them.

Life and man are an insoluble enigma except on one hypothesis, and
that is that this is a nursery-ground, and that the plants will be
pricked out some day, and planted where they are meant to grow. The
hearts that feel after absolute and perfect love, the spirits
that can conceive the idea of an infinite goodness, the dumb desires,
the blank misgivings that wander homeless amidst the narrowness of
this poor earth, all these things proclaim that there is a region
where they will find their nutriment and expatiate, and when we look
at a man we can only say, He that hath wrought him for an infinite
world, and an endless communion with a perfect good, is God.

Still further, another field of the divine operation to this end is
in what we roughly call 'providences.' What is the meaning of all
this discipline through which we are passed, if there is nothing to
be disciplined for? What is the good of an apprenticeship if there is
no journeyman's life to come after it, where the powers that have
been slowly acquired shall be nobly exercised upon broader fields?
Why should men be taken, as it were, and, like the rough iron from
the ground,

'Be heated hot with hopes and fears,
And plunged in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom,'

if, after all the process, the polished shaft is to be broken in two,
and tossed away as rubbish? If death ends faculty, it is a pity that
the faculty was so patiently developed. If God is educating us all in
His school, and then means that, like some wastrel boys, we should
lose all our education as soon as we leave its benches, there is
little use in the rod, and little meaning in the training. Brethren!
life is an insoluble riddle unless the purpose of it lie yonder, and
unless all this patient training of our sorrows and our gladnesses,
the warmth that expands and the cold that contracts the heart, the
light that gladdens and the darkness that saddens the eye and the
spirit, are equally meant for training us for the perfect life of a
perfect soul moving a perfect body in a perfect universe. Here is a
pillar in some ancient hall that has fallen into poor hands, and has
had a low roof thrown across the centre of the chamber at half its
height. In the lower half there is part of a pillar that means
nothing; ugly, bare, evidently climbing, and passing through the
aperture, and away above yonder is the carved capital and the great
entablature that it carries. W