investigations and recognitions and has not been stopped by the obstructions which the intellect has thrown in his way.

More fortunate is it that the vast concourse of the simple ones have seen and do know what the wise and the prudent are searching for but do not find, because it is hid from them by their own wisdom and their own prudence.

Into all this, in the middle years of that which we call life, have come the toils, the strifes, and the ambitions of the world, with all the mad rush after its ephemeral pleasures; but the consciousness of ignorance concerning God, freedom, and immortality, presses hard for further answer. The old vigor and earnestness is strengthened by the power and intensity of manhood. As years pass and the shadows of materiality lengthen and deepen, throwing the things of this life more and more into the shade, the unknown of God demands increased attention. Finally, when that is soon to come which, to our human eyes, seems to be the end, one who can look back over the secret way by which he came sees, despite the devious wanderings into unproductive paths and into the distractions of the many things which seemed to demand immediate attention, there was running through the whole a golden thread of inquiry which, even though overshadowed at times, still maintained itself unbroken. There might be search after everything else, yet, beneath it all, and through it all, there was the search after God, which, with its subtle influences, really dominated all the rest.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the race. The great quest of humanity is the search after God, whether it be the pursuit of the golden fleece or the Holy Grail; whether it be seeking after scientific knowledge or delving after sordid gain. It may not be so intended, but all the ways of man minister, either directly or indirectly, to the success of the quest, as the perfection of the engines of human butchery tends to the extermination of war. The efforts of science, even though intended. for the destruction of religion, may modify it perhaps, but they only change its direction into other and better channels, and thus aid its ultimate success. Every attempt to find the truth or to sustain the truth, however variant it may seem to be from that

object, is really a search after God, because God is truth, and all truth is one.

We, in these latter days, have found and declared that God is good, that He is goodness itself, that He is the ultimate good. All pursuits of men, however erroneous we may consider them, are really attempts to obtain something better than that already in hand. However the act may appear to another as the consequence of ignorance and vice, however another may characterize it as a mistake, an evil, or a sin, and whatever the motive may be, it was done because the one doing it thought it would bring him something better than he already had. This is the history of every human being who ever lived, and, therefore, it is the history of the race. But the search after something better is really the search after good, and can end only with the acquisition of the ultimate good, beyond which there is no better-and that is God.

It is a curious and very pregnant fact that we never find man without a god. Everyone has for himself some idea of a god which is for him, however unsatisfactory in its minor details, a working theory. His god may be only a little superior to himself, but he is superior, whether he merely whispers in the wind upon the mountain top, or thunders from the clouds of heaven, or comes into the garden in the pleasant part of the day to inquire after the creature he has made. He may, and probably will, deny as utterly preposterous and false the claims of every one else for every peculiar idea of deity which other men have ever had, whether it be Bael or Ashtaroth, Bel or Osiris, Jupiter Olympus or Thor, Yahveh or Elohim, First Cause, or the Power not Ourselves that makes for Righteousness; yet each reveres a being or a power greater than himself which is his deity, even if it is only force or law. It is a very remarkable feature of them all, from the crudest to the loftiest ideal, that each comprises within itself some essential characteristics of the one true God.

It is also remarkable that in the faintest echoes of the farthest and earliest times we find indications of the simple fundamental truths which we ourselves now accept, and think them new. They may be recognized in pre-Confucian China, in the Vedas of oldest India, in the oldest documents of the Hebrew bible, in the

traditions of the unlearned American Indians, and in the testimony of those prehistoric temples whose builders have been forgotten forever. The race is but one after all, and however diverse they may appear in our eyes, they are all searching after the one God, even as we are.

The rockhewn structures of India, the temples buried beneath the sands of Assyria and Babylonia, the pyramids and temples of old Egypt, the European cathedrals of the Middle Ages, all alike testify that the search after God is the paramount object of the whole race in all its history. The structures which man has reared for other purposes have either disappeared or are overtopped by those which testify to the supremacy of this idea.

