absolutely full of the desire to help his fellow-man. He peers into
those faces as he goes, and sees the divine possibility that is in them,
and he sees the divine nature everywhere. They are talking about the
idlest trifles, about the last bit of local Boston politics. But in
their souls one of those men has consecrated himself, with the new
morning, to the glorious service of God, and the other of them is asking
how he may be a little richer in his miserable wealth when the day
sinks. Oh, we look into the other world and read the great words and
hear it said, Between me and thee, this and that, there is a great gulf
fixed; and we think of something that is to come in the eternal life. Is
there any gulf in eternity, is there any gulf between heaven and hell
that is wider, and deeper, and blacker, that is more impassable than
that gulf which lies between these two men going upon their daily way?
Oh, friends, it is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is
not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant
and know that God knows me through all these misconceptions and blunders
of my brethren, that God knows me--that is the awful thing. The future
judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now. It
is awful to think how the commonplace things that men can do, the
commonplace thoughts that men can think, the commonplace lives that men
can live, are but in the bosom of the future. The thing that impresses
me more and more is this--that we only need to have extended to the
multitude that which is at this moment present in the few, and the world
really would be saved. There is but the need of the extension into a
multitude of souls of that which a few souls have already attained in
their consecration of themselves to human good, and to the service of
God, and I will not say the millennium would have come, I don't know
much about the millennium, but heaven would have come, the new Jerusalem
would be here. There are men enough in this church this morning, there
are men enough sitting here within the sound of my voice to-day, if they