all other earthly things.  Earth, air, water; light and heat; all the successively existing worlds, mineral, vegetable, animal, spiritual; grass, herbs, corn, fruit-trees, cattle and sheep, and all other living creatures; all are upheld for the use and the support of man.  And, then, all that is in man himself is in him for the end and the use of his heart.  All his bodily senses; all his bodily members; every fearfully and wonderfully made part of his body and of his mind; all administer to his heart.  She is the sovereign and sits supreme.  And she is worthy and is fully entitled so to sit.  For there is nothing on the earth greater or better than the heart, unless it is the Creator Himself, who planned and executed the heart for Himself and not for another with Him.  ’The body exists,’ says a philosophical biologist of our day, ’to furnish the cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food.  The higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but it is just this that is most precious and significant—­all of which shows His unrolling purpose.  It is the last that alone explains all that went before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present.  God before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still preparing all; God in all is profoundly evident.’  Yes, profoundly evident to profound minds, and experimentally and sweetly evident to religious minds, and to renewed and loving and holy hearts.

2.  For fame and for state a palace, while for strength it might be called a castle.  In sufficiently ancient times the king’s palace was always a castle also.  David’s palace on Mount Zion was as much a military fortress as a royal residence; and King Priam’s palace was the protection both of itself and of the whole of the country around.  In those wild times great men built their houses on high places, and then the weak and endangered people gathered around the strongholds of the powerful, as we see in our own city.  Our own steep and towering rock invited to its top the castle-builder of a remote age, and then the exposed country around began to gather itself together under the shelter of the bourg.  And thus it is that the military engineering of the Holy War makes that old allegorical book most excellent to read, not only for common men like you and me, who are bent on the fortification and the defence of our own hearts, but for the military historians of those old times also, for the experts of to-day also, and for all good students of fortification.  And the New Testament of the Divine peace itself, as well as the Old Testament so full of the wars of the Lord—­they both support and serve as an encouragement and an example to our spiritual author in the elaboration of his military allegory.  Every good soldier of Jesus Christ has by heart the noble paradox of Paul to the Philippians—­that the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall