from his heart will confess that in human life as he sees it, in his own life as he knows it, there have been, there are, and there will be again, thoughts, words, and deeds which are rightly punishable by perfect love.

There is need in human life, without question, for something comparable to a tennis net; and since it is always better to fall into the hands of God rather than the hands of men, the wise man will hope and believe that it is God who places it there, and that it is God who will take it away when, but not till when, the game of life can be played without it.

The Players.-The players are engaged in a game; a game is a combat heavily disguised. True, they are not gladiators armed with javelin or spear, struggling for life or death; they are in all probability 'jolly Bank holiday every-day young men'; their weapons are harmless, and the prospect of victory or defeat need prevent neither victor nor vanquished from enjoying his tea. However, although the combat is innocuous, innocent, and makebelieve, it still remains essentially a combat.

It is not a far cry from this thought to the application thereof to spiritual life. St. Paul maintains in one place that life is a boxing match, and no reader of the Bible will forget how often spiritual life is spoken of in terms of combat, weapons, armour, wrestling, victory, and defeat.

Considerations of space prevent me going too far and in detail into all the spiritual truths which are associated with a combat, and I must content myself with one or two outstanding examples. In the first place, the need of preparation. No one can hope to win success in life or a lawn tennis tournament unless he carefully fits himself for the combat both in body and mind. If the young men and maidens, whose neglect of training for a tournament is evidenced by misty eyes and fingers stained with nicotine, are equally careless in their preparation for the combat of life, they are handicapping their prospects of success. Nor need that man expect a happier fate in the struggle for his daily bread whose only mental preparation consists in filling his mind with the same gloomy anticipations of defeat with which he is accustomed to await the first round of a lawn tennis tournament. Victory, like the kingdom of heaven, is often taken by force: force of character, force of will, force of practice.

But a lawn tennis tournament is not only a parable of life in its preliminaries, but also in its consequences. Victory! Let us not begrudge the victor his reward. He has every right to a splendid sense of pleasure, satisfaction and well-being. But the sweets of victory, let us remind him, must be digested as well as tasted, if they are to be made to serve his whole welfare. Victory will have been won in vain-whether on the court, or in the

school, or in business, matters not-if it lingers too long in his mouth, cloying his lips with tiresome bragging, or if it sticks in his throat, stiffening his neck with pride.

Among Christians the real reward for good work is more work: 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things.' It should not be otherwise on a lawn tennis court. The most valuable prize the tournament has to offer is not the silver 'what-not,' but rather the further opportunity of placing the skill and experience which have proved themselves victorious at the service of less skilful and less experienced players.

Defeat must be a spur on the heel to prick us on to renewed practice and progress, not a nail in the shoe which disinclines us to advance. Defeat may bring pain, but it ought to be a growing pain. As in the case of victory, so in the hour of defeat, the Christian should not be without comfort. How can a Christian be heard to say that he cannot try again after losing a set at lawn tennis, when he does not hesitate to believe that when he has lost his life he will rise from the dead?

The Christian doctrines of resurrection and perseverance are meant, no doubt, primarily for those who must face and wrestle with the principalities and powers of a wicked world, but they are worth the attention of those who, in the hour of defeat on the lawn tennis court, persist in going into mourning for a time, times, times and a half.'

It remains, in conclusion, to clear our minds as to which is the part and which is the whole. In these days of lawn tennis every day of the week, lawn tennis all the year round, lawn tennis for the old, for the young, for the tiny tot, it is possible that a mistake may be made. Let it be said, then, that life is the big thing, lawn tennis the small one. To spend all one's time in playing lawn tennis, as some do, is to mistake the part for the whole. Life demands more practice, greater concentration and determination, from those who would live but passably well than lawn tennis demands from those who would win its most resounding triumphs.

If ever, here or hereafter, the thoughts, words and deeds of men are to be given their real and eternal values,—that is according to the good they have accomplished for God and man,-then it is to be feared the lawn tennis champion, if he has nothing but a lawn tennis championship to recommend him, will have some difficulty in persuading himself that he has a serious contribution to place before the eyes of eternal Justice. A good lawn tennis player may make sad ruin of his own life and, what is worse, of the lives of others, but no true Christian can ruin a game of lawn tennis. That he may play badly is quite possible; that he may receive and deserve a sound beating is more than probable. But,

whether his lot is to be victorious or to be vanquished, he will keep his temper, his head and his tongue. He will not grumble at his partner, at the light, at his racket; he will not play to the gallery or poach the balls his partner can reach; he will not quibble at the decisions of the umpire or air his grievances in the club-house. In a word, behaving like a Christian, he will almost persuade others to become Christians, and he will show that it is possible even on a lawn tennis court to be not far from the kingdom of God.'

