its beholder consecration of divinest aspiration and unfaltering
effort. "If I could uncover the hearts of you who are listening to me
this morning," said Phillips Brooks, in a memorable sermon, "I should
find in almost all--perhaps in all--of them a sacred chamber where burns
the bright memory of some loftiest moment, some supreme experience,
which is your transfiguration time. Once on a certain morning you felt
the glory of living, and the misery of life has never since that been
able quite to take possession of your soul. Once for a few days you knew
the delight of a perfect friendship. Once you saw for an inspired
instant the idea of your profession blaze out of the midst of its dull
drudgery. Once, just for a glorious moment, you saw the very truth, and
believed it, without the shadow of a cloud. And so the question
comes,--What do they mean? What value shall I give to those
transformation experiences?"

On the personal answer to that question depends all the success or the
failure; all the nobleness or the unworthiness of the individual life.
No one can estimate too ardently, or too earnestly, the spiritual
salvation of keeping faith with the exalted moment,--

"Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse--not a few,
With much to learn and much to forget"--

ere the golden hour of fulfilment shall come; but faith in the exalted
moment is but another name for faith in God.

The great truth of life--that which we may well hold as its central and
controlling and dominating truth--is that "our best moments are not
departures from ourselves, but are really the only moments in which we
have truly been ourselves." These moments flash upon the horizon of the
soul and vanish; they image themselves before us as in vision, and fade;
but the fact of their appearance is its own proof of their deep reality.
They are the substance compared with which all the lower and lesser
experiences are mere phantasmagoria.

And this fulfilment is not found, but made. It is a spiritual
achievement. So let one not reject, or ignore, or be despairing before
undreamed-of, unexplained, and incomprehensible forms of trial, but know
that it is trial that worketh patience; know that "no chastening for the
present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it
yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness unto them which are
exercised thereby."

"It was given unto me," wrote Dante in the _Vi