on, ever near the prize—­“wealthiest when most undone:”  he has reaped the whirlwind, but he will go on still, till life is over, sowing the wind.

Now observe the beautiful result which comes from this indestructible power of believing in spite of failure.  In the first centuries, the early Christians believed that the millennial advent was close; they heard the warning of the apostle, brief and sharp, “The time is short.”  Now suppose that, instead of this, they had seen all the dreary page of Church history unrolled; suppose that they had known that after two thousand years the world would have scarcely spelled out three letters of the meaning of Christianity, where would have been those gigantic efforts,—­that life spent as on the very brink of eternity, which characterize the days of the early Church,—­and which was after all, only the true life of man in time?  It is thus that God has led on His world.  He has conducted it as a father leads his child, when the path homeward lies over many a dreary league.  He suffers him to beguile the thought of time, by turning aside to pluck now and then a flower, to chase now a butterfly; the butterfly is crushed, the flower fades, but the child is so much nearer home, invigorated and full of health, and scarcely wearied yet.

2.  This non-fulfilment of promise fulfils it in a deeper way.  The account we have given already, were it to end there, would be insufficient to excuse the failure of life’s promise; by saying that it allures us would be really to charge God with deception.  Now life is not deception, but illusion.  We distinguish between illusion and delusion.  We may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron, or marble; this is delusion:  but you may paint a picture, in which rocks, trees, and sky are never mistaken for what they seem, yet produce all the emotion which real rocks, trees, and sky would produce.  This is illusion, and this is the painter’s art:  never for one moment to deceive by attempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which the feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves would create.  Let us take an instance drawn from life.

To a child a rainbow is a real thing—­substantial and palpable; its limb rests on the side of yonder hill; he believes that he can appropriate it to himself; and when, instead of gems and gold hid in its radiant bow, he finds nothing but damp mist—­cold, dreary drops of disappointment—­that disappointment tells that his belief has been delusion.

To the educated man that bow is a blessed illusion, yet it never once deceives; he does not take it for what it is not, he does not expect to make it his own; he feels its beauty as much as the child could feel it, nay infinitely more—­more even from the fact that he knows that it will be transient; but besides and beyond this, to him it presents a deeper loveliness; he knows the laws of