We mistake immortality if we read it merely as a future promise. It is a present gift. It is not merely the offer of a hope. It ought to be the joy of a possession. The Christian life ought to be full of Easter days,—a perpetual renewal of purpose and of being from their temporal into their spiritual shape and power.

It is a superficial measuring of life that estimates it simply by its duration. Its abundance consists rather in its intensity, in its breadth and depth and height. A revelation of immortality does not greatly interest me if it merely means an infinite continuance of years. It is not altogether good tidings just to be told that we need fear no end to these burdened and misunderstanding lives of ours. Immortality is not a thing of time or place so much as of spiritual quality. It is not a matter of continuance of life so much as of fulness of life.

I prefer to think of immortality as existing not merely then, but now; not merely there, but here; not so much beyond as within. Did Jesus speak of immortality only as a mere future rising from the grave? Are we not all the time stretching the language of Scripture, and changing the present tense into the future? "My sheep hear my voice," said Jesus, and "I give them"—not "will give them"—"eternal life." "This is life eternal, to know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." We speak of going to a better world, but the Lord's Prayer gives no authority for that. Jesus prayed for a new government and spirit to come into this world, which will constitute it a new heaven and a new earth. He did not bid us look away from the things of time in order to discover the things of eternity. He did not expect us to find eternal life beyond the loves and experiences of this world, but in them and through them. Let us base our assurance of immortality not upon "proofs that do not prove," but upon the fact of our present share in the eternal life of a changeless God. Shall we not perceive that the change which a man is conscious of when he inherits eternal life is not in his prospects, but in himself; not that he shall live longer, but that he shall live differently?

If we can attain to something of this thought of Jesus of immortality, as a spiritual condition rather than an everlasting monotony, shall we not be freed from the childish dream of heaven as a place? I think one of the causes of unbelief in immortality is to be found in the exceedingly uninteresting picture of the future which it has pleased some prosaic theologians to draw. The ordinary heavenly Jerusalem is not a city where I want to dwell. The spirit's growth in vision and in activity, and the satisfaction of yearning love, are the things that make any hereafter worth while.

SAMUEL A. ELIOT.
In Christian Register.

William D. Little says in The Christian Register:—

"There is no real, permanent happiness, no lasting satisfaction for any man save in being absolutely loyal to the truth as he sees it (even though he knows it may be only relative and not final truth, in being faithful to his conscience, his reason, and his ideals,—his ideals of righteousness, of perfection, of God. And ideals forever march on before, and beckon us to still loftier living. If man would be true to himself and live up to his highest, where that light leads he must follow, what that inner voice commands he must do. Call this voice the voice of God if you will. The name is nothing, words are only symbols. To obey its commands is the all-important thing.

"When religion is divested, stripped naked of all its clothing of traditional dogma and doctrine and inherited belief; when all its concrete symbols, all the tangible, visible centres round which it has been thought to cluster, all the props which have been supposed to support it are taken away,—it does not perish from the earth, but still persists, still lives perennially in the soul of man, and it finds its refuge, its springs of faith and hope, in idealism. It does not consist or depend in the slightest degree upon the holding fast to certain appearances of truth, but in doing the will of the Lord as each man finds it recorded, in ever-widening reach in proportion as he obeys it in his own soul.

"And so the idealist, shaking himself clear of the last shred and vestige of dogmatic belief, divesting himself of the grossness of materialism and the more refined grossness of symbolism, rises into the clear atmosphere of purely spiritual thought and feeling. Days and seasons, books, dogmas and doctrines, institutions and personalities, lose their meaning and sink and shrivel into insignificance. They have value for him only as they help him to a higher plane of living and thinking. The narrow walls of the church crumble away, and he worships in the vast temple of the universe. He no longer needs a minister to break for him the bread of life, but becomes his own priest. No longer does he depend on the dicta of a book to show him what to do, but turns to the law of the Lord written large on the tablets of his own consciousness, the law of the Ought that suits all occasions, that fits all changing circumstances. The image and the symbol give way to the idea; the prayer of formalism is replaced by aspiration, that unseen, unheard breathing of the soul; he rises out of the narrow provincialism of popular Christianity into the broad, universal religion whose only search is for truth, whose only endeavor is to usher in the kingdom of God in the hearts of men,—that kingdom which Jesus, himself an idealist, sought to establish, and to which he was faithful even unto death."

How the world goes round! The time was when devout ministers proclaimed to the world that there was no good in good deeds unless they were performed by a Christian. Again, the time was when nothing worse could be said of a preacher than that he preached "that old absurdity" that there can be no good save it comes from a Christian's heart. Now the time is when President Eliot of Harvard says: "To my mind philanthropic work is no use unless it is prompted by love." What is the difference? There is a difference of expression and of understanding, but as for the real essence of the thing, the good old shouting revivalist of the olden time and the dignified President of our great University stand on the same platform. In all probability the old revivalist did not know what he was talking about; in all probability President Eliot does. The difference is in the men, not the thing. The child plays with pieces of glass; the man makes the telescope. The early man says you cannot do good unless you are a Christian, the later man, in some measure the product of the earlier, says, "you can do no good work unless it is prompted by love. Christianity is disinterested love. I regret the tendency which draws workers away from the Church, for Churches teach and preach disinterested love." How does the world go round!—The Universalist Leader.

The true resurrection may, nay, must be gin in this present life. It is the rising again from the death of selfishness to the life of love, from the merely natural to the unfolding spiritual.

Few persons notice that our Lord speaks of the resurrection and eternal life as a present possession. "I am the resurrection and the life; . . . whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." That is a truth of this day, this moment, not of some far-off and shadowy event dimly apprehended by the human mind. If we have gone any way along the road of regeneration, if we have ever denied ourselves for love's sake, if we have ever felt an unselfish compassion or sympathy cast out our worthless pride, we know the throb and thrill of eternal life as truly.—I do not say as fully, but as truly,—as we ever shall know it in heaven.

The whole spiritual drama of life, the contest by which our human nature sets its foot steadfastly on the beastly, and holds it under, is this very process of our resurrection.—New Church Messenger.

People are led to look wistfully up to heaven, whereas they ought to be engaging their attention with something nearer home. It is not outpouring that is wanted, but inletting. The prayer for the Spirit which is needed is not the beseeching of heaven to open its shut windows. The windows of heaven are not shut. They are wide open. In too many cases it is our hearts that are shut. Ah, these gates that shut the Spirit out! gates of brass, doors whose hinges are so stiff with selfish habit that they seem forever closed. "Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of Glory may come in!"

MONRO GIBSON.

A good deal of what goes by the name of the Higher Criticism is like appreciating the "Angelus" on the basis of the number of threads in a square inch of the canvas on which it is painted, or depreciating the artist's work because he did not weave the canvas.

The Watchman.

What portion of God's life, of His sanctity, of His tenderness, of HIs benign activity, of His untroubled peace, of His supreme regard for holiness, lives also in us? That is the meaning and the measure of our devotion.—JOHN HAMILTON THOM.

We never graduate in religion, because the nearer we are to God the more we see there is to be learned.—M. H. SEELYE.