opportunity. The late Mr. E. R. Sill has pictured such a man in "Opportunity."

66 This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge,

but this

And thought, 'Had I a sword of keener steel
That blue blade that the King's son bears
Blunt thing!' - he snapt and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.

Then came the King's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day."

LECTURE III. THE VISION OF MAN

JOHN 4:35. "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, that they are white already unto harvest."

LECTURE III

THE VISION OF MAN

MEN are ranked by their vision. In a very real sense the vision makes the man. It gives him his reach and his power. One man sees nothing new in the materials of life and work, and he becomes one of the world's drones, or one of the world's blind drudges. Another man sees an engine in the kettle, a new language in the clouds, an angel in the marble, a hero in the child, a people in the multitude; and he becomes an inventor, an artist, a prophet, a statesman.

One man keeps his eye on the ground. He is a realist. He takes things as they are. He believes in the actual and the practical. He rarely looks beyond his day or his spot of earth. He is a comfortable or restless mole, with no eyes beyond his little burrow. Another man lifts up his eyes. The ladder of his life does not lie flat upon the ground, but, as in Jacob's vision, it is raised to heaven, and there are angels of God ascending and descending upon it. He believes in the ideal,

the possible man, and he labors to make the ideal the actual.

No man does anything worth doing who has not first some vision of it. It is first simply an idea of his mind, a desire of his heart, a bright vision before his eyes. "See that thou make all things according to the pattern showed thee in the mountain," is the divine law for building character or any worthy temple of achievement. "All that God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eternal idea come to utterance." Nothing can be built without a plan—that is, an ideal. The boy who did not know what he was making by his whittling was not engaged by the master. The longer the plan, the larger the life. That is not worth doing that can be done in a brief day.

And the ideal not only directs the aim and the energy of life, but it is the great discoverer and quickener of man's nature. He is more and does more because he reaches out beyond the present and the actual.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

The same influence is upon preaching. The pulpit is often divided between the realists and the idealists. One preacher is