doorsteps, they gather themselves into knots as if to gossip and to talk in the language of flowers by the doorways—­utterly beautiful!  You look at the city with wonder and astonishment—­with desire.  How wonderful, you say, that church tower covered with its flowers; that altar covered with flowers not gathered and placed in vases, but with Nature’s own hand arranging an offering to the living God.  These streets that sound no footfall of an angry multitude, but that listen to the footfall of a quiet nature—­yes, it is beautiful in the early morning.  But stay there until the later afternoon, when the fog begins to gather; stay there until night-time, when the miasma begins to rise; stay there until morning, and you are in danger of destruction from poison.  It is a land of flowery expression; but it is not a land of real life.

My friends, the activity of man, the poetic faculty of man, all the gifts and all the capacities of man—­they are beautiful, they are touching, they are attractive; but if they are all, if they express all that you have to offer, and all that is in you to feel, then they are hollow, or they-are poisonous, and like that city of flowers.  Why?  Because there is in you and me a soul that lies behind our thought, altho there is more than feeling there—­a soul that supports our will, and is more than our volition.  It thinks, but is not thought; it feels, but is not feeling; it wills, but is not volition.  There is something deeper in man than his esthetic desire or his active practise, something deeper beneath us all than anything that finds expression, certainly than anything that finds satisfaction.  There is the self; there is myself, yourself; there is that strange, mysterious life of loneliness which stands, and thinks, and judges, and appraises.  When, by divine grace, we escape from the voice of the crowd, and from the cry of custom, from the delirium of desire, that poor lonely self within us pleads to us in a cry like the call of the starveling crying to the rich man that passes by, “Oh, will you gratify desire?  Oh, will you gratify pleasure?  Oh, will you stimulate activity, and will you leave me alone?  I, yourself, your very self, the foundation of your life, the permanent expression of your immortality—­I must be satisfied, and being infinite and immortal, I know but one satisfaction:  ’My soul is athirst for God, for the living God; when shall I come, and appear before the presence of God?’”

If that be true, or if it be approximately true, dear friends, let us ask ourselves this morning these questions.  Let us be quite practical.  What do you mean, you may say for a moment, by the thirst for God?  I remember long ago in Paris, in conversation with one whom I deem one of the greatest modern statesmen, tho not one of the most successful—­I remember, when a mere boy, talking to that thoughtful man just at the moment when he was standing amidst the ruins of his activity, and gazing with the placid spirit