Too long the Christian world has accepted the legendary Hebraic God, in the place of our real “Father who art in heaven.”  The teachings of Jesus—­the testimony he gave of the love of God, if taken to the heart—­must dispose forever of the perception of God as a Being of cruelty and revenge, and given over to low attributes.  The Creator of the universe—­“without whom was nothing made”—­manifests to us through the action of eternal and unchangeable law.  This is demonstrated to us by and through his vice-gerents, the angels of his who do his pleasure.  Down, down from the supernal regions, from the supernal plane of being, comes the Divine Mandate which is made known to the human soul through the instrumentality that can penetrate the surroundings, and best make manifest the inspiration, the warning, or the perception of the undeviating law which holds all human experience and its sure results in its care and keeping.  And those who dwell upon the threshold of the door which opens upon the life eternal are those who have loved and who still do love the children of earth—­fathers, mothers, children, friends who have walked the earth by our sides, and whom no starry crowns, and no glorious heaven could tempt away from the work of blessing and comforting the sorrowing souls still left on earth to mourn the loss of their loving companionship, and sympathy.  And this is God’s “Special Providence” made manifest in our lives whenever and wherever we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

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Once the soul really looks forth and sees, there can be, after that, no more sleeping.  All is effort, weighing, balancing, deciding, groping painfully along, or running swiftly the race, bracing against fearful odds, or bravely out-riding the storm.  Taking it all as it comes, it is increasing action, motion, change.

HUMAN DESTINY.

Confucius, long considered the oldest and wisest of all the ancient teachers, when he was consulted upon an abtruse point of ethics, said in effect:  “Ask the ancients.  I do not know.”  The results of modern research are constantly undermining the first-recorded ideas concerning the age, and the degree of scientific and religious culture of the race, and we may well feel like turning from the authenticated historical records with which we are familiar to ask of the old, old world the occult meanings of the messages graven on pillar and on chiselled stone.  The records which have survived the storm and stress of the ages bringing down to us unexpected knowledge of the lives, the achievements, and the histories of far-off, long-buried, hidden and lost peoples, communities, and even distinct personalities, were carefully planned and exactly executed by those who, already perceiving the mutability of all human life, and all its affairs, who—­in a word—­realizing that “the fashion of this world passeth away,”