The Warriors | Page 7

act of sin, to penitence, and to an earnest desire to pattern after God.
4. Jesus calls us by our sorrows, Jesus calls us by our dreams. He thrills us by each high aim that life inspires. His voice is one of understanding, of tenderness, of human appeal. How could we love Jesus if He did not sympathize with our ideals? But here is a Divine One in whose sight we are not visionary; who lovingly guards our least hope; who welcomes our faintest spiritual insight; who takes an interest in our social plans, and points out to us the great kingdom that is to be. Christ lays hold of the divine that is in us, and will not let us go.
5. Jesus calls us by our latent gifts and powers. Which of us has ever exhausted his possibilities? Which of us is all that he might be?
It is an impressive thought, that nothing in the universe ever gets used up. It changes form, motion, semblance,--but the force, the energy, neither wastes nor dies away. Air--it is as fresh as the air that blew over the Pharaohs. Sun--it is as undimmed as the sun that looked down on the completion of Cheops. Earth--it is as unworn as the earth that was trodden by the cavemen.
No generation can ever bequeath to us a single new material atom. The race is ever in old clothes. Nor can we hand down to others one atom which was not long ere we were born. Yet the vitality of the universe is being constantly increased, and this increase is also permanent. God has a great deal more to work with now than a thousand years ago.
For not all energy is material. With each birth there comes a new force into the world, and its influence never dies. The body is born of ages past, of the material stores of centuries; but the soul, in its living, thinking, working power, is a new phase of energy added to the energy of the race.
This fact confers on each individual man a strange impressiveness and power. It gives a new significance to the fact that I am. I am something different from what has been, or ever shall be. In the great whirling myriads, I am distinguished and apart. I am an appreciable factor in universal development and a being of elemental power. By every true thought of mine the race becomes wiser. By every right deed, its inheritance of tradition is uplifted; by every high affection, its horizon of love is enlarged. We can bequeath to others this new spiritual energy of our lives.
This thought gives us a new zest for life. There is an appetite which is of the soul. It is this wish for growth, for the development of our powers, for a larger life for ourselves and for those who shall come after us.
Is there any one who wishes to stay always where he is to-day?--to be always what he is this morning? Beyond the hill-top lies our dream. Not all the voices that call men from place to place are audible ones. We hear whispers from a far-off leader; we are beckoned by an unseen guide. Out of ancestry, tradition, talent, and training each departs to his own way.
What calls is not largeness of place--it is largeness of ideal. To each of us, thinking of this one and that one who has taken a large part in the shaping of the world, there comes a feeling: Beside all these I am in a narrow way! What can I think that shall be worth the consideration of the race? What can I do that shall be a stepping-stone to progress? What can I hope that shall unseal other eyes to the universal glory, comfort others in the universal pain? We say: I do not want to be mewed up here, while others are out where thrones and empires are sweeping by! I do not want to parse verbs, add fractions, and mark ledgers, while others are the poets, the singers, the statesmen, the rulers, and the wealth-controllers of the world! We wish to step out of the trivial experience into that which is significant. Each day brings uneasiness of soul. "Man's unhappiness," says Carlyle, "as I construe it, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite." Says Tennyson:
"_It is not death for which we pant, But life, more life, and fuller, that we want_."
These aspirations are prophetic. Does a clod-hopper dream? We move toward our desires. The wish for growth is but the call of Jesus to our souls. We sometimes hear of the "limitations of life." What are they? Who set them? Man himself, not God. The