a somewhat analogous relation—­in a closer one certainly—­than more ordinary endowments.  The flights of genius, we know, appear like maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same spiritual level.  Now these are perfectly compatible with mis-use, abuse, and moral disorder.  The most gifted of our countrymen has left this behind him as his epitaph, “The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind.”  The most glorious gift of poetic insight—­itself in a way divine—­having something akin to Deity—­is too often associated with degraded life and vicious character.  Those gifts which elevate us above the rest of our species, whereby we stand aloof and separate from the crowd, convey no moral—­nor even mental—­infallibility:  nay, they have in themselves a peculiar danger, whereas that gift which is common to us all as brethren, the animating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil the spiritual being of all is rooted, cannot make us vain; we cannot pride ourselves on that, for it is common to us all.

2.  Again, the gifts which were higher in one sense were lower in another; as supernatural gifts they would rank thus—­the gift of tongues before prophecy, and prophecy before teaching; but as blessings to be desired, this order is reversed:  rather than the gift of tongues St. Paul bids the Corinthians desire that they might prophecy.  Inferior again to prophecy was the quite simple, and as we should say, lower faculty of explaining truth.  Now the principle upon which that was tried was that of utility—­not utility in the low sense of the utilitarian, who measures the value of a thing by its susceptibility of application to the purpose of this present life, but a utility whose measure was love, charity.  The apostle considered that gift most desirable by which men might most edify one another.  And hence that noble declaration of one of the most gifted of mankind—­“I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.”

Our estimate is almost the reverse of this:  we value a gift in proportion to its rarity, its distinctive character, separating its possessor from the rest of his fellow-men; whereas, in truth, those gifts which leave us in lonely majesty apart from our species, useless to them, benefiting ourselves alone, are not the most godlike, but the least so; because they are dissevered from that beneficent charity which is the very being of God.  Your lofty incommunicable thoughts, your ecstasies, and aspirations, and contemplative raptures—­in virtue of which you have estimated yourself as the porcelain of the earth, of another nature altogether than the clay of common spirits—­tried by the test of Charity, what is there grand in these if they cannot be applied as blessings to those that are beneath you?  One of our countrymen has achieved for himself extraordinary scientific renown; he pierced the mysteries of nature, he analysed her processes,