insatiable ambition, became the slave of the exacting situation into which his genius raised him; obliged incessantly to plot and counter-plot, to distrust and deceive, without one moment of sweet peace, one moment of ingenuous faith in men, one moment of innocent joy; and when his eagle heart broke on the lone rock in the sea, the last cry of his despair might have been, "I fancied I had gained the whole world, but it has profited me nothing! Wretched delusion, farewell!"

Coleridge, whose marvellous genius seemed intuitively to grasp the intellectual universe and use its contents at pleasure, fell under the dominion of opium. That accursed drug stole the natural man from his nature, unhinged and blasted his thrice-royal mind, devastated his life with an almighty blight, turned every friendly sympathy or appeal poured as oil into his wounds into oil of vitriol, and set a thousand ghosts gibbering after his remorseful steps, Aha, Son of the Morning, how art thou fallen with thy glorious schemes! Thus the proud world-monarchy of his genius profited him nothing, because he did not keep his soul in tune, with duty as the key-note.

The topmost king among the nations to-day, who sees all the crowned heads of the earth ranged below his own, who has won his way to that dizzy eminence by all sorts of means, fair and foul, especially by a transcendent ability to rule, who sees the baseness and fickleness of the ungrateful crowds that eddy around the foot of the social fabric, who understands perfectly well the envious hate with which he is regarded, how fatal it would be to place any confidence in the selfish plotters around him, with what eager relish, on any change of fortune, they would see him dragged through the streets like a dead dog,—so far as happiness and the choicest good of life are concerned, what a splendid bargain he would make if he could exchange conditions with a secluded, rich-souled poet, who, remote from the tur moil of politics, free from every galling passion, loves his fellow-men, enjoys the beauty of nature, adores his God, and leads a life as peaceful as a lily in a mountain-pond, as happy as a lark mounting from the dew to sing on the rosy edge of a cloud!

It is true that the prerogatives of the greatest positions give no sufficient compensations for what these terrible temptations, responsibilities, and devouring cares take away. And I verily believe, if the secrets of all hearts could be truly read by all men, far more would wish to come down from lofty seats than to climb up from lowly ones. And yet, let us not fall into the vulgar fallacy of underrating the prizes of wealth, power, and knowledge, nor into the more vulgar wrong of railing at them. Accurate discrimination is needed; for the exact truth alone is a safe guide. The enjoyment of the uses of the wealth of the rich, of the wisdom of the learned, of the authority of the powerful, of the love of the affectionate, of the devoutness of the pious, this is the essential good, at bottom, really coveted by all; this is the genuine conquest of the world. If this be truly possessed, the outer symbols of it are unimportant. If these be not possessed, all those symbols-money, knowledge, position, fame, genius - are empty shadows or galling taunts. Surely, if we must choose between the two, it is better to be poor and happy than to be rich and miserable; ignorant and contented, than learned and repining; obscure and blessed, than illustrious and accursed. But it is best to be rich and happy, wise and contented, illustrious and blessed. Reconciliation of goods is superior to contradiction of goods. Better, infinitely better, lose the world and save the soul, than gain the world and lose the soul, if one must be elected. But, really, this is a false alternative. It is a sophistical antithesis, the result of careless and shallow thinking, which has confounded things often accidentally associated, but always intrinsically distinct. In the most absolute truth of the case, in the highest and deepest meaning of the thought, the asserted contradiction between the winning of the world and the saving of the soul is an impossibility. You must gain or lose both the world and the soul together. It is not possible for any man truly to do one alone. The proof of this proposition will form the fitting climax of this discussion, and yield the true moral of the subject.

A queen, full of grief and care, weary of the heartless round of pomp, sighed with envy as, looking from the palace win

dow, she saw a milkmaid go by with her pail, blithely singing as she passed. At the same moment, the milkmaid, looking up at the gorgeous lady, enviously sighed, Ah, that I were the queen! Now, in the truest sense of the words, neither of them had gained the whole world, though both had lost their own souls. That is to say, neither one commanded a rich fruition of the world in a peaceful enjoyment of her soul. The trouble lay not in the proud rank of the one, the world at her feet; nor in the humble station, poverty and toil, of the other. The trouble lay in the fact that neither one had a contented spirit. To lose the soul, — that is, to be spiritually enslaved, tormented, idiotic, insane, or mechanized, is to be also unable to enjoy the world. To save the soul, — that is, to perfect the rightful freedom of reason, the rightful supremacy of conscience, the rightful enjoyment of the functions of your being —is at the same time to possess, in the harmonious action of the soul, the noblest and sweetest use of the world. It is obvious, consequently, that the experience of gaining the world and saving the soul is a correlative process, of which one side necessarily implies the other. The miser, wretchedly gloating over his wealth, has not really gained the enjoyment of the world, only an idle emblem of it. Did he truly possess and improve the reality of it, the inevitable inference would be that his soul was saved.

