VI.-UNREALIZED IDEALS.

BY J. SPENCER Kennard, D.D., CHICAGO, ILL.

THE ideal and the real should not be regarded as naturally contrasted things. Strictly, the ideal is the conceived but unborn or undeveloped real. The steamship floating in the sea of a Fulton's thought was as real as the Furnesia plowing the Atlantic. The ideal is the real not yet translated into the actual-hovering as a beckoning angel in the horizon.

The ministry of the Gospel, beyond any other calling and character, suggests to cach aspirant an ideal life and work. His devout soul, seized upon by the lambent flame of religious enthusiasm, evolves this infinite fair creation, and Hope paints in the distant years its full realization. I speak, of course, of the minister who is born, not madewho possesses in his very regeneration the apostolic call, impulse and aim.

What true preacher of the Gospel at mid-life does not recall the fair portraiture of the man, the ambassador, the priest of God and men, the pastor, which adorned in his early years the picture-gallery of his imagination-looming up in the meditative walk or in the reverie of the old study-chair in seminary halls. What a noble portrait it was! How pure from earthly stain, how full of seraphic fervor, how brave and unselfish in service, how happy in simplicity of motive and sacrificial poverty, how dignified its humble bearing, how salutary and loving in conversation with men, how intimate and constant in communion with God! There stood your ideal in the pulpit, with mind spiritually illumined, soul rapt into eloquent utterance by the sublimities of your theme, with voice modulated to the thunders of rebuke, the pathos of entreaty, and the clarion tones of triumphant faith, you stood before the eager and silent throngs, an apostle of salvation confessed! Such was the ideal, or something in moral symmetry and inspiration grander than my words can express. Alas! how distant as yet we are from its full-rounded realization! In truth, to most men, middle life reveals a rather commonplace reality for all their early dreaming and aspiration, with broken wings limps painfully along, with growing sense of dissatisfaction through failure to apprehend that for which we were apprehended of Christ as his ministers.

Why have we not attained our ideal? If we can answer that question, there is hope of some higher character and work still left for us. Doubtless the causes of disappointment are many, and do not all exist in any one case.

The idealist in any form of merely earthly aim is doomed to disappointment; for life, if divorced from the spiritual and eternal, is essentially illusive. In so far as its pivotal point is self and its horizon

earth, life itself is a vain show, a dance of shadows, an eager chase of mocking and receding beauties.

Could we personify the noblest ideal of the merely "natural man,” we should need to paint a viper sleeping in its bosom, destined to waken one time or other, and a cypress-wreath upon its brow, be it never so proudly lifted. But the ideal of the man whose life is hid with Christ in God, and who has become partaker of a divine nature, cannot be too lofty or radiant in moral features-nor has it any inherent element of decay or disappointment, for He shall perfect that which concerneth us. But truly the function and aim of the minister of Christ is essentially and immeasurably grand:

"It well might fill an angel's heart,

It filled the Savior's hands."

It has in it all the features of immortal worth and beauty. In it there is scope for unlimited development in every affection and faculty. Its object overtops all others, its motives blend the human and divine, its force combines the finest elements of native elo

quence with the anointing of a celestial fire. Nor is there anything in the ideal of Christly or apostolic character and service which the most fervid fancy may paint that can outreach the reasonable and practical, so long as it transcends not the patterns outlined for us in the Scriptures. It can be transferred to the sphere of actual experience without dimming its lustre or shrinking its symmetrical proportions. Concrete illustrations of such ideals are seen in a Paul, a Chrysostom, a Chalmers, a Simeon, a Baxter, a Martyn, a Judson, a Wesley, and many a man unknown beyond his humble parish save to the recording angel. Luminous witnesses these, shining like sentinel characters all along the Church's history, telling that the ideal ministry may become the real—at least, carries in it no natural defeat.

Why, then, do most of us fall strangely short of it? Perhaps our portraiture has not been drawn from a divine model, nor from any true standard, but is simply the outgrowth of egoism and worldly ambition.

