a brown tree in the foreground. We have all our "brown trees," which we think we can do well, and these limit our ambition to secure other gifts which God is ready to bestow upon us. So, "forget the things that are behind." Cultivate a wise obliviousness of past sorrows, past joys, past failures, past gifts, past achievements, in so far as these might limit the audacity of your hopes and the energy of your efforts.

IV. So, lastly, pursue the aim with a wise, eager reaching forward.

The Apostle employs a graphic word here, which is only very partially expressed by that "reaching forth." It contains a condensed picture which it is scarcely possible to put into any one expression. "Reaching out over" is the full though clumsy rendering of the word; and it gives us the picture of the runner with his whole body thrown forward, his hand extended, and his eye reaching even further than his hand, in eager anticipation of the mark and the prize. So we are to live, with continual reaching out of confidence, clear recognition, and eager desire to make the unattained

our own.

What is that which gives an element of nobleness to the lives of great idealists, whether they be poets, artists, students, thinkers, or what not? Mainly this, that they see the unattained burning ever so clearly before them that all the attained as nothing in their eyes. And so life is saved from commonplace, is happily stung into fresh effort, is redeemed from flagging, monotony, and weariness.

seems

The measure of our attainments may be fairly estimated by the extent to which the unattained is clear in our sight. A man down in the valley sees the nearer shoulder of the hill, and he thinks it the top. Reaching the shoulder he sees all the heights that lie beyond rising above him. Endeavour is better than success. It is more to see the Alpine heights yet unscaled than it is to have risen so far as we have done. They who thus have a boundless future before them have an endless source of inspiration, of energy, of buoyancy granted to them.

No man has such an absolutely boundless vision of the future which may be his, as we have if we are Christian people, as we ought to be. Only we can thus look forward. For all others a blank wall stretches at the end of life, against which hopes, when they strike, fall back stunned and dead. But for us the wall may be overleaped, and, living by the energy of a boundless hope, we, and only we, can lay ourselves down to die, and say then, "Reaching forth unto the things that are before."

So, dear friends, make God's aim your aim; concentrate your life's efforts upon it; pursue it with a wise forgetfulness; pursue it with an eager confidence of anticipation that shall not be put to shame. Remember that God reaches His aim for you by giving to you Jesus Christ, and that you can only reach it by accepting the Christ who is given, and being found in Him. Then the years will take away nothing from us which it is not gain to lose. They will neither weaken our energy nor flatten our hopes nor dim our confidence, and at the last we shall reach

the mark, and, as we touch it, we shall find dropping on our surprised and humble heads the crown of life which they receive who have so run, not as uncertainly, but doing this one thing, pressing towards the mark for the prize.

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XVII.

God's Scrutiny Longed for.

EARCH me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."-PSALM CXxxix. 23, 24.

HIS psalm begins with perhaps the grandest contemplation of the Divine Omniscience that was ever put into words. It is easy to pour out platitudes upon such a subject, but the Psalmist does not content himself with generalities. He gathers all the rays, as it were, into one burning point, and focusses them upon himself. "O Lord! Thou hast searched me, and known me." All the more remarkable, then, is it that the psalm should end with asking God to do what it began with declaring that He does. He knows us each, altogether-whether we like it or not; whether we try to hinder it or not; whether we remember it or not. Singular, therefore, is it to find this prayer as the very climax of all the Psalmist's contemplation. The "searching" which was spoken of at the beginning is not so profound or effective as that which is desired at the end. It is a process which has for its issue the cleansing of all the evil that is beheld. The prayer of the text is, in fact, the

yearning of a devout soul for purity. I simply wish to consider the series of petitions here, in the hope that we may catch something of their spirit, and that some faint echo of them may sound in our desires. My purpose, then, will be best accomplished if I follow the words of the text, and look at these petitions in the order in which they stand.

I.-Note, then, first, the longing for the searching of God's eye.

Now, the word which is here rendered "search" is a very emphatic and picturesque one. It means to dig deep. God is prayed, as it were, to make a section into the Psalmist, and lay bare his inmost nature, as men do in a railway cutting, layer after layer, going ever deeper down till the bed-rock is reached. "Search me"-dig into me, bring the deep-lying parts to light -" and know my heart"; the centre of my personality, my inmost self.

That is the prayer, not of fancied fitness to stand investigation, but of lowly acknowledgment. In other words, it is really a form of confession. "Search me. I know Thou wilt find evil, but still-search me!" It seems to me that there are two main ideas in this petition, on each of which I touch briefly.

One is, that it is a glad recognition of a fact which is very terrible to many hearts. The conception of God as "knowing me altogether," down to the very roots of my being, is either the most blessed or the most unwelcome thought, according to my conception of what His heart to me is. If I think of Him, as so many of us do, as simply an "austere man" who "gathers where he did not straw," and reaps where he did not sow; if my thought of God is mainly that of