his bounty alike upon the evil and the good, let us take the gracious lesson of forgiveness to our hearts. Why should we hate like. Satan when we may forgive like God? Why should we cherish malice, envy, and all uncharitableness in our breasts? I know that some people use us despitefully and show themselves our enemies, but why should we fill our hearts with their bitterness and inflame our wounds with their poison? This world is too sweet and fair to darken it with the clouds of anger. This life is too short and precious to waste it in bearing that heaviest of all burdens, a grudge. Forgive and forget if you can; but forgive anyway ; and pray heartily and kindly for all men, for thus only shall we be the children of our Father who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

66

X.

THE HORIZON

'The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Deuteronomy xxix. 29.

"The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

THERE is no landscape which is not bounded by the horizon. This fact is the symbol of a profound truth. It reminds us that our powers are finite and limited. However high we may climb to win a wider outlook, our vision will touch its confines and the known will be ringed about by the unknown. This is the Doctrine of the Hori

zon.

Now the text applies this truth to religion. It speaks of things revealed and declares that they belong to us. And in speaking thus it appeals to our religious instinct, our spiritual common-sense. For a religion

which contained no real disclosure of the divine to our minds and hearts would have no meaning and therefore no value. The

horizon must include something. It is idle to talk of the religious sentiments of awe, reverence, humility, and gratitude as if they could exist without any known motive or object. That of which we are, and must remain, altogether ignorant can never influence our belief, our worship, or our conduct.

A religion all mystery is a light all darkness. It does not help us in the least when a philosopher spells the Unknowable with a capital U and advises us to worship It. For when we ask him what to believe about It, he can only answer, "Believe that you can never know what It is; " and when we ask him what to say to It, he can only answer "Say nothing;" and when we ask him what It would have us do for Its glory, he can only answer, "You must find out for yourself, for It will never tell you." A religion of this kind, a religion of the Unknowable, is a large name for something which has no existence it is an idle word dancing recklessly on the brink of nonsense. Certainly it is not the religion of the Bible which discloses a God who has made himself known unto men; nor of Paul, who said, "Whom there