XII.

THE FRAGMENTS.

John vi. 12: "GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN, THAT NOTHING BE LOST.'

TWO

WO facts strike us in regard to Nature: one is its exuberance; the other, its economy.

The exuberance of Nature appears everywhere. There is everywhere a surplus, -a large margin over and above what is necessary. In what immense spaces the planets swim through the heavens! The moon, nearest to us, is two hundred thousand miles away. What vast spaces in the universe are empty of planet, sun or star, comet or nebula! Then, on the earth, what latitude is given to the ocean! What vast portions of every continent are empty! China, with its three hundred millions of inhabitants, has great forests, deserts, and mountains, where no one dwells. Massachusetts is much the most densely settled State in the Union; but, if you ride on the cars from Boston to Providence, it seems, for a great part of the way, as if you were going through an uninhabited country. New York, with its three millions of

people, Pennsylvania and Ohio, each with their two millions, have enough rich farming land and woodland to give homes to the whole population of the United States, and leave room enough for twice as many more. What quantities of trees grow, stand, fall, and decay, unused and unseen by man! What flowers come and go every summer day in the thousand valleys, never noticed! What fruit ripens and falls uneaten by man or beast! What myriads of seeds are produced for one that germinates! How luxuri-. ant is the aspect of Nature !-its infinite showers of light; its treasures of rain and snow; its abundance of every thing; its generous superfluity,

66 'Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss!"

So in the nature of man is the same exuberance, the same abundance in his faculties and his experience. Our life is not tied down to any mechanical rigor of performance. We have time enough, opportunity enough, faculty enough, for every thing. What we cannot do to-day, we can do to-morrow. What we cannot do one way, we can do another. There is plenty of every thing in human nature. One thing only we need; and that is faith in it, - faith in the nature God has given us, its capacities and possibilities. Faith is the golden key which unlocks this splendid treasury, the human soul. Whatever is right and good, whatever the instinct of the heart tells us to do, believe that we are able to do it, and we can do it.

How much there is in man has never been dis

covered. The maximum of human attainments has not been reached. Napoleon did a great deal; but he seemed to himself to be idle. He might have done a great deal more. Theodore Parker, one of the severest workers we have ever had in America, declared that he had left half his faculties unused. The greatest saint is conscious to himself of how much better he might be than he is; and so he calls himself the chief of sinners. The great poet or artist knows that his noblest deed has had another,

"Of bright imagination born,
A loftier and a nobler brother,
From dear existence torn."

One of Milton's sonnets, written at twenty-three years of age, laments his own backwardness, and his late spring that shows no bud or blossom. If he had known what he was to do before he died, he might have been patient.

Time, also, is given us in profusion. We often say we have no time for this or that; but we usually say what is not true. Every one has ten times as much time as he uses. No one has ever put into a day a hundredth part of what he might. One day would be enough to think every thing, feel every thing, and do every thing we need to in this world, if we were only fully alive, full enough of soul, to make its hours crowded with glorious life. Did you ever see a letter from any one to a distant friend, which did not begin with this apology: "I ought to have written to you sooner; but I had no time"? It is almost always a

falsehood. It should be, "I had not the will, I had not the heart, I had not the confidence in myself, nor the trust that things would come to me to say. My mind has seemed empty." That is the true reason;

but we make believe it is a want of time. No: time is inexhaustible to a living soul. Only let the soul be sufficiently full of life, and a moment seems like a year.

To be sure, there is a certain amount of time required for all merely mechanical work; but, for soul-work, there is always time enough, if we only find soul enough. It takes me fifteen minutes to come from the town in which I live to Boston; and I do not see how that can be abridged: but, when I reach Boston, I go to see some noble person, some dear friend, or some earnest, generous spirit; or I go to the home of sorrow and trial; and, in one minute, I live a whole year of thought or sympathy or purpose. One second is long enough to change the current of life, to turn us upward toward heaven, or downward toward hell. The critical moments of life are not to be measured by the watch or the almanac. We look back over weary years, empty of all interest, to some few golden moments when we really lived. Those moments of pure insight, of pure love, of real action, those made our life all the rest is nothing. "What is the chaff to

the wheat?"

We have, therefore, not only enough of every thing, but more than enough, and a great deal more

than enough. The busiest person has some golden, precious moments of leisure, worth far more than the long days of the idle man.

Consider the life of Jesus. His active recorded life is thought to have been, at most, three years: probably it was not much more than one year. But because he had faith in God, and confidence in himself, his overflowing soul filled those few months so full of thought and love, that the four Gospels, the sacred books of mankind, could only take up and record for us a small part of it. If every thing had been written, "the

world itself could not contain the books that should be written." That is hardly an hyperbole. Of course, it could not. Why, what Jesus said and did each day, during the twelve hours, was all memorable. We have only gathered up a few shells by the side of that ocean of truth and love. We are riparian proprietors, so to speak, dwelling on a little bit of the shore, and looking out over a small portion of the surface of the immeasurable sea which bathes all the continents of earth.

But thus, while nature and life are so exuberant, the difficulty is that we waste them both. Therefore the lesson of our text, "Let nothing be lost."

Count nothing insignificant.

This lesson is also taught by Nature, throughout whose boundless profusion and royal abundance there reigns an equally austere economy. God gathers up in nature the fragments, and allows nothing to be lost. Not a comet, escaped from its elliptic restraint, and