great saving tides of
the human spirit into some shallow or artificial stream of your own time
and generation. But, on the other hand, it is a happy thing for our life
if, growing up in the habitual use of time-honoured spiritual exercises,
we have truly learnt to know by our own experience, as by the example of
the Saviour set before us in the Gospel, that they are the support and
safeguard of all that is highest and purest and best in us, if only we
are careful to use them with sincerity and reverence.

VIII. AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION.

"Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one."--JOB xiv.
4.

This is one of those simple questions which, by their very simplicity and
directness, set us thinking about the importance of our personal life.

"Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?" But all our common life
is somehow the outcome of our separate individual lives--of your life and
mine. Therefore how important it is in the common interest that each of
us should look above all things to his own life and its character, for
this will determine his contribution to the life of his society.

Nearly all men are keen about the reputation of their society, about the
name it bears, about the way in which men think and speak of it.

Thus you are no doubt sensitive, almost every one of you, about the good
reputation of your school or your house, or any society with which you
may happen to be closely connected or identified.

And this is a healthy and praiseworthy feeling. It would indeed be a bad
sign if such a feeling were wanting or weak in any society.

But I am not sure that we keep it before us--all of us--as clearly as we
ought to do, that this reputation of the society is simply the outcome of
our separate lives and habits.

The reputation is the reflex of the life; hardly ever, perhaps, an exact
reflex, very often a distorted reflex with this or that feature
exaggerated; but yet always a reflex.

The reputation you bear is the impression made by your common life on the
minds of those who see it from the outside, or who hear men's talk about
it.

And we do well to be sensitive on such a subject; but we do still better
if we bear in mind that this common life is what comes out of our own
life, and is the result of its contact with that of our neighbour.

And with this thought in our minds we feel how searching and how directly
personal is this primitive and childlike question