,
some corner of their being.

Most men spend their lives in the attempt to accumulate the means to
live, and forget to begin to live at all. Sometimes, as you are riding
through the country on a winter evening, you come to a silent farm-
house, and you see one window lighted; and, if you should go and knock
at the door, you would probably find out that the light is shining from
the kitchen, where the family is gathered in the evening, perhaps as a
matter of economy to save fire, perhaps to save trouble. And, if you
examine the lives of these people, you would find that they live
chiefly in the kitchen. They may have a sitting-room where they spend a
few leisure hours; perhaps they have the beginning of a library; but
they do not spend much time in that. They have little opportunity for
the life of the parlor, representing the expansive, social human life
which comes into contact with other lives. And so you will find that
this, which is a figure, represents that which is true of most of us.
We have only begun to live; and we live in the lower ranges of our
nature, or perhaps we have touched life on a higher level in some
tentative sort of way. But the most of us are only partly alive, have
only developed a little of what is possible in us, have only come in
contact with some fragments of this wonderful universe that is all
around us on every hand.

What, then, is the meaning of life? What shall we try to do? What are
we here for? I do not attempt to go into the profound explanation of
mysteries too deep for me to answer, as to what must have been in the
mind of God when he planned and created this universe of which we are a
part. My task is a humbler one. Let us see if I can help you comprehend
a little part of it. Take an illustration.

An immensely wealthy man suddenly dies, leaving his estates to a little
boy seven or eight years of age. He has wide stretches of land, hill
and valley, river, woods, all that is beautiful as making up a
landscape. The house represents the accumulated resources of the
experiences and the intelligence of a lifetime. There are not only
beautiful drawing-rooms, telling of taste, but there is a library in
which is all that the world has been able to accumulate of learning, of
literature in every department. Here is another room containing
instruments of music and the works of the great composers. There is an
art gallery, containing some of the finest masterpieces in the way of
painting