its fruitage grief and pain.  Temptations and evil purposes are the chief blights.  When the fiery passion hath passed the soul is like a city swept by a conflagration.  Each night we go before the judgment seat.  Reason hears the case; memory gives evidence; conscience convicts, each faculty goes to the left; self-respect pushes us out of paradise into the desert; and the angels of our better nature guard the gates with flaming swords.

A journey among men is like a journey through some land after the cyclone has made the village a heap and the harvest fields a waste.  An outlook upon the generations reminds us of a highway along which the retreating army has passed, leaving abandoned guns and silent cannon with men dead and dying.  Travelers from tropical Mexico describe ruined cities and lovely villages away from which civilized men journey, leaving temples and terraced gardens to moss and ivy.  The deserted valleys are rich in tropic fruits and the climate soft and gentle.  Yet Aztecs left the garden to journey northward into the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.  Often for the soul paradise is not before, but behind.

Shakespeare condenses all this in “King Lear.”  Avarice closes the palace doors against the white-haired King.  Greed pushes him into the night to wander o’er the wasted moor, an exiled king, uncrowned and uncared for.  In such hours garden becomes desert.  This is the drama of man’s life.  The soul thirsts for sympathy.  It hungers for love.  Baffled and broken it seeks a great heart.  For the pilgrim multitudes Moses was the shadow on a great rock in a weary land.  For poor, hunted David, Jonathan was a covert in time of storm.  Savonarola, Luther, Cromwell sheltered perishing multitudes.  Solitary in the midst of the vale in which death will soon dig a grave for each of us stands the immortal Christ, “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”

That Infinite Being who hath made man in his own image hath endowed the soul with full power to transform the desert into an oasis.  The soul carries wondrous implements.  It is given to reason to carry fertility where ignorance and fear and superstition have wrought desolation.  It is given to inventive skill to search out wellsprings and smite rocks into living water.  It is given to affection to hive sweetness like honeycombs.  It is given to wit and imagination to produce perpetual joy and gladness.  It is given to love in the person of a Duff, a Judson, and a Xavier to transform dark continents.  Great is the power of love!  “No abandoned boy in the city, no red man in the mountains, no negro in Africa can resist its sweet solicitude.  It undermines like a wave, it rends like an earthquake, it melts like a fire, it inspires like music, it binds like a chain, it detains like a good story, it cheers like a sunbeam.”  No other power is immeasurable.  For things have only partial influence over living men.  Forests, fields, skies, tools, occupations,