The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1897 Copyright, 1897, All rights reserved. The chief end of man,—to define it anew, and cite the witness of the ages, may seem an audacious attempt, likely to issue in failure or in commonplace. By the scholar this work must often be judged as crude, to the churchman it will sometimes seem mischievous, and to the man of science it may appear to lack solidity of demonstration. But its essential purpose is to utter afresh, though it be with stammering tongue, the mes

It sometimes happens that a man is confronted by a perplexing crisis, before which he is quite at a loss how to direct his course. His familiar rules and habits seem to fail him, and his perplexity approaches dismay. At such a time, if his previous life has been guided by purpose and consideration, he may perhaps help himself by looking attentively back at the steps by which he has hitherto advanced. He recalls other crises, he sees how they were met, and light, it may be, breaks on the path bef

The ideas and sentiments which underlie the higher life of our time may be largely traced back to two roots, the one Greek-Roman, the other Hebrew. Each of these two races had originally a mythology made up partly of the personification and worship of the powers of nature, and partly of the deification of human traits or individual heroes. The higher mind of the Greeks and Romans, in which the distinctive notes were clear intelligence, love of beauty, and practical force, gradually broke away al

The way of the highest life is clear and certain. Its first and last precept is fidelity to the best we know. Its constant process is that fidelity wins moral growth and spiritual vision. All attempts to demonstrate the nature and attributes of God, all effort to prove by argument that the universe is administered by righteousness and benevolence, are aside from the main road. The real task for man is to order his own life, as an individual and in society. To do that, he needs to understand his

A tourist who roams for a brief while through some great country like England or Russia may jot down a few of the impressions which come home to him, making no pretense at completeness or symmetry of description. So, one who has journeyed like a hasty traveler over some passages in that vast tract of years which we describe as the classic and Christian civilizations, notes down in the following pages a few of the salient features that have impressed him. He has already prefaced this with a sort

The virtue of truth-seeking is a modern growth. The love of speculative truth, indeed, shines far back in antiquity, in individuals or in little companies. But the truth-seeking quality has had its special training through the pursuits of physical science. The achievements of three centuries in this direction have been made under the constant necessity of attention to reality, at whatever cost to prepossession or desire. Watchfulness, patience, self-correction are the requisites. There is the di

When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar. Lyell took up the question by the near and homely end. He patiently watched the