Your answer might be: “Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, why hast Thou made me thus?”[118] But in place of rebuke You silence my trouble by an invitation: “_Come up hither_”.[119] I am to take my stand by Your side, and from that height look around on the design framed from eternity. Parts of a plan can be viewed aright only in connection with the whole. To consider them independently is to miss not only the meaning and grandeur of the scheme in its entirety, but particular excellence also. This I know. Yet the tendency of selfishness is to contract the vision, and let the tiny portion assigned to itself in the universal design absorb the interest and warp the judgment. I am too near to earth, too involved in its passing interests to preserve the relative proportion necessary for viewing things aright. I must move further off--look forward a few years--plant my feet, not on this transitory world, but on the eternal shore, and from that standpoint look out upon creation. “_He hath begotten us ... that we might be some beginning of His creature._”[120] What an unsealing of eyes awaits me the moment after death! What a vista all but infinite will open out before me as the divine plan unfolds! All this human race, which because it encloses my lot is apt to engross my whole interest--if indeed my interest extends to the race and is not absorbed by the little miserable me--all this vast assemblage of human souls to be--but _some beginning of His creature_! In eternity I shall see the part assigned to this beginning in the universal scheme. I shall see the part assigned to each unit. I shall grasp without effort, without reasoning, the self-evident fact that the dignity of every human being lies in its having a place in God’s eternal design; that independent or solitary greatness is an impossibility; that our happiness no less than our grandeur consists in filling that place in the vast mosaic which divine wisdom and love has appointed us; that the significance of the creature, its beauty and well-being are to be found only in its conformity with the ideal in the Creator’s mind. Those who on earth have worked out that ideal and thereby reached their appointed place are happy. Those who, absorbed by selfish aims, have failed to fit themselves for the place assigned them, are necessarily cast aside as failures--and this whatever the gifts, station, influence that distinguished them in the momentary interval between two eternities that we call Time. Nothing indeed will astound me more than the reversal of lots in the world beyond the grave. I shall see how in innumerable instances paths of glory have led to everlasting confusion and oblivion. How, on the other hand, the unnoticed, the meagrely gifted, have made their way up to the highest honour, and are placed “with the princes of His people”. The beggar of the Roman streets, shunned by every passerby, the shepherdess of an