God has wrought us for it in the very act of making us what we are.  Human nature is an insoluble enigma, if this world is its only field.  Amidst all the waste, the mysterious waste, of creation, there is no more profligate expenditure of powers than that which is involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised.  If you think of what most of us do in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to consider the disproportion.  All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment.  They find in life a field for every power.  You and I do not.  ’The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places.’  They all correspond to their circumstances, but we have an infinitude of faculty lying half dormant in each of us, which finds no work at all in this present world.  And so, looking at men as they are with eternity in their hearts, with natures that go reaching out towards infinity, the question comes up:  ’Wherefore hast Thou made all men in vain?  What is the use of us, and why should we be what we are, if there is nothing for us except this poor present?’ God, or whoever made us, has made a mistake; and strangely enough, if we were not made, but evolved, evolution has worked out faculties which have no correspondence with the things around them.

Life and man are an insoluble enigma except on one hypothesis, and that is that this is a nursery-ground, and that the plants will be pricked out some day, and planted where they are meant to grow.  The hearts that feel after absolute and perfect love, the spirits that can conceive the idea of an infinite goodness, the dumb desires, the blank misgivings that wander homeless amidst the narrowness of this poor earth, all these things proclaim that there is a region where they will find their nutriment and expatiate, and when we look at a man we can only say, He that hath wrought him for an infinite world, and an endless communion with a perfect good, is God.

Still further, another field of the divine operation to this end is in what we roughly call ‘providences.’  What is the meaning of all this discipline through which we are passed, if there is nothing to be disciplined for?  What is the good of an apprenticeship if there is no journeyman’s life to come after it, where the powers that have been slowly acquired shall be nobly exercised upon broader fields?  Why should men be taken, as it were, and, like the rough iron from the ground,

  ’Be heated hot with hopes and fears,
  And plunged in baths of hissing tears,
  And battered with the shocks of doom,’