This thought gives us a new zest for life.  There is an appetite which is of the soul.  It is this wish for growth, for the development of our powers, for a larger life for ourselves and for those who shall come after us.

Is there any one who wishes to stay always where he is to-day?—­to be always what he is this morning?  Beyond the hill-top lies our dream.  Not all the voices that call men from place to place are audible ones.  We hear whispers from a far-off leader; we are beckoned by an unseen guide.  Out of ancestry, tradition, talent, and training each departs to his own way.

What calls is not largeness of place—­it is largeness of ideal.  To each of us, thinking of this one and that one who has taken a large part in the shaping of the world, there comes a feeling:  Beside all these I am in a narrow way!  What can I think that shall be worth the consideration of the race?  What can I do that shall be a stepping-stone to progress?  What can I hope that shall unseal other eyes to the universal glory, comfort others in the universal pain?  We say:  I do not want to be mewed up here, while others are out where thrones and empires are sweeping by!  I do not want to parse verbs, add fractions, and mark ledgers, while others are the poets, the singers, the statesmen, the rulers, and the wealth-controllers of the world!  We wish to step out of the trivial experience into that which is significant.  Each day brings uneasiness of soul.  “Man’s unhappiness,” says Carlyle, “as I construe it, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite.”  Says Tennyson: 

     “It is not death for which we pant,
      But life, more life, and fuller, that we want.”

These aspirations are prophetic.  Does a clod-hopper dream?  We move toward our desires.  The wish for growth is but the call of Jesus to our souls.  We sometimes hear of the “limitations of life.”  What are they?  Who set them?  Man himself, not God.  The call of Jesus urges the soul of man to possibilities which are infinite.

A large life is the fulfilment of God’s ideal of our lives—­the life which, from all eternity, He has looked upon as possible for us.  Could any career be grander than the one that God has planned for us?  God does not think petty thoughts:  He longs for grandeur for us all.

6.  Jesus calls us by the spirit of the times.  There is a growing recognition of the affinity between God and the human soul.  Religion has changed in spirit as well as in form.  It used to be considered a tract in one’s experience, and now it is perceived to be all of life—­its impetus, its central moving force, the reason for being, activity, development, for ethical conduct, and for unselfish and joyous helpfulness.  Religion is more and more perceived to be, not a thing of feeble sentiment, of restraint, of exaction, of meek subordination and resignation, but the unfolding of the free human spirit to the realization of its highest possibilities and its allegiance to that which is eternal and supreme.  The nineteenth century closes with the thinker who is also a man of meditation and devotion.  We offer to Heaven the incense of aspiration, hope, research, talent, and imagination.