misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even more
rigid in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder's
teaching to extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he never
dreamed of. Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, like
all echoes, give only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teachers
can tell what they see, but they cannot give their followers eyes,
and so the followers can do little more than repeat what their
leader said he saw. They are like the little suckers that spring up
from the 'stool' of a cut-down tree, or like the kinglets among
whose feebler hands the great empire of an Alexander was divided at
his death.

It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yet
men will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. The
followers of some of the fashionable teachers of to-day--Comte,
Spencer, or others--protest, in the name of mental independence,
against accepting Christ as the absolute teacher of morals and
religion, and then go away and put a man in the very place which
they have denied to Him, and swallow down his _dicta_ whole.

Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleship
is ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shall
come to us authoritatively and say, 'Here is truth--believe it and
live on it.' And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and it
is miserable to have to change guides perpetually and to feel that
we have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look down
on the height which once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cut
ourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary,
and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to
force or find the path through the tangled jungles of error.