Although many of the followers of these great teachers have been able to see the beauty of their conceptions, few have been able to transmit them as pure and bright as they received them. It is by no means easy to avoid interpreting what we hear in a merely personal way. Seldom do the “hearers of the Word” have the humility “of the broken and empty vessel,” so well expressed in a hymn at one time popular among revivalists: “Empty, that He might fill me As forth to His service I go; Broken, that so unhindered His life through me might flow.” Instead of that, we have tried to make the truth fit our ideas of “personal” life, when we should have made our “personal” life fit the truth. One cannot conceive of the Universe growing weary, of infinity becoming exhausted, because material science has shown us that harmonious laws govern all life. Scientists have been able to state laws that experience has shown to be unfailingly true. For example, take the heavenly bodies: through the study and comparison of their motions, astronomers have stated laws that apply to all that is known of them, and which illustrate the perfection of the solar system. To-day, if some asteroid is discovered which seems to move in opposition to known laws, no one supposes that the laws are wrong. So impossible is any haphazard occurrence in the solar system that astronomers know that any disturbance simply shows some existence or activity not hitherto observed. They do not doubt the unchangeable universal nature of the laws; but they recognize that only lack of knowledge prevents our understanding the relation of what we see to the laws that govern it, and they bend every effort to the solution of the mystery. If we but look upon the occurrences of human life with the same confidence, there is no cause for worry and uneasiness. Why should man chafe? Because of those who do ill? “Fret not thyself because of evildoers,” for they, too, have their uses. Every man is in the plan of God. It may be that he is here simply to show us something that we should not otherwise have seen. Had not someone done the ill and made the results known, many men might have made like mistakes and the consequences have been much worse than they are. Says Ernest Crosby: “I thank the kind round-shouldered men And treat them with respect For teaching me to raise my chin And hold myself erect.” No man can tell how much more he owes to the things that he would have made different had he shaped his own life, than to the things he regards as good.