under the power of the actual, the visible, the local. He regards men as they seem. He knows all the local gossip about the men and women of his parish. He comes to dwell upon the littleness and the weakness of men. He does not believe them capable of any large life and does not expect it. He does not lift them up, call them into the realm of nobleness and magnanimity, into the larger life of the race, into the new man of spiritual progress. He does not live there himself, and how can he help men to live there?

"I am contemplating another move, since there seems to be little chance of development here. Though I have been here but eighteen months, it has been long enough to test myself in this rural field. We have fitted in all right, and everything is pleasant as regards our relation to the community, but the work does not move except in an old and deep rut. About all I can do here is to keep a garden, raise chickens, pitch hay occasionally for the neighbours, eat big dinners, and preach every Sunday when it does not rain. I do not feel that this is all there is for me to do."

Another man who went to a similar field found that there were forty-three families of

Protestant antecedents within three or four miles of the Church, who never, save in the case of funerals, set eyes within the Church. I wonder if these two men are examples of what Charles Kingsley has expressed in his lecture on "Mr. Eyes and Mr. No-eyes"?

Another preacher has spiritual eyes. He looks beneath the surface view of life, into its heart. He knows that man was made for God and is restless until he finds God. He knows that Christ was made in accordance with the power of an endless life, and therefore you cannot put any narrow, earthly limits to what man may become. This is the vision of the spiritual preacher.

It is Christ's vision of man. It has striking illustration in the passage from which I have chosen a text for the lecture. A crowd of Samaritans were coming out of Sychar, attracted by the word of the woman — "Come, see a man who told me all things that ever I did." They were drawn together by curiosity as any crowd of men might be anywhere in the world. We would not think them very interesting or very promising. The disciples did not think them so. They were not a pure race, half Jew, half Canaanite; their religion was as impure as their blood; they were low down in the

social and moral scale. You could not expect any good thing from them. They were a dry and unpromising field. Christ did not think so. He saw men as they really were. He knew what was in man. And he says to the dull-eyed disciples; "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields that they are white already to harvest."

And this was always the mind of Christ. His eye was single and so it was full of light. He saw things whole and he saw things clear. He looked through all the disguises and wrappings of life, all the artificial barriers that hide and divide men, and saw the real man, the essential màn, man as a living soul, a child of God.

An hour before this, he had met the woman at Jacob's well. She was ignorant, superstitious, degraded. We should be tempted to withdraw from her as from contagion. A modern congregation might feel uncomfortable if she came in to worship. What could she know of God? What could she have to do with the pure and holy Jesus? Surely, she was too low down in the scale! And yet, notice how Christ dealt with her! What courtesy, what kindness, what understanding! Well might Charles Lamb call Jesus "the first gentleman." No selfish attitude

of superiority to her, no haughty condescension, no speaking down to her! He recognized her spiritual nature, the secret need and craving of her heart. He tried to awaken it and then to satisfy it. To this ignorant, superstitious, degraded woman he spoke, as though it were hers by right as well as his, the loftiest truth He ever spoke to man, the spiritual nature of God and of all true worship of God.

And so it was with Christ always. He was a revealer of life. He spoke to the best in man and called it forth. He saw in Peter and John, the rough, untutored fishermen, the open-mindedness and loyalty and courage of great apostles. He saw in the sinful woman who washed his feet with tears of penitence and wiped them with her hair, not the outcast, but the soul, washed of its sin, capable of great love and sacrifice. He saw in Levi, the despised tax-gatherer, that poverty of spirit, that hunger after a better life, that would make him a true disciple and the writer of the first Gospel. He saw in Saul, the conscientious Pharisee, the religious zealot, the capacity for profound conviction and sustained enthusiasm and unwearied labor that made him the missionary Apostle.

The early Church had much of the idealism of Christ. It was the vision of the white harvest fields of human life that scattered the early disciples everywhere preaching the word, and in a single generation made men messengers of the Christ from the pillars of Hercules to the gates of India.

Paul, in his missionary journeyings, had come to the western limits of Asia. If the day were clear, he could look across the Egean and see the dim outline of a new continent. He was ambitious to conquer new lands and he went to sleep with that hope in his heart, and he had a dream that changed the face of Europe, and made possible a Christian civilization beyond the sea. A man of Macedonia stood before him with that cry which has been the watchword of Christian advance ever since. "Come over and help us."

To Paul man was the greatest word next to God. He was not thinking of men as they were. Macedonia did not know of his gospel and did not care. No committee from Macedonia with urgent appeal called for the service of Paul. Then, as now, men were indifferent to their high calling, or ignorant of it. God sent the vision and not man but it was the vision of man. It was