opposing that which he, in such a distinguished way, had contributed to establish.

So this is not peculiar, you see, to politics, not peculiar to religion it is a human defect against which we need constantly and in all directions to be on our guard.

3. Then there is another thing that stands in the way of seeing things as they are, and that is the fact that we occupy so frequently a wrong point of view. What does a landscape look like, or a city or a mountain? You are perfectly familiar with the fact that Boston from the top of Bunker Hill Monument, from the summit of the State House, from Corey's Hill, is not one Boston, but three Bostons. You can have as many cities as you please, by taking different points of view from which to look at it. A painter may go out and draw the outline of a mountain, another may go out and draw the outline of the same mountain; and you shall never dream that they are the same. It is a different point of view that they occupy. So a landscape painter may look down from this hill or that, surveying the field in one direction or another, and have as many different pictures as he has points of view.

And this which is true in the physical world is true in every other department of thought and life as well. Let a man be trained in the Catholic Church, for example,born in it, with its traditions behind him, having inherited the Catholic way of thinking about things, Catholic in every strain of his blood, Catholic in every nerve-fibre, Catholic in every part of his being; let him be educated as a Catholic, brought up in the midst of his surroundings, and how shall you expect him to look out on the same world as that which the Protestant sees? How should you expect him to agree with you in his religious ideas? It is only after years of training, of study, of throwing off one trammel after another, after climbing up into God's clear air, that a Protestant and a Catholic can get together so as to meet on common ground, and see the same kind of world at their feet and the same kind of sky overhead.

A

Here was the difficulty between the North and South during the war. I remember one touching little story - hardly a story, only a saying that illustrates what I mean. beautiful young boy from the South, hardly old enough to leave home, and yet fired with enthusiasm for what he believed to be a noble cause, was lying wounded and dying, when one of our Northern boys came by where he was; and he looked at him as though he were some sort of monster at first, hardly comprehending that these Northern soldiers, about whom he had heard, could look so human, so nearly like himself. And then, at last, seeing the tenderness and the pity in his eyes, seeing how ready he was to assuage his pain, to help him if he could, he was overwhelmed with astonishment, and at last said in the Georgia dialect, which I shall find it hard even to approach the reproduction of, "What did you-uns come down here to kill we-uns for?" All he could think about it,- for some inexplainable reason the people of the North had come down to kill him and the people at the South. He occupied so different a point of view. And this lies at the base and is the explanation of nearly all the world's bitternesses, hatreds, and battles.

4. And then there is another thing that stands in the way, and that is the fact that almost of necessity we select some particular feature of our landscape as that of chief importance,

that which is the centre of it; and everything else shades away from that, and becomes of less importance. And do you not see how, out of precisely the same materials, we may make half a dozen different pictures? Suppose I were a painter, and were looking on a certain landscape. Here in the landscape, is a river with a waterfall, a grand old tree, a house, a man, an animal,- all these in the landscape. can make a picture of which the waterfall shall be the centre, and from some power of sympathy, or as a matter of taste, select that as the more important feature. I make that the centre of the picture, so that every man who looks at it says, "That is a picture of a waterfall." But the tree and the house and the man and the animal are all there,

but they are all subordinated to this. Or I may take my house, and make that the centre. Then these things are all there, but they are subordinated to that. Or I may take the man as the centre. The rest are all there, but of comparatively slight importance.

that.

