Now, we ask ourselves the question why our Lord poured out all this scorn on what the world counts the desirable condition and atmosphere of life, why the New Testament has no patience with self-seeking, indulgence, contentment, or ease as the standard of a human life, why it speaks contemptuously of smooth ease of every kind, and exalts, instead, the austere life, the life of strength, and of self-discipline, why our Lord said to men when He came to call them into the best thing there was in the world, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow after me.” Well, one reason why the whole New Testament pours out such contempt upon the smooth life and exalts hardness, is because only hardness can make a great soul, and the end of the Gospel, the end of life, was the growing of souls. The words of Socrates, understood in the social sense which he intended and not selfishly, contain the central end. “For I do nothing,” said he, “but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.” It is true, in a sense, that we are here for the work we can do, but it is also true, in a yet deeper sense, that we are here to become the best workmen that we can become, and that the work we do has a large measure of its value in its reflex power of making us capable of doing better work. Evidently this is not the real workshop where God needs His best men and women. When He has perfected His workmen and workwomen and recognizes that they are prepared to do their best work, does He make use of them here? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where evidently the real work is to be done. Everything we see in this world would seem to indicate that it is only the preparatory school, a place where men and women are equipped for the real thing, that the career that is to abide lies elsewhere than here. The purpose of these days is to make us ready for the work God has for us to do in a larger sphere than this, where we pass on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have a larger government given to us to administer. God pours out His contempt on smoothness of life because it cannot make greatness of soul, and greatness of soul is one object of our being here. The Christian ideal despised, also, this smoothness which seems to many of us the most desirable thing that life has for us, because there is such little knowledge given with it. At best it can only play on the very surface of life. We know no more than springs out of the deep experience through which we pass. You remember the lines of Father Tabb: “‘Where wast thou, little song, That hast delayed so long To come to me?’ ‘Mute in the mind of God Till where thy feet had trod I followed thee.’”