comes after will be but the increment of what now is, for even now we are in the eternal world. The kingdom of heaven has come and is ever coming; its powers and processes, its rewards and punishments are to-day in full activity, mounting into ever higher expression, but never more real in one moment of time than in another. Thus seen, life begins to get meaning and dignity, and this world becomes a full theatre of God's action, for here and now is his throne of judgment set in the heart of every man and in every nation. And so life is the single theme of the Christ, — life and its fullness. God gives his children one perfect, all-comprehending gift-life. It is his own image, his very substance shared with his creatures. Life carries everything with it; if true, it may be trusted to the uttermost; all things belong to it. By its own law it is endless; why should life ever cease to be life? It has but one enemy, sin. So long as life is true to its own laws and relations, it knows no diminution of its forces. If there had been no sin, no law-breaking, there would have been nothing that we now call death. Change there might have been, successive phases of life, as the bud yields the flower, and the flower the seed, but nothing like that we call death. Even the body would not really die. Had its powers not been impaired by sin it would have filled its round of years without evil defect, and sunk into sleep, ending life as it began, with slowly fading consciousness, not dying, but changing bodies as the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. Heredity almost teaches this in cer

tain exceptional lives. Nor would we ever have known this lethargy of mental faculties, this dullness of spiritual vision, this apathy of moral feeling, this that we truly call deadness of spirit, if in all generations the laws of our whole nature had been observed. But when sin came, death also came. And so the entire system began to work towards death, in body and spirit, in men and nations. Christ in troduces a reversing power, and turns the stream of tendency toward life. It is no mystery or miracle, unless it is strange that one being should change another into his likeness, or bring him under his power. We can conceive one so recipient of Christ's truth, so in sympathy with Him, so obedient to Him, as to have little sense of yesterday or to-morrow, to care little for one world above another, to heed death as little as sleep, because he is so filled with the life of God. It is towards this high state that Christ conducts us, sowing in our hearts day by day the seed of eternal life, — truth and love and purity. For if order is restored to our souls, the mind and body will follow after, and spiritual life will assert its preeminence over physical death.

The subject leaves us with two leading impres

sions :

1. Comfort in view of the change called death. That was Christ's aim, to comfort Martha as she wept by the grave of her brother. He does not strive to annihilate her grief, but to infuse it with another spirit. As Jesus Himself wept, so we would not have love shed one tear less over its dead; but there are tears that are too bitter for the human

eyes to shed, tears of despair; and there are tears that reflect heaven's light and promise as they fall, -tears of hope. Death in certain respects can never be other than it is, but there is a despair, a horrible sickening fear to which Christ will not consent. He takes death as the world has conceived it, and, because He so changes the thing, He gives to it a new name; He takes away its sting by taking away the sin of which it is the shadow. If a strict separation between sin and death can be effected, there is no evil in the latter except something of physical suffering, and of pain in parting from friends; but this is taken up and submerged in that vast flood of hope that flows out of the gospel. Aside from this we may approach death as wo approach sleep, as a grateful ordinance of nature, not longing for it, not dreading it, but accepting it as God's good way: a step in life, and not a going out of life. Here is where the comfort of Christ's revelation centres; it does not leave death a horrible uncertainty, a plunge into darkness, an entrance into some ghostly realm of torpid, waiting existence. It is instead, from first to last, a matter of life, life enlarged and lifted up, fuller and freer: "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."

2. The subject leads us up to a new sense of the value of faith in Christ.

It is no small thing to be delivered from false views of death. Consider with what a hopeless gaze the heathen regard it, what dreary visions of an under-world, peopled with shivering, bodiless

shades, working out the penalties of earthly sins, or revisiting the earth in degraded forms. The Jews even got no farther than some vague notion of a resurrection at the last day. There is no certainty till we come to Christ, and no deliverance from fear except through faith in Him. And by what rule shall we measure the value of this certainty and deliverance? We who have looked the last upon faces dear to us, and seen the life spark vanish from sight, can feel, though we cannot measure, the value of the faith which assures us that death is but the shadow of a coming greater life. It is a matter of unspeakable comfort, a blessing not to be compassed by thought, that Christ has inverted all the meanings that nature and habit have put upon death. The question is often put, What has Christianity done for the world? It has, at least, done this: When a mother lays her babe in the grave, life of her life, and loved more than life, she can believe that it is not dead but alive; that elsewhere its sweet life is going on with full function and personality. It is no small matter that human love is thus kept alive in hope, rather than crushed under the nether millstone of despair. What has Christ done for the world? He has delivered human love from the bondage of despair, and brought it under the inspiration of hope. And this is nothing more nor less than keeping love alive and strong; for nothing is surer than that the constant blighting of love by hopeless death wears away its fineness and weakens its power as an element of civilization. Few heathen wives are like Phocion's, of whom

Plutarch tells, who, when her husband was unjustly put to death by the Athenians, herself lighted his funeral pyre and gathered up his bones in her lap and brought them to her house and buried them under her hearthstone, saying, "Blessed hearth! to your custody I commit the remains of a good and brave man." What love, and yet what despair! Under the strain of such unrelieved suffering, love shrinks and hardens : —

"Death with its mace petrific, smites it into stone."

Love must have hope to feed on or it shrivels into mere animal instinct; but when soothed and drawn up to heaven by its hope, and spiritualized by a sense of eternal life, it asserts its infinite energies, and works in its own mighty way for the regeneration of the world. It is in such ways that Christ ministers to civilization. He invented no machine, neither engine, nor loom, nor compass; He taught no science; He laid down no theory of public education, no system of government; He organized no school of social science. It is a superficial view that regards civilization as depending upon these things. Christ went deeper: He took off the pressure from the human heart so that it could beat freely, and send full pulses of healthy blood to the brain and hands and feet of society. The human heart lies back of and underneath all else; out of it are all issues of life, for society as well as for individuals. Unless love, parental and social, is kept strong and vital, there will be no civilization worth the name. But love cannot be constantly smote by death and