opportunity for the discipline of love. It comes
to us at many points, trying us at different levels, that it may get
entrance somehow, and so make our lives not altogether a failure. When
we give up our selfishness and isolation, even in the most rudimentary
degree, a beginning is made with us that is designed to carry us far,
if we but follow the leading of our hearts. There is an ideal toward
which all our experience points. If it were not so, life would be a
hopeless enigma, and the world a meaningless farce. There must be a
spiritual function intended, a design to build up strong and true moral
character, to develop sweet and holy life, otherwise history is a
despair, and experience a hopeless riddle. All truly great human life
has been lived with a spiritual outlook, and on a high level. Men have
felt instinctively that there is no justification for all the pain, and
strife, and failure, and sorrow of the world, if these do not serve a
higher purpose than mere existence. Even our tenderest relationships
need some more authoritative warrant than is to be found in themselves,
even in the joy and hope they bring. That joy cannot be meant as an
empty lure to keep life on the earth.

And spiritual man has also discovered that the very breakdown of human
ties leads out to a larger and more permanent love. It is sooner or
later found that the most perfect love cannot utterly satisfy the heart
of man. All our human intercourse, blessed and helpful as it may be,
must be necessarily fragmentary and partial. A man must discover that
there is an infinite in him, which only the infinite can match and
supply. It is no disparagement of human friendship to admit this. It
remains a blessed fact that it is possible to meet devotion, which
makes us both humble and proud; humble at the sight of its noble
sacrifice, proud with a glad pride at its wondrous beauty. Man is
capable of the highest heights of love. But man can never take the
place of God, and without God life is shorn of its glory and divested
of its meaning.

So the human heart has ever craved for a relationship, deeper and more
lasting than any possible among men, undisturbed by change, unmenaced
by death, unbroken by fear, unclouded by doubt. The limitations and
losses of earthly friendship are meant to drive us to the higher
friendship. Life is an education in love, but the education is not
complete till we learn the love of the eternal. Ordinary fri