e in
the observer himself some quality akin to that he would detect. Only the
good see goodness, only the lover sees love. A mother would convey to
her little daughter some full sense of the motherly feeling that yearns
within her, but how can it be done? In just one way: let that daughter
grow up and have children of her own, _then_ she will know how her mother
felt.

Would we know something of the Divine Mother-heart? We must first get in
ourselves something of the mother-feeling. "Every one that loveth
knoweth God and is born of God."

Perhaps there has been given to us some human friend,--parent or comrade,
husband or wife,--in whom as nowhere else we see the beauty of the soul.
Best, divinest gift of life is such a friend as that,--a friend who fills
toward us a place like that to which our poet so nobly aspires:--

"You shall not love me for what daily spends,
You shall not know me on the noisy street,
Where I, as others, follow petty ends;
Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;
Nor when I 'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean;
But love me then and only, when you know
Me for the channel of the rivers of God,
From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow."

Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the very
presence of God is one whom we have never seen. To millions of hearts
that place has been filled by Christ.

These lines of Emerson--heroic idealist that he was--ask to be loved only
when he is at his highest, and so is felt as a revelation of something
higher than himself. But our best friends--comrade, mother, or
wife--love the ideal soul in us, and love us no less when we are "jaded,
sick, anxious, or mean," covering with exquisite pity our infirmities,
and by their nobility lifting us out of our baseness. And in that
affection which embraces our best and our worst, those human friends are
the symbols--yes, and are part of the reality--of the Divine love.

And what is all beauty, all grandeur, but the manifestation, through the
eye to the soul, of the one Supreme Being? The mountains, the sea, the
sunset, touch us with more than pleasure: they stir in us some awe, some
mystic delight, some profound recognition of sacred reality. How can we
better frame the wonder in speech than by saying, "Just as my friend's
face manifests to me my friend, so Nature is as the very face of the
living God"?

In the processes of human life,--the life we live and the life we
se