Pythagoras was wont to say that 'our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body that they may carry away the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage but only to look on and consider how and why everything is done and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and to regulate their own.' These words express exactly the idea which lies behind this essay.

I have asked my readers to watch an imaginary game of lawn tennis, not, I hope, to pass an idle half-hour or to gratify mere curiosity, but to consider how and why everything is done and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and to regulate their own.'

It was with this serious purpose in view that I took up my pen, and it is in the hope that what has been written may in some measure accomplish it that I write in conclusion, 'Game, set, match!'

C. B. HULTON.

THE EAGLE IN A CAGE

The captive thrush may brook the cage ¡
The prison'd eagle dies for rage.

SCOTT: Lady of the Lake.

FROM earliest times the eagle has been looked upon as the lord We read in the Book of Proverbs, in the thirtieth

of the air.

chapter :

The way of an eagle in the air,

The way of a serpent upon a rock,

The

way of a ship in the midst of the sea,

The way of a man with a maid.

It is part of the confession of Agur which we read here, and in this fine and little-known passage he deals with the four things which are too wonderful to understand.

The flight of the eagle has inspired many poets. Keats, who saw the eagle early in the nineteenth century in its rocky fastnesses on Beinn Cruachan, in the highlands of Argyll, writes in 1818:

Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air.

He speaks elsewhere of the great bird'struggling with the buffeting north,' 'cleaving the mists,' 'dim-seen,' 'towering.' How charmingly descriptive, too, are Wordsworth's lines:

Faint sound of eagle melting into blue,

and the passage in Scott's Lady of the Lake describing how the eagle, from her rocky fastnesses upon Ben Venue, 'spread her dark sails to the wind.'

The eagle is the imperial symbol of three universal monarchies : Assyria, Persia, Rome.1 It is also the royal bird of Greek mythology, and is (or was) the national crest of France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria and Poland. And, to write of more commonplace affairs, it was only the other day that I was driven in a taxi that carried as its mascot a miniature golden eagle with wings widespread.

Of all living things an eagle is least suited to confinement.

1 An eagle of solid gold was the standard of the ancient Romans, and was carried into battle 'as the proud eagle of all-conquering Rome.'

And yet all zoological gardens throughout the world have their caged eagles-miserable, bedraggled objects, with their joy of life entirely gone. What an appalling existence for a bird that seemed to sleep wing-wide upon the air'! All too frequently their cage is a wretchedly inadequate one. In a confined, sordid space, with the odour of flesh clinging about it, four or five eagles may be enclosed together. So small is their prison that it is impossible for them to fly more than a few feet in any direction; and so listless are the great birds, they crouch by the hour upon their perch, uninviting and covered with stale excreta.

A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions.

And if it be a crime to imprison a robin-which, after all, is a bird of limited flight and easily tamed-how much more disgraceful is it to take the king of birds and condemn him to a living death, from which there can be no possible reprieve.

I have seen imprisoned eagles gaze wistfully at the leaden sky of the city in which they are confined. Between them and the boundless spaces of the air is an impenetrable barrier of wire netting, which, to their cost, they have many times tested and found unyielding. Do they wonder how it is that the small impish sparrows are able to pass through this barrier, flying impudently in and out through the minute spaces, as though the passage were free to all?

Some of the eagles one sees in cages are young birds, taken from the nest in contravention of the Act that protects the eagle in almost every county of Scotland-how futile, by the way, is that piece of legislation known as the ' Wild Birds' Protection Act '— and these for a time retain their wild instincts.

A friend of mine last summer took to a cage where some eagles were kept in captivity a grouse which he had purchased at a game-dealer's close by. He told me afterwards that, to his surprise, the only bird which showed any interest in the grouse when he held it out was a young eagle. This dejected exile from its fatherland was stirred into sudden activity, and striking the lifeless grouse a terrific blow, carried it away into a corner of the cage, where, concealing its prey from its fellow-captives with its wings, it plucked the grouse carefully, and then devoured it with relish.

How many of the spectators who peer curiously at the gloomy eagles in their prison have ever seen the birds as they soared in freedom above the highest hills of Scotland? Can these people

VOL. XCV-No. 567

3 B