positively of Yonderland, and was it not divinely becoming in Him who was before all things, and in Whom all things hold together? A weary old mother, at the end of a hard day's toil, said to her son: "Well, I am one day nearer my grave." "No, mother," the son quickly answered, "you are just one day nearer home: we are Christians." Oh, let us not forget that, my friends. If we are indeed Christians, ours is the privilege of a brave, unearthly assurance; for the universe is not talking in its sleep as we listen to the speech of the untroubled heart. When a soul is indwelt by Christ, man is no more afraid of death than a child is afraid of its mother's kiss.

"In my

The second idea is spaciousness. Father's house are many mansions." Heaven is the Land of Room Enough. There is room for all the dumb generations of the tongueless past; for all who have nobly striven and heroically failed; for all who have daringly dreamed and had not time here to witness their dreams' fulfillment; for all who entered the world with a hopeless handicap and left it with strong crying and tears. One thing— and one thing only-can shut out a soul from the spiritual capaciousness of the everlasting abidingplaces. It is an impure heart, an unholy will-love of what God hates, and hate of what God loves. 'Nothing in the world," said Kant, "or even outside of the world, can possibly be regarded as good without limitation except a good will." Here men

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are jostled and crowded-crowded for time; crowded for health; crowded for wisdom; crowded in multitudinous ways. And this is true of the good who desire to become better; true of the better who yearn to attain the best. But the time is short; our noisy days speed on wings of laughter and sighing; we spend our years as a tale that is told. Always it is the amplest nature that most poignantly feels the brevity of life. A Moses, with his promised land still untrodden; a Paul, with his world-programme still unrealized; a John, with his city of pearl and jasper still far away in the ethereal distance; a Dante, with his haunting vision still uncaught in poetic colours; a Shakespeare, with his immortal music still slumbering in the unplumbed deeps of his mighty soul; a Phillips Brooks, in the height of his powers, who still feels that he might come to something, if only he had five hundred years in which to pray and think and work. It is the thousand-souled man, far more than the one talent grave-digger, to whom the spaciousness of the Father's many-roomed Home appeals like melodious trumpet-blasts quivering with violent thrills of life. "Here," said Origen, "we see with eyes, act with hands, walk with feet. But in that spiritual body we shall be all sight, all hearing, all activity."

The Master's final idea is the immortal society. "And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself.

That

where I am, there ye may be also." If, as Beecher once said, "the bosom of God is the food of the universe," then the purpose of the universe is to grow a true and lofty society of chaste souls. Men are the end of nature, but men are not the end of themselves. Leaving nature behind, men go endlessly on and ceaselessly up-on and up the shining hills of light. First that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual-the dawn of the eternal, the call of the celestial, the ache and thrill of the personal, the peace and poise of the Christocentric. "I know mine own, and mine own know me," says the all-knowing Christ. What is it but the downbending of divinity and the upreaching of humanity, until the twain become one new and redeemed society in that Holy City paved with myriad rolling stars and washed by silver-singing seas? Then why should we not lean listeningly upward as we go thither? It is the starward look that gives majesty to the earthward step. Have we not left behind the burning mount, with its blackness, and darkness, and tempest? And are we not now pilgrims of grace, facing toward Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and myriads of angels, and the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and God the Judge of all, and the spirits of just men made perfect, and Jesus the mediator of a new covenant? All that ever lived are living still! It is a sublime, solemn, heart-shattering thought!

Consider it-ah! consider it well in your waking thoughts and tasks, and sometimes its voiceless wonder will lovingly invade your dreams! "All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity," said Shakespeare; yet it is equally true that all that die must live, passing out of the flesh into the world of spirits. What heavens and what hells there are in that immeasurable Milky Way of Deathless Souls! Once, at the end of a Sabbath whose hours were heavy with rain and storm, Doctor Hillis and I were talking of the "wonderful dead who have escaped from their bodies and gone." Raphael was one; Rembrandt was another; then Brooks, then Beecher, and, last of all, Robertson of Brighton. We were still talking, even as I passed out of his door into the night. Suddenly he paused, looked out and up, and asked: "What are they all doing tonight? What are they thinking about? Do Sundays mean anything to them?" It was a moment not to be forgotten-one in which silence is golden speech. Yet there is a deep, divine answer to my friend's great questions. It is this: "And there shall be no curse any more: and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be therein: and his servants shall serve Him; and they shall see his face; and his name shall be on their foreheads. And there shall be night no more; and they need no light of lamp, neither light of sun; for the Lord God shall give them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever."

This, then, is the way of The Untroubled Heartfaith in the Christlike God, faith in the Christlike Sonship, faith in the Christlike Society. And this is the rhyme of the Christian Mariner:

"I have a faith that life and death are one,

That each depends upon the self-same thread,
And that the seen and unseen rivers run

To one calm sea, from one clear fountain-head.
I have a faith that man's most potent mind
May cross the willow-shaded stream, nor sink;
I have a faith, when he has left behind

The earthly vesture on the river's brink,
When all his little fears are torn away,
His soul may beat a pathway through the tide,
And, disencumbered of its inward clay,

Emerge, immortal, on the summer side."