And in this way, friends, we make our worlds, the worlds we live in, and have just as many different worlds as there are different people. Let a man, for example, make up his mind that the one thing worth living for is the accumulation of money. He concentrates thought, time, attention, on that. That is the central figure in his landscape, his universe. Everything else is subordinated to that. Everything else takes color from and is shaded by So that that is his world. If he sees anything else, he sees it only in a half-light, catches a side glimpse of it: it is something entirely subordinated to this, of less importance. A man who has made himself that kind of world will find it practically impossible to comprehend the character, say, of a Jesus. Jesus said: "My meat and drink is to do the will of my Father. My business is to go about doing good," not caring enough about money even to look after his own personal wants, trusting that they would in some how, some fashion, be attended to, as were those of the sparrows and the ravens, concentrating all his soul on this one thought of the need of the world and his power to minister to that need. Do you not see how his world is utterly unlike that of this other man? Riches, station, the things that people generally care about,-trifles lighter than air to him. God, truth, the soul,- these things make his world. Here is the difference, I take it, between the philosophies that go by the names of pessimism and optimism. Here are the differences between the judgments of men as to the kind of world they live in, optimistic or pessimistic, whether they know anything about the philosophies that go by those names or not. I have a friend with whom I frequently converse on this subject. He is a business man. He knows the tricks of the trade, though he does not practise them,

one of the noblest and most honorable men I have ever met, transparent himself. But he sees the little trickeries, impositions, underhanded ways, by which so many people try to get at their ends; and he has concentrated his attention on this feature of business life so many years and to such an extent that he tells me over and over again that he envies me my ability to believe in the general honesty and goodness of average human nature, but for the life of him he cannot. He has made that the centre of his picture of human life. I admit every one of his facts, only he, as I said, in painting his picture of society, of the business life of the world, has fixed his eye on that as the one chief central object, and everything else shades away from that; and he does not see the other things so clearly, so distinctly, as they are. I look over the face of society, and I see that, where one man is guilty of a defalcation, there are a thousand that meet their honorable obligations every day of their lives. Where one goes home intoxicated and abuses his wife and children, a thousand go home lovingly to care for them. Where one man betrays a trust, a thousand others are true to the trust, even to the cost of suffering. I make this the centre of my picture. And so, while not denying any of these other facts, they naturally shade away from the central trust in the general integrity of human nature. And so I have another kind of world; and, having no personal interest in believing in either of them, I cannot help thinking that my world is truer to the reality than the other one.

5. Then there is another thing that stands in the way of our seeing. I must touch on many of these lightly; and, when I have done, I shall have only touched on a very few. This one is strongly akin to the first point, and yet sufficiently distinct and important to be marked by a word for itself. This is the lack of love, of loving sympathy,the lack of sympathy. Charles Lamb loved the town. Every old walk, every brick, every weather-stain, every city cry, call, street noise, was dear to him; and so he could see all the beauty, glory, and wonder in that Babel, London.

Wordsworth hated the town.

He loved nature. So he fled

to the English lakes; and he could see, be touched by, and thrill in response to every tiny flower, every blade of grass, every touch of mist on hilltop, every light and shade of a changing English day. Wordsworth did not see in nature. any more than there is there. Lamb did not see in the town any more than there is there. But each saw what he loved, saw what he had a sympathetic power of appreciating. And so we say, concerning a book, it is only fair that the person who is to pronounce judgment on a book should get himself into sympathy with the purpose, the intention of the author; and only a person who does that is capable of reporting what that author says, what that author means. It is an untranslatable language, though it be English, to a person who does not come to it endowed with this sympathetic power.

I only touch on this in this brief and fragmentary way. You will run it out for yourselves into a thousand applications.

6. One other point only is there time for me to mention, and that is that we see incorrectly so many times because we ignorantly assume that ability to see clearly in one department of human thought and life is equal ability to see clearly in another. In other words, we are not willing to admit our limitations. As a trite illustration, take that case that we have all been familiar with for ages of the cobbler's criticism of the work of the sculptor. The sculptor did not understand so perfectly about shoes as the cobbler did, and he gratefully accepted the cobbler's criticism so far as the shoes extended; but, when he presumed on this gratitude to criticise the rest of the statue, the sculptor wisely and justly advised him to stick to his last.

A curious case has come up this summer. I think I will not mention the man's name, because, as he is living, he might possibly find out that I had done so; and I do not wish to seem to criticise any person. A gentleman of national distinction, of great fame in a certain department of