X. THE MEASURING REED. In the visions of God brought He me into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very high mountain, by which was as the frame of a city on the south. And He brought me thither, and, behold, there was a man whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand and a measuring reed; and he stood in the gate. EZEKIEL xl. 2, 3. T is a complex and mysterious thing, — this IT human life which it is appointed us to live. At first glance it seems as if it were simply the outflowing of ourselves from day to day, very much as water flows from a jar, without effort or design or law of movement. The element of choice, the element of chance plays such an important part in every human life, the choices are so capricious, the chances are so uncertain, that it seems as if it were impossible to recognize in any life a persistent force of which it was the out growth; to find in it anything that could be called its law. Day What Take the history of a day, or the larger history of a life from the cradle to the grave; what subtle breaths of desire, of affection and repulsion determine its movements! What accidents, casual contacts, unexpected pressures of circumstance carve its outlines! by day the tapestry is woven. We cannot stop the play of the loom. But what a wilderness of aimless lines comes out in the fabric! a blur of unfinished patterns, overlying each other! What a tangle of broken threads! This is true of some lives more than of others; but in ordinary human life, as it flows out from us and around us, there is such a complexity of forces, and such an elasticity and spontaneity of movement, that at first glance it seems difficult to recognize it as the product of law. But a deeper glance reveals to us the persistent and inexorable action of law in the shaping of our life. Indeed it is easy to formulate a theory of life in which it seems as if it were all law, nothing but law, law that crushed all freedom and spontaneity out of life. This happens when you try to reduce life to a department of physics. You find everywhere law; only the law lies not so much in the life, as in the things that press upon it and give it direction. The water that flows from a jar falls and sparkles and runs on the ground with no choice of its own. Every drop is the slave of law. So it seems when we look upon life and treat it as a chapter of mechanics; as if it were simply the product of the forces that beat upon it, as if the measure of the forces gave the measure of the life, as if the colors and shapes it takes in its outflow were all determined by the angle of the sunbeam that strikes it, and the lay of the ground where it falls. According to this theory, the spontaneity that life seems to possess, its freedom of play, its sense of choice, are all an illusion. It moves simply as it yields to the pressure of a force from without. The forces, it is true, are complex. There is antagonism and interplay. This produces the crossing lines and the blurred patterns; but every life, as it unrolls, whatever its strength or weakness, whatever its |