mislead the judgment. The outside trials of men are so much more penetrable than their inside experiences, that compassion becomes with us a chief perverting agency.

There are some general considerations which must be present to our thoughts before we can speak safely about the discipline of the world. It must be judged under the light of its own prevailing idea. Read otherwise, it is misread, and filled with the confusion of the mind that interprets it. We must accept and expound the history of the world as a moral discipline. It is on this basis that the question of the goodness of God arises, and on this basis it must be settled. It is not a question of pleasure simply, but one of training, one of growth, one of spiritual evolution. It is not, therefore, a question of the past, or of the past and present, but of the past, present and future; one to be decided by the scope of the entire movement, and preeminently by its ultimate results. Growth is the initial word, the prevailing word, the final word. .All that is requisite to moral growth is admissible; all that interferes with moral growth is inadmissible, no matter under what disguises of pleasure it may appear. God gives us a rehearsal of his own government in the wise training of a child. Human love we find daily failing on the side of leniency; the failure is none the less a failure. The thing to be won by training is true, simple, strong manhood. Kindness that feeds exaction is fruit flung to a beggar. That moral growth is the fundamental idea of the world is seen in the fact