shall glow with a diviner beauty than of any picture that was ever hung on wall, than of any poem that was ever written, of any music that was ever played, simply because the actual beauty of a faithful, tender, and heroic life is more to God and man than the report or fiction of the most splendid Ideeds that have been done or dreamed since human life began.

THE EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.

I AM indebted for my subject and my text this morning to Mr. M. D. Conway: my subject, the Earthward Pilgrimage, being the title of a little book published by him some years ago; my text, the title of its leading chapter, "How I left the world to come for that which is." These words, you will observe, are pretty nearly an exact inversion of the title of Bunyan's famous allegory, which he called, "The Pilgrim's Progress from this world to that which is to come," and in which he describes, in the similitude of a dream, the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and his safe arrival in the desired country. It is a wonderful story that he tells-one that may well keep children from their play and old men from the chimney-corner, one whose grotesque and solemn phantasms were to my young life a source of inexpressible though fearful joy, the charm of which will long outlast the special system of theology which colors every page, even as the charm of Homer has outlasted the faith of men in his Olympian deities. The language of the book, like

that of Shakspere and Milton, is ploughed into the world. It is an armory from which thousands of moralists and preachers still draw their happiest illustrations. Hardly a day goes by and we do not hear something about the Slough of Despond, or Doubting Castle, or Vanity Fair, or the Hill of Difficulty, or the dreadful burden that fell off from the Pilgrim's shoulders and was seen no more. Whatever may come of Bunyan's system of theology, here as incarnate as the Roman Catholic system of Dante's time in his "Divine Comedy," and whatever systems dominate the future, we shall not lack for antitypes of Pliable and Worldly-Wiseman and Hate-Light and Ready-to-Halt and Talkative. If you do not know Mr. Great-heart you are not so fortunate as I, nor so unfortunate if you have not encountered Giant Despair at one time or another, nor again so fortunate if you cannot count a Mercy and a Hopeful and a Faithful too among your dearest friends.

There are more senses than one in which the pilgrimage of man from this world to that which is to come is still a subject of engrossing interest, and may well be so.

"Solemn before us looms the dark portal,

Goal of all mortal.

Stars silent rest over us;

Graves under us silent."

Death is a fact of our experience, so notable, so inevitable, that it may not be blinked. I find more tolerable the disposition that dwells upon it

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with morbid earnestness than the cheap sentimentalism which seeks to bury it under flowers of rhetoric, as under roses and forget-me-nots the poor inanimate husk of our mortality. I have but little patience with the circumlocutions to which we resort in conversation, in obituary notices, and in mortuary inscriptions, to express the simple fact of death. Let us be more manly and honest and straightforward about this. Let us not pretend that death is altogether lovely, for it is not, whatever faith we have in life and love beyond.

That cheeks which mantled with love's rosy hue;

That feet which wanted nothing else to do

But run upon love's errands, this and this;
That hands so fair they had not seemed amiss

Reached down by angels through the deeps of blue-
That all of these so deep in earth should lie
While season after season passeth by ;

That things which are so sacred and so sweet
The hungry roots of tree and plant should eat ;

Oh for one hour to see as thou dost see,

My God, how great the recompense must be !

If some could have their way the fact of death would be so buried under sugared phrases that all of its enormous pathos would be gone, and there would not be left a yard of ground for men to plant courageous feet upon. I must confess that I like Bryant's Thanatopsis because it so manfully accepts without any shuffling or equivocation the colossal fact of death, calls it by its name, and then embraces it with noble resignation. This seems to me a hundred times truer and better than to mask the solemn face of death

with the insipid features of a smiling faun. It seems to me that that philosophy of life is condemned already from which the opportunity for a hard and lofty courage is excluded. For all our flimsy rhetoric, life is not "roses, roses all the way."

And so in this most literal sense of all the journey from this life to that which is to come, down through the valley of the shadow, may well be made the subject of much serious reflection.

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as with this most literal sense so with the most ideal. What but a pilgrimage from this life to another and a better is, or should be, all of this mortal life of ours? Our City of Destruction—what is it but our present ignorance and selfishness? Our City Celestial, what is it but the ideal of beauty, truth, and good, toward which we should forever yearn and strive. And, between this and that, what sloughs of despond, what doubting castles, what hills of difficulty, and what glib companions to persuade us that we should be satisfied with something short of that which is, we know, our only proper goal; yes, but what mounts of vision also on the way; what stalwart arms to hold us up in days of weariness; what men and women to believe in us when we can hardly in ourselves! So in this high ideal sense life is a pilgrimage, and from this world to one that is to come--a pilgrimage so long and arduous, beset with so many dangers, rich with so many opportunities, that the genius of a Bunyan were inadequate to tell of all its wonderful significance.

It was not in this sense that Bunyan wrote of leaving this world for that which is to come, nor

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