I was reading of that disappointed and misanthropic genius Doré, whose illustrations in black and white have won for him a wide reputation. Starting with a sensitive organization, and tender affections, he became the victim of ambition for praise as a painter in oil. It was characteristic of him to ignore model and law, and to develop his powers according to his own capricious fancy. "My mind is my model for everything," he once said. And then he loved Paris rather than humanity at large, and craved her honors, and worked his brain. and hand in hope against hope of receiving a tribute from her artistic tribunal commensurate with his genius. His egoism led him to think no laudation could exceed his merit, he made no effort to cultivate humility; he aimed not so much to be true to nature's sim

plicity as to startle the world by the number and variety of his original conceptions and the rapidity of his execution. He aimed to create a sensation and secure a medal from the French Academy. He created a sensation, he failed to gain the medal, and he died of a broken heart. Might not his ambition and his failure find many a parallel in the ranks of the ministry? Are there not men now living and scarcely grey-headed, whose once tender and aspiring soul has been embittered, whose passion for greatness has scorched the freshness out of their affections, who are growing prematurely old and fretful, have even abandoned hope, because success has eluded them; and has it not been because their ideal was a brilliant vanity?

With some, while their ideal may have been noble, failure is to be traced to mental and physical indolence, a vagrancy of habit, or, what is worse, to moral cowardice. There may be a sentimental yearning for ideal excellence: in fond revery the poetic temperament imagines a career and character invested with the fairest features; but the nerveless will does not impel to action, self-indulgence procrastinates, and the heart lolls on its pillow of dreams when it should be patiently plodding on towards its goal.

A pleasant nest and popularity following in the wake of talent, a comfortable income and a loving family, the luxury of desultory reading and the lounge with congenial friends, all combine to cool the fervid glow of spiritual aspiration, and weaken the high resolution to climb to a unique and original superiority in character and life-work. Sometimes an environment of sheer worldly cares, the coarse necessity of making a small salary support a large family with liberal tastes, the grinding burden of debt, anxieties arising from the crookedness of parishioners, or the total depravity of things that cannot be made to go right in church-life, and perhaps physical maladies or family sorrows, all may prevail to chill our enthusiasm, and turn our Pegasus into the wingless toiler on the tow-path. Perhaps the spirit and example of the people by whom we are surrounded, their pell mell chase for material wealth and luxury and ease, for condition rather than character, the social atmosphere of the commonplace, selfish and uninspiring men, even in the ministerial office, with whom we are habitually thrown in contact, tends to lower us to their level and generate a secret skepticism as to the reasonableness of our early ideal. We learn to doubt whether its attainment is practical by us; and, if so, whether the world wants such characters or could appreciate them; and so we grow shy of the romantic, and suspicious of our guardian-angel, who yet may be beckoning us to spiritual superiority. Sometimes our ideal is not attained because its salient features are adapted to an obsolete order of things, or a foreign environment. The susceptible student finds in the seminary library the memoirs and works of a Chrysostom, Knox, Pascal,

Savonarola, La Cordaire, Xavier, Pastor Harms, or Edward Irving, and he is fascinated. From one or all he selects features which he combines in his Model Preacher and Pastor. But his attempts to train his thought and feeling to journey along the way their "diaries" indicate, or, later on, to work upon their methods, to train his flock to the church-life they secured, or to dare enterprises to which they were impelled, all fail. His preaching in their style, dealing with phases of thought and habits of life prevalent with the people whom they ministered to, proves to be in large part beating the air. He lives in a different age; new phases of temptation, new forms of religious experience have to be dealt with; the Church to which he is attached have other traditions and usages; other issues have arisen, and new adaptations to the actual wants of the people must follow. The splendid orations of a Bossuet or a Jeremy Taylor, the stately movement of a Robert Hall or Chalmers, would be found as incongruous and worthless to him as would the armor of a Saul to the stripling David.

