that
everything here is empty and disappointing. The nobler his heart and
the more unquenchable his hunger for the high and the good, the sooner
will he find that out. Bubble after bubble bursts, each bubble tinted
with the celestial colours of the rainbow, and each leaving in the
hand which crushes it a cold damp drop of disappointment. All that is
described in Scripture by the emphatic metaphor of "sowing the wind
and reaping the whirlwind," the whirlwind of blighted hopes and
unreturned feelings and crushed expectations--that is the harvest
which the world gives you to reap.

And now is the question asked, Why is this world unsatisfying?
Brethren, it is the grandeur of the soul which God has given us, which
makes it insatiable in its desires--with an infinite void which cannot
be filled up. A soul which was made for God, how can the world fill
it? If the ocean can be still with miles of unstable waters beneath
it, then the soul of man, rocking itself upon its own deep longings,
with the Infinite beneath it, may rest. We were created once in
majesty, to find enjoyment in God, and if our hearts are empty now,
there is nothing for it but to fill up the hollowness of the soul with
God.

Let not that expression--filling the soul with God--pass away without
a distinct meaning. God is Love and Goodness. Fill the soul with
goodness, and fill the soul with love, _that_ is the filling it with
God. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us. There is nothing else
that can satisfy. So that when we hear men of this world acknowledge,
as they sometimes will do, when they are wearied with this phantom
chase of life, sick of gaieties and tired of toil, that it is not in
their pursuits that they can drink the fount of blessedness; and when
we see them, instead of turning aside either broken-hearted or else
made wise, still persisting to trust to expectations--at fifty, sixty,
or seventy years still feverish about some new plan of ambition--what
we see is this: we see a soul formed with a capacity for high and
noble things, fit for the banquet table of God Himself, trying to fill
its infinite hollowness with husks.

Once more, there is degradation in the life of irreligion. The things
which the wanderer tried to live on were not husks only. They were
husks which the swine did eat. Degradation means the application of a
thing to purposes lower than that for which it was intended. It is
degradat