judged simply by their works. Parallel with humanity is the Kingdom of Heaven. Parallel with men's deeds are the purposes of God. Over and above what humanity does of itself is a plan of redemption, the working out of which enters into human destiny. It may be that the other book represents that other power, and the influences that flow out of the life of Christ. It is a book of life, and He is the life of the world. Men are judged by the records of their works, but it may be that the sentence pronounced is affected by what is written in the book of life. I am aware that this complicates the thought, but we must remember that the problem of spiritual destiny is not absolutely simple. It has other elements than mere goodness and badness. It involves the divine will, a reconciliation, a work wrought upon humanity as well as by it; it has a God-ward as well as a man-ward side. Nor is it strange that a question involving such a mystery as evil should be hard to answer. With an unknowable element in the problem, who shall solve it? And when this or that is asserted about eternal destiny on either side, as though it were a matter of alphabetic plainness, we say, "Explain evil, before you assert its consequences." While the way of life is plain, so that even a little child may walk in it, it is overhung by mysteries whose shadows deepen as it leads into the future.

But we will leave this side issue and turn to the main thought: the books out of which men are judged. We say at once, "Books, records, items of conduct written down in order! how can there be

such things in a spiritual world?— earthly things after the earth itself has vanished?" There can indeed be no books, but there may be something that corresponds to books; no records, items of conduct, engraved or engrossed, but there may be something that answers the purpose of records. There may be no reading of charges, or rehearsal of deeds, but there may be something that shall make everything known and evident. Where shall we look, to what shall we turn, for such a solution? I do not think we are permitted to go outside of nature and its divine laws for answer. The books must be found in God, or nature, or man. The mind of God must indeed be a tablet whereon are written all the works of men, but let us not touch that ineffable mystery without warrant. Science, in the person of some of its high priests, has suggested that all the deeds of men are conserved as distinct forces in the ether that fills the spaces of heaven, and may be brought together again in true form, in some new cosmos, as light traversing space as motion, is turned to heat when arrested by the earth. But we can find no link between such a fact, if it be a fact, and the moral process of judgment. We must search man himself for the elements of his great account.

There is more in man than we have yet compassed. He is a deep down which the plummet of science has not yet sunk. We look at ourselves, and say: “Here I am, a body with five senses; a mind that thinks and chooses; a soul that enjoys and suffers and loves and worships; a grand cate

gory of faculties, something worthy of immortality?" but we have not reached the bottom of our nature. A closer analysis, or chance revelations as in dreams or abnormal conditions, indicate faculties that slumber, or exist in germ, that may awaken, or grow into fullness. We do not yet know the capacity or reach of our most evident powers.

Let

a fit of anger or the delirium of disease, or some great excitement like that of battle, possess the body, and resources of physical strength are developed not common to it. Horatius holds the bridge against an army. Achilles in his wrath slays the mighty Hector. The sick, in the delirium of fever, pass from utter weakness to herculean strength; even the body is an unmeasured force.

Take the mind: at first it is merely a set of faculties, without even self-consciousness, but contact with the world brings them into action, first observation, then memory; soon the imagination spreads its folded wings; then comes the process of comparison and combination, and thus the full process of thinking is developed, a process to which there is no end, and the capacities of which are immeasurable. When we reach the limit of our own powers, we open the pages of some great master of thought, and there find new realms that reveal corresponding powers.

Take the soul: there are faculties that exist only in germ till certain periods of life arise. The child knows nothing of the love that breaks in upon the youth with its rapturous pain and yearning of insatiable desire, flooding the heights of his being, but

the capacity was in the child. The soft touch of a babe's hand unlocks new rooms in the heart of the mother. New relations, new stages of life, disclose new powers and reveal the mysteries of our being. We are all the while finding out new agencies in nature; even its component parts are not yet all discovered, while the forces developed by combination are doubtless immeasurable in number and degree. It is a most suggestive fact that the bringing together of two or three simple substances develops that prodigious force seen in the stronger explosives. If mere combination of material things yields such results, what may new scenes and new contact not do for the soul; what new powers, what new experiences may not follow when the spirit breathes ethereal air, and the eyes look on the whiteness of God's throne! It is the specialty of man that his nature is an unsounded deep. A handful of acorns covers a mountain-side with forest, a sufficient mystery when we think of it, — but there it ends, in simple immense reproduction. But man, being made in the image of God, is stored with endless capacities, for he has a long journey before him down the endless ages, and new powers will be needed, - fresh wings as he mounts into higher atmospheres. Such a theme must be touched reverently, but I knew nothing to forbid us regarding the soul of man as a seed dropped from God's own self into this earthy soil, here to begin its endless growth back towards its source, an end never to be attained, because limiting conditions have been assumed, but still at an ever lessening

distance. What other dream can cover so well the majesty and mystery of our nature?

But we need not let our thought travel so wide from absolute knowledge in order to find a capacity that shall uphold the fact of future judgment. Take the memory, the faculty through which the consciousness of identity is preserved. With so important a function to fulfill, it is altogether probable that its action is absolute, that is, it never forgets. We cannot understand its action, but probably we speak accurately when we say that an impression is made upon the mind. The theory that memory is a physical act, and therefore cannot outlast death, is untenable. Matter, having no real identity, cannot uphold a sense of identity, which is the real office of memory. The impression of what we do, say, hear, see, feel, and think, is stamped upon the mind. An enduring matrix receives the impression; is it probable that it is ever lost? We think we forget, but our thought is corrected by everyday experience. The recalling of what was lost, shows that the forgotten impression remains true. The mind wearied by toil forgets at night, but remembers when sleep has refreshed the body. The body forgot; the mind retained its knowledge. How significant! If death is sleep, with what freshness will the mind resume its offices when its new morning dawns upon it! We forget the faces we have seen, but on the first fresh glimpse we remember them. We revisit scenes that long since had faded from memory, but the new sight uncovers the old impression. Even so slight a thing as a note of