The wars of the race show the intensity of this pursuit. It is true there have been wars solely for conquest, but even those were tinged with devotion to a god, while many were waged purely to establish some god's supremacy. In the earlier days the defeat of a nation was the destruction of its god. The wars of the Israelites were no exception, but were characteristic of the times in which they lived; and these wars, while they were for the nation, were for Jehovah also, and were believed to be under His immediate direction. However much personal ambition may have played its part, even the atrocities of the Middle Ages were, in the main, contests for the aggrandizement or the perpetuity of some religious belief. They who were burned at the stake and those who burned them, they who suffered under the inquisition and those who inflicted the sufferings, alike were faithful to what they believed was taught by their gods-each sustaining his own. All these are but incidents in the search, blind and mistaken though the actors may have been; and they prove the intensity of man's earnestness because they show what he will do and suffer in the cause.

The ideal has been and is always a god, and the search, in one form or another, has always been the guiding, dominating power moving men and the world. The progress of the world is marked by its progress in this great search. As men have searched, they, and therefore the world, have progressed. Whenever men have become satisfied with their success and have ceased their search, they and the world have stood still or have retrograded. But

the quest moves on and will continue to progress from one better thought to another, from the worship of stocks and stones, beasts and birds, ancestors and heroes, the god of a hill or of a cairn, the god of a tribe or a nation, until all ideals have risen and have been merged into the thought of one universal and infinite God. So the search has progressed and man's ideas have broadened and improved, passing from the petty god of a tribe, whose business it was to avenge personal indignities and tribal insults, up to the idea of a god whose vengeance was directed only against those guilty of wrong. Some of this survives even in these days; for we Americans are not all of us above appealing to our god to aid us in our wars, nor are we above thanking him for our success in butchering our enemies.

But the end is not yet. The search still goes on. Some erroneous ideas are dropping away; better ones are being added. The last and the greatest is the thought that God is good-absolutely. We talk about the acquisitions of the century just passing by, but this is greater than all others. To raise man's ideal to the thought of perfect good is more than all the material progress of the world. Man's god has never before been wholly good. The gods of the past have been vindictive, wrathful, tyrannical, cruel. These are qualities which man knows are not good when he sees them in himself or another. These ideas are passing with the century, and the thought that God is absolutely good is the light which ushers in the new era which is just dawning upon the world. The race will no longer need to worship the finite and the erroneous as it has done through all the ages.

In striving after an ideal of absolute perfection, in the worship of absolute good, there will come a change in the ambitions and in the actions of men proportionate to the change in their ideal. With a vengeful god of wrath men strove after righteousness through slaughter and carnage. They knew this was not good, but it seemed the most available. Now, in the recognition of a God Who is goodness itself they pass into the domain of the absolutely good and will emulate the characteristics which they worship in their God.

But the end is not yet. In all history each time a man or a nation has set up a god it has been something better than them

selves and the best they knew. Their god was no better because in their search they had found nothing better. They deified their best. So do we. Shall we say that we have reached the ultimate? We may think we have. So also thought they. Past experience contains no warrant for such an assertion. What we worship is better than anything that has gone before. May there not yet be a better which we shall find as we continue our search? Or may we not enlarge the scope of what we call good? Who shall say that he can compass the infinite good? Let us then acquaint ourselves with this God who is good, trusting in the suggestions of the history of the search, but more in its constituent characteristics, that as we progress new and better still will open on our vision, until at last we shall see the absolute good which is perfection and rest in it. Then shall we realize in ourselves the truth of that declaration made by the mightiest of men: "The pure in heart shall see God."

In this way only will the search be ended.

OUR SOCIAL PROBLEM IN THE LIGHT
OF CERTAIN SPIRITUAL TRUTHS.

BY RALPH WALDO TRINE.

I am interested in that great movement-mental, spiritual, philosophical, metaphysical-whatever term each may deem it best to use that is attracting to itself such vast numbers of people in all parts of the world to-day, in so far as it enters into and is a help to us in the common, practical, every-day affairs of our common life. But that which is the true and genuine does this, and I am therefore deeply interested in this, what I would term great movement.

With me the foundation, the starting point of all things is that Spirit of Infinite Life and Power that is back of all, working in and through all, the Life of all, therefore the life, the reality, the essence of your life and my life, in fact, our very life itself. From this we can arrive at none other than the essential unity and oneness of all life. No life is lived unto itself, for in Him—