eternal," "the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our
Lord."

Brethren, does our common thought of redemptive glory reach back
into this august and awful presence? Does the thought of the modern
disciple journey in this distant pilgrimage? Or do we now regard it as
unpractical and irrelevant? There is no more insidious peril in modern
religious life than the debasement of our conception of the practical.
If we divorce the practical from the sublime, the practical will
become the superficial, and will degenerate into a very lean and
forceless thing. When Paul went on this lonely pilgrimage his spirit
acquired the posture of a finely sensitive reverence. People who
live and move beneath great domes acquire a certain calm and stately
dignity. It is in companionship with the sublimities that awkwardness
and coarseness are destroyed. We lose our reverence when we desert the
august. But has reverence no relationship to the practical? Shall we
discard it as an irrelevant factor in the purposes of common life?
Why, reverence is the very clue to fruitful, practical living.
Reverence is creative of hope; nay, a more definite emphasis can be
given to the assertion; reverence is a constituent of hope.
Annihilate reverence, and life loses its fine sensitiveness, and when
sensitiveness goes out of a life the hope that remains is only a
flippant rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, the careless onrush of
the kine, and not a firm, assured perception of a triumph that is only
delayed. A reverent homage before the sublimities of yesterday is the
condition of a fine perception of the hidden triumphs of the morrow.
And, therefore, I do not regard it as an accidental conjunction that
the psalmist puts them together and proclaims the evangel that "the
Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in them that hope in his
mercy." To feel the days before me I must revere the purpose which