massed together in that hungry multitude. They needed to learn another kind of arithmetic.

We live and move and have our being in the presence of the everlasting mystery of the expanding, enlarging, dominating power of life. How can a man fling away a bushel of seed wheat in the spring and then four months later, because that seed wheat has been wrought upon by the mysterious forces of soil and sunshine, of rain and dew, go out and harvest thirty, sixty, a hundred fold? How can the tiniest germ of human life, scarcely distinguishable under the microscope from a germ which would develop into an ape or a dog, carry over in its minute cells a bundle of personal characteristics, facial resemblances, mental traits, moral tendencies, like those of the Father? It is by means of such germ-cells that the stream of heredity maintains its steady flow. How can these things be!

The bravest knowledge of our day stands helpless before that problem. How, how, how? The same beneficent hand of power and of wisdom which works in the wheat-field and among the

potencies of cell and tissue was there at work that day by the Sea of Galilee when the hungry multitude was fed. This dull, prosaic, matter-of-fact man would have missed all that if the Lord had not opened his eyes that he might see. It has been well said: "When a man gives Christ loaves, Christ gives him back more loaves. When he gives Christ himself, Christ gives him back a larger and a finer self."

How many loaves have you, Philip? How many loaves of knowledge as we face these world problems, vast intricate, baffling? Not many! We do not know just how all these problems are to be solved in those great, hard years which lie ahead.

How much faith have you, Philip, as you undertake to press forward in some bewildering situation? Not much! Not enough surely to move mountains, not enough perhaps to move mole-hills.

How much genuine goodness have you, convertible into redemptive energy, as you undertake to save society from its greed and hatred and strife? Not much! Look at us! We have all erred and

strayed from the way like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts and there is not much moral health in any of us.

Five loaves and two small fishes! Two hundred pennyworth of provisions! What are they among so many! What will our meager supply of knowledge, our uncertain wavering faith, our limited measure of goodness, be able to accomplish in the face of need like that.

If you sit down with pad and pencil to figure it all out in a matter-of-fact mood, leaving Him out of the account, you may well despair. You will all be saying: "Show us! Show us! Let us see the end from the beginning, that we may walk not by faith, but by sight!" This is the everlasting limitation of that whole method.

In the third place, the value of these matter-offact people for the kingdom of God! One man looks up at the starry skies and is thrilled by the sight. He cries out, "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork." Another man looks up at the same sky

and begins to figure out how many millions of miles the sun is from the earth, how many times greater some of those stars are than this globe of ours. He goes on with his spectrum analysis until he knows how many different kinds of fuel each star burns.

Well and good! The poets and the singers, with their visions and dreams, have their rightful place. But the prudent, patient mathematicians, making those calculations which have interest and value for us all, have also their place. It was the men of the latter class who were able to tell us, last January, the day, the hour, the minute when the total eclipse of the sun would occur and just where the boundary lines would run dividing those who would see it as "total" from those who would see only a "partial" eclipse.

Man does not live by bread alone nor by hard facts alone. Neither does he live by visions, dreams, and enthusiasms alone. He lives by all the great words which proceed out of the mind of God. The ignorant, untrained man, even where he is honest and earnest, may, with all his enthusiasm, become a positive menace to society.

He

may be for all the world like that hero of Galsworthy's riding madly ahead on a dark night with his face toward the tail of his galloping horse. He will be sure to ride somebody down before daybreak and to bring up himself in the ditch.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart in the desires you cherish, and with all thy strength in the deeds you do, and with all thy mind in the thoughts you think. It is for every man to seek for the joy of intellectual fellowship with his Maker by thinking his thoughts after him and by sharing with Him in his wise, beneficent purposes for mankind.

Here are men in all our churches who might not add up very large in a prayer-meeting! Their religious experiences are so plain and simple, so lacking in romance and picturesqueness, that they would not seem worth telling. They would not make good copy for another chapter in Harold Begbie's "Twice Born Men." There are deep, rich, beautiful elements in such a nature as John's which these men do not possess. There are warm, eager, compelling enthusiasms in Peter which