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 deeper sense, that we are here to become the best workmen that we can become, and that the work we do has a large measure of its value in its reflex power of making us capable of doing better work. Evidently this is not the real workshop where God needs His best men and women. When He has perfected His workmen and workwomen and recognizes that they are prepared to do their best work, does He make use of them here? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where evidently the real work is to be done. Everything we see in this world would seem to indicate that it is only the preparatory school, a place where men and women are equipped for the real thing, that the career that is to abide lies elsewhere than here. The purpose of these days is to make us ready for the work God has for us to do in a larger sphere than this, where we pass on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have a larger government given to us to administer. God pours out His contempt on smoothness of life because it cannot make greatness of soul, and greatness of soul is one object of our being here.

The Christian ideal despised, also, this smoothness which seems to many of us the most desirable thing that life has for us, because there is such little knowledge given with it. At best it can only play on the very surface of life. We know no more than springs out of the deep ex