It is well for the man that he has not attained his ideal in such a case, for, if successful, it would only be to find himself out of harmony with his period, and a mystic, or a philosopher, or a controversialist, in an age and among people who need and expect a style of man and preacher adapted to their actual life and current thinking, suffering and struggle.

But when our ideal is just, and in harmony with our native talents and mental make-up, then we are to cherish and guard it from decay; we must strenuously keep our souls alive to its pursuit, we must not lose our faith in its attainment:

"To doubt would be disloyalty,

To falter would be sin."

Emerson said, regarding the oft despised "air castle": "Build your castle in the air; where else should castles be built? Only see to it now that you put foundations under it." Cloud-built towers, piled up by winds and adorned by sunbeams, will fade when the sun sets, and fall into wreck when another breeze strikes them. But ideals of character and life-work have no such airy genesis. They are children of the heart and intellect, and that, too, when the affections and the soul are healthy and normal, unwearied and unsophisticated-yea, they are oft begotten of the Spirit of God. They are essential to the natural and best development of character, and the fairest, noblest forms of service. Mere ambition for the rewards of success will lead to unspiritual tone, narrowness of sympathy, and a distortion of moral symmetry. For all that is most valuable and enduring in life, we must be carried above ourselves by some inspiring example or conception of the virtues in transfiguration; some pure, uplifting aim must be kept like a pole-star constantly before us. Let the minister not forget to read memoirs of the great and consecrated souls that have adorned

the Church: the higher illuminati, whose biography and work, whose struggles and victories, have rescued human nature itself from ignominy, have made the Church revered by thinking-men, and constrained us thankfully to say, as we studied their portraits: "I too am a minister of the Gospel."

Your ideal, my earnest yet discouraged brother, is not yet actualized in your experience! Well, remember there is, after all, something to be glad of even in that. Thorwalsden, it is said, on the completion of his finest work, surveyed it with a feeling of sadness from the very fact that it satisfied him. That exquisite genius, that severe critic of himself, could see nothing to be improved, and he interpreted the fact as a token that his talent had reached its culmination, and that henceforth the fires of aspiration would begin to pale. Doubtless, there is a secret providential reason for the fact that your ideal still eludes your grasp. Faith and Hope must have a distant goal, or fall asleep in bowers of ease and self-sufficiency. Hence it has been said: "In

our life there is always some dream yet to be fulfilled. We have not come to the point which we feel sure has yet to be reached. Thus God lures us from year to year up the steep hills and along roads flat and cheerless. Presently, we think the dream will come true; presently -in one moment more-to-morrow at latest; and, as the years rise and fall, the hope abiding in the heart and singing with tender sweetness; then the end, the weary sickness, the farewell, the last breath-and the dream that was to have shaped itself on earth welcomes us, as the angel that guarded our life, into the fellowship of heaven."* This, which was written of life's ideal in general, is intensely true of the minister's hope. No loftiest spirit in the Church's history of heroes ever thought he had reached his ideal; the noblest and most unselfish mourned to the last their failure; but each holy and prayerful effort brings us nearer to our goal, and each faithful toiler shall be welcomed with the Master's word, "Well done!"

* Jos. Parker.

VII.—THE PUBLIC READING OF THE SCRIPTURES.

BY S. H. KELLOGG, D.D., TORONTO, CANADA.

It is the custom in all Protestant churches to read a portion of Holy Scripture at each public service. In most congregations, however, little seems to be made of it, and it is doubtful if, on the whole, there is any part of the service from which the people generally derive less benefit. A chapter more or less is indeed read, sometimes well, too often poorly. Very commonly a passage is selected which contains the text of the sermon which is to follow, or, at least, has some bearing upon it. But, as the congregation do not know what is coming, they do not have much advantage from this. As a general thing, whatever be the reason, the public reading of the Scriptures is a part of the service in which most of the people seem to feel little concern. In too many cases it is impossible to mistake, as one looks over the congregation, the manifest lack of attention and of interest in the Word which is read.