ALL THINGS ARE YOURS.

"All things are yours; and ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's." I COR. iii. 22, 23.

In this wonderful summary of what your life and mine may be, we have the Christian life set forth in its largest, most glorious aspects. These aspects are all different, yet all necessary to the full stature of spiritual manhood.

Let us try to set these great thoughts in relation to our actual lives, and to the language and ideas of our own time. Then we shall see that the thought of the apostle is a reaching out toward the highest and most satisfying truths which we think the special message of this century.

All things are yours. Already, centuries before, the Psalmist, in a sublime flight of faith, declared that God has given to man, being "little lower than the angels," a "dominion over all the works of his hands." But many centuries have passed, centuries of art and science and discovery, and still man's dominion over the earth is not completely realized. It never will be. Wonderful as may be the future achievements of civilization, we may be sure there will always be new inventions, new experiments,

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new attack and struggle, in which science will unfold secrets deeper still, and art win some larger mastery for man over the powers and elements of nature. Even to us, on the verge of the twentieth century, as to an apostle in the first, the word "All things are yours" is still a prophetic vision rather than a fact recorded. When we say that nature is at the service of man, we mean that such is her final law and destiny, not that such is our present relation toward her.

In this, as in so many profoundest matters, our best aid to clear thinking comes when we interpret clearly the Christian symbolism of Father and child. We all are children in a Father's house,- a house of many mansions. This glorious world we live in, is to us as a palace of gifts and treasures to the princely heir who is yet a child. The palace is all his. Its gifts are his, its beauty and splendor are to his honor; and all its music and feasting only wait till the heir shall give command. In such a position is the soul

of man, when we speak of man's dominion over the earth. The earth is ours; all Nature and every element is ours; but ours as the palace belongs to the child-prince. There are gifts we have not claimed, stately presence-chambers and dazzling corridors we have never entered, or peeped into only to be afraid. Nature is ours, not as the plaything belongs to the heedless child, to do with what he will, but as his father's whole kingdom and treasure belong to the heir of a throne,- his only as he shall grow up to claim, to comprehend, and govern them.