Preacher seems not to have been free from traces of such a feeling, as he surveyed the course of his experience, and tried to interpret it. At times the interpretation baffles him, and he sees nothing in life beyond its incessant alternations and the wearying round of activities which lead to nothing, and have no meaning beyond themselves. We begin to wonder if he has anything to tell us beyond the vanity of desire, the disappointment of hope, and the negation of all noble ambitions as well as lower enjoy

ments.

But there is a higher spirit also running throughout the book, and rising into a clear and consistent meaning. In all the changes of life there is a purpose, obscure as it may often seem. In the day of health man needs to be reminded of his weakness. The mere enjoyment of life should never terminate in itself, for there is always more in life than the passing hour. It is running on, and taking new shapes before we are well aware. "Truly the light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun." But clouds may follow the sweetest morning, and days of darkness will come in the most rejoicing life. A man may live many years and rejoice in them all, and his heart cheer

him in his youth. He may fondly take pleasure as it comes, and find happiness in many happy objects. But he is always to remember that there is another side to life than that of enjoyment. And he should keep before him not the half, but the whole of the picture. This of itself will give a meaning to life which the mere experience of its transitory moments will never give, and still less the abandonment of thought, in which many pass their lives, taking what comes of good and evil without ever trying to unite them into a consistent picture.

But more than this. Life is not only to be looked at on its darker as well as its lighter side. It must further be regarded on its moral side. It is not enough to be reflective, and to remember the days of darkness. We must get beneath all the superficial changes of life to the great fact of responsibility which underlies it, and alone gives it a complete meaning. It is this fact, above all, which is to be set against the fact of enjoyment as its great counterpart, and the conjunction of which with the other serves to glorify it and raise it into an ideal. The moral element is never absent from life. We must read it everywhere if we would not fall below its true

end and purpose. Our highest moments of exhilaration should never dispense with it, or put it out of sight. For it is always there, whether we heed it or not. The handwriting is on the wall while the feast is advancing, and the characters of judgment come forth when the winecup is drained, and the guests are disappearing from the board. "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment."

Let us dwell shortly on the thoughts suggested by the text, so striking in the picture of contrasts which it sets before us.

I. And first, it may be well to recall the reality of the contrasts presented in life. Nothing might seem less necessary, seeing how these contrasts meet us everywhere in the world, and in our own experience. But, full as life is of pathetic meanings, we are often strangely insensible to them. We may not regard them with indifference, but we fail to realise them. We may be free from the ignorant contempt which looks on all life as a chance, and its good and evil as

alike contingent and worthless; but how few are able to enter with a sympathetic intelligence into phases of life of which they themselves have no experience! If we are well and happily circumstanced, we have difficulty in putting ourselves in the place of others who are otherwise. We know that life is full of misery, but we may have never known its burden, nor the days of darkness, which are many. Instinctively we put away all thought of pain and wretchedness, and sometimes even our imagination can lay but feeble hold of them. When we stand in the calm strength of morning, with radiance flooding the awakened earth, and "all nature apparelled in celestial light," we have difficulty in recalling the night which has fled. Or when in summer-time the sunshine broods in every hollow of the hills, or sleeps in softness on the sea, we can barely imagine the wintry storm or the dreary gloom of an unlifted sky. So the man who rejoices in health and strength, with all his faculties of mind and body in full play, can hardly imagine sickness and weariness, languor and depression nigh unto death. The young man, in the pride of his youth and eager hopefulness-how little can he understand the old man, full of years and cares, and looking

backwards rather than forwards with burdened eyes! The rich man, walking in the ways of his heart, with no material want unsatisfied and no wish unanticipated, may know that there are not far from his door poor and miserable wretches without bread enough to eat or raiment to cover them-but how little can he enter into all the difference between his own fulness and their poverty! The well-born and happy girl to whom no harm has ever come, who has been shielded by domestic care and social convention from the evil that is in the world-how little is she able to know the very name of the misery under which thousands of her sisters are perishing day by day! The horrors of war are a byword; but how little can any that dwell at ease realise them truly the agonies of the wounded, the desolated homes, the bleeding hearts, the outraged sanctities, the inexpressible terror and horror and suffering which follow in its train!

And yet these are all facts in life. Everywhere weakness mingles with strength, sickness with health, poverty with riches, war with peace. The darker colours are everywhere wrought into the picture, and form a part of it as real as the other. Whatever be our experience, we are never to forget this. Especially if we are rejoicing