ultimate fact and the final purpose and power of the universe, and that
everything that man tries to do for his fellow-man is but the expression
of that love of God which is everywhere struggling to utter itself in
blessing, to give itself away to the soul of every one for whom He
cares?

It is in this truth that I find the real secret, the deepest meaning,
of the everlasting dissatisfaction of man that is always ready to be
stirred. We moralize, we philosophize about the discontent of man. We
give little reasons for it; but the real reason of it all is this, that
which everything lying behind it really signifies: that man is greater
than his circumstances, and that God is always calling to him to come up
to the fulness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when the world
becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself
over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes
absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts
that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not
forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do
something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do
because he is the child of God. And there is the real secret of the
man's struggle with his sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the
sin, as we have said again and again, but it is the dim perception, the
deep suspicion, the real knowledge at the heart of the man, that there
is a richer and a sinless region in which it is really meant for him to
dwell. Man stands separated from that life of God, as it were, by a
great, thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, to make himself
a nobler and a purer man, is simply his beating at the inside of that
door which stands between him and the life of God, which he knows that
he ought to be living. It is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who
feels through all the thick wall that shuts him out from it the sunlight