The Christian, poor, suffering, exiled, but swaying the sceptre of conscience over all his lower powers, and trusting in God with serene submission, has not lost the world, only some of its baser pleasures. The truest and noblest empire of the world—the realm of virtue and faith is pre-eminently his. I protest against the blasphemous shallowness of identifying all the worthlessness, all the sinfulness, all the wretchedness, all the transientness of experience, with the substance of the kingdom of time, and then crying with mock piety, Love not the world! It is both wiser and more religious to consider the order of God's works, the benignity of God's ways, the solemnity of duty, the sweetness of friendship, the sublime loveliness of nature, all the delicious prizes of life, as the true substance of the world, and then call on

men to love it better. Those phrases of the New Testament which would seem to contradict this, in their real sense broadly taken, affirm it. They are loose, metaphorical expressions which have been mischievously perverted, exaggeratingly emphasized. It is certainly more philosophical and more devout to characterize that sum of things made by God which we call the world, from its intrinsic contents and divine design, which must be good, than from the evil which hap pens to accompany it. Therefore we may boldly say that the current precept, Hate the world as the foil of heaven, expresses a falsehood of superstition; but the opposite precept, Love the world as the prophetic forecourt of heaven, expresses the truth of a deeper religion.

Every appearance to the contrary of this view is a superficial delusion. For example, it was the overweening ambition of Alexander, and not the world he seemed to have already conquered, that made him weep for more. The trouble was in his unsaved soul, not in his gained world. Had he really subdued the world to his mental use and profit, by the moderating of his desires to his condition, he had been happy. But his Macedonian phalanx yielded no genuine conquest of the world for his soul, only an empty token of its outward subjection. His inordinate greed of vanity was the fatal bane of all the good it touched; but that good remained none the less good for those who could find it good.

There now lives a man, who, beginning his career as a penniless boy, at an early age had accumulated a fortune of millions. He then suddenly collapsed under a softening of the brain, and went to the insane asylum, a hopeless idiot, leaving a beautiful and beloved family to mourn for him in his princely home. It was not that he gained the unprofitable world, and it undid him; it was that the overwrought intensity with which he pursued a symbol of the world was a violation of the laws of his nature, and the penalty was the loss of both the whole world and his own soul. So, too, a mastery of the scholarship of mankind, a vision of the entire circle of science and philosophy from the centre of self to the nebulous ring of the Infinite, is a sublime privilege, an inde

scribable dignity and joy, to one who trusts in the benignant spirit and beneficent order of the LIMITLESS UNKNOWN, surrounding all that he can know. And if one endowed with this stupendous vision be a morbid and shuddering doubter, distrusting the providence of God, filling the unknowable with frightful spectres, his impious distress is not the fault of his too much knowledge, but of his too little faith; not the retribution for what he has won, but for what he has failed to win. His exacting and rebellious self-will has vitiated his very wisdom: the discord of his soul has poisoned the world.

Thus it is seen, that, without the previous saving of the soul, there can be no true gaining of the world, but only of some hollow symbol of it; such as wealth, rank, or opinion. For the possession and use of the reality, or of any solid equivalent for the reality, a healthy and vigorous soul is indispensable. Thus the false opposition, so perniciously supposed between the world and the soul, is exploded by the affirmation of the true identity of their claims in the actual coalescence of their enjoyment. The true conception of a divinely fulfilled life, therefore, is the picture, not of an impoverished and ascetic soul opposed to a renounced and hostile world, but of a richly equipped and happy soul exercising its prerogatives over the contents of a tributary world expanded to the utmost limits of consciousness. The present state is no less truly a work and gift of God than the unseen one to which we look forward in eternity. By a healthy and devout keeping of the laws of God here, then, men should seek to cleanse, edify, and furnish their. souls, fitting them for the conquest and enjoyment of the world which is to come, through a preliminary conquest and enjoyment of the world which now is. He makes an ennobling sacrifice who foregoes cheap and mean indulgences for high and costly achievements, abandoning inferior advantages for superior ones. But he commits an injurious error who puts a fancied contradiction between forms of good where no real contradiction exists. And the grandest thing a man can do, a feat which will immeasurably profit him as long as he has a being anywhere in the universe of God, is to gain the whole world and