The need of vision is "vnost emphatically expressed in the words of our text, For these words show a deep insight into the facts of life: they are the ripe fruit of experience: they penetrate and they expose the falseness of ideas which so widely prevail, and are x0 baneful to the highest in man.
Solomon here contradicts the agelong materialism of men, which seeks and is content with happiness in present possession: which has no outlook beyond to-day: which confines man's interest to earth and time: which grasps and holds physical and material good as the be-all and end-all of existence, and has no thought for the well-being of a later day.
The wise man's words remind one of Sir Noel Paton's picture "The Man with the Mucl-Rake rating that scene in Pilgri gress where, contrast with Christian and his out-stretched hand and his uplifted look to things, celestial, this man is seen with gloating eyes, raking to himself the empty baubles and sticks and dust of the floor.
And our text tells us that this sordid concentration, upon the present, the actual, the material, without thought of the future, the ideal and the spiritual, reacts upon ourselves, ramps and stunts life, so that "where there is no vision the people perish." thin "vision"? Tt the looking beyond the present, the actual, the unsatisfactory and' see ing the possible, the ideal, the satisfactory: the power to realize in imagination the promise and the Potency of life, to see the world Few made, upon a better, happier plan; and the wish to have a hana in the remaking, It was vision in Christ which enabled him "for the joy that was set before him to endure the cross despising the shame."
It wan vision in Paul the Apostle which saw Christ reigning and all enemies put under his feet; and which sent him with couragevae heart to untold labours for the bringing in of that glad time, It way vision which stirred the Feart of Abraham Lincoln, when. torning from the sight of the ulto the great task remaining before us, that, from these honoured dead ive may' take increased inspiration Yor that cause for which they gave the lant full measure of devotion."
'And that vision. was before his eyes ill he translated it into fact, when, January, 1863," he signed the Declaration' which ended slaveholding In. America.
Te was vition which sent Liv stone with burning heart on that tecond journey. up the Zambest, when he. travelled" past. blackened aid rained villages, and the blench-fed bones. of dead' children whose parents had been sold by' wicked men to slavery.
Tt was the sight realized in thought. of an Afrien freed: from theeruclties of these hounds of hell, and litted from misery and degradation to happiness and peace Tight.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.