worthier ideal of humanity. If we wish to awake interest in the future life, we must add to the merely spiritual ideas of uncultivated teachers, others which will minister food to the imagination, the intellect, the social and national instincts of man; nay, more, if we believe in the resurrection of the body, others which minister to the delight of the purified senses.

We need only go back to the revelation of Christ to gain the true ground of this wider conception. He revealed God as each man's Father. Now the highest work of a father is education, and the end of God's education of man is the finished and harmonious development of all his powers. If in the future life our intellect or imagination is left undeveloped, it is not education ; and we cannot conceive of a perfect fatherhood. If all our powers have not there their work and their opportunities of expansion, the full idea of fatherhood is lost. If any of our true work here on earth is fruitless work, and does not enable us to produce tenfold results in a future life, no matter what that work may be, work of the artist, historian, politician, merchant, then the true conception of education, and therefore of God's fatherhood, is lost.

No, brethren, we rest on this, 'I go to prepare a place for you.' A place is prepared for each one of us; a place fitted to our distinct character, a separate work fitted to develope that character into perfection, and in the doing of which we shall have the continual delight of feeling that we are growing; a place not only for us, but for all our peculiar powers. Our ideals shall become more beautiful, and minister continually to fresh aspira

tion, so that stagnation will be impossible. Feelings for which we found no food here, shall there be satisfied with work, and exercised by action into exquisite perfection. Faint possibilities of our nature, which came and went before us here like swallows on the wing, shall there be grasped and made realities. The outlines of life shall be filled up, the rough statue of life shall be finished. We shall be not only spiritual men, but men complete in Christ, the perfect flower of humanity.

And this shall be in a father's home, where all the dearest dreams of home-life shall find their happy fulfilment; in a perfect society, where all the charming interchange of thought and giving and receiving of each other's good which make our best happiness on earth, shall be easier, freer, purer, more intimate, more spiritual, more intellectual; and lastly, in a perfect polity, 'fellow-citizens with the saints,' where all the interests of large national life shall find room and opportunities for development; and binding all together, the omnipresent Spirit of love, goodness, truth, and life, whom we call God, and whom we know in Jesus Christ, shall abide in us, and we in Him, for He is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto Him.'

IMMORTALITY.

'For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.'-Luke x. 38.

It is remarkable that the theological questions which are now most widely spoken of are no longer those which presuppose a general confession of Christianity, but other and deeper questions altogether; questions the very discussion of which shows how strongly the foundations of the religious world are moved. It is now frequently asked whether there be a God or not, whether immortality be not a mere idol of the imagination. It is plain, when society has got down to these root questions, that modern theology in its past form has no longer the power to do its work, otherwise these things would be axioms. It is plain that, if Christianity is to keep its ground, it must go through a revolution, and present itself in a new form to the minds of men.

It is the characteristic excellence of Christianity that it is able to do this. For with regard to his own religion the saying of Christ remains for ever true—that saying which declares the continued progress of Revelation, 'I have yet many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now.'

But when the time draws near for the growth of

Christian thought around a new idea, and for the regeneration of Christian practice by the life which flows from the fresh thought, the change is heralded by the appearance, sometimes in infidel teaching, sometimes in isolated religious teachers, of scattered and disconnected truths, which do not naturally belong to the old form of religion, or which are set up in opposition to it. Being half-truths, or isolated truths, they point forward to a complete form which shall supplement and include them. At the present day many of the new truths, or rather, of the extensions of the old truths, which Christianity will have to absorb, are to be found in infidel teaching, combined with a rejection of immortality and of the being of a God. We shall search for those truths to-day, and try to show that without the doctrine of immortality they have no lasting value, but that in union with it they are of real importance, and ought to be claimed for Christianity.

But first, let us examine for a moment what is taking place at present with regard to Christian and infidel teaching.

During the time when an old form of Christian thought is slowly passing away, having exhausted all it had to give, it repeats again and again with the garrulity of old age the phrases which in its youth were the expressions of living thought and feeling. They fitted then the wants of men, and they were the means by which religious life advanced and religious truth developed. But being naturally cast into a fixed intellectual system, they remained behind the movement they began; they made men grow, but men outgrew them,

for systems become old, but mankind is always young. It follows, then, almost of necessity, that when a certain point in this progress is reached, there will be a strong reaction against the old form of Christianity, and the reaction will contain the assertion of that which is wanting in the dying phase, and a protest against its weakness. Both the assertion and the protest will often be combined with infidel teaching, for there will be many who, seeing these garments of Christianity rotting away, and hearing them declared to be Christianity itself, will believe the declaration, and attack not only the garments but the living spirit itself which is waiting to be reclothed. The infidel teaching on religious subjects will then consist of two parts, a negative and a positive part. The negative will deny or ignore all Christian truth as then taught; the positive will assert some ideas necessary for the present time and answering to some of its religious wants. It is the business of Christian teachers, while setting aside the negations, to claim as their own those positive ideas which, though developed in a foreign soil, are yet derived from Christian seeds. They will say, 'We have learnt from our enemies; they have told us what the age desires. In answer to that desire they have unwittingly fallen back upon Christian ideas and expanded them, led unconsciously thereto by the ever-working spirit of God. Those expansions are ours; we did not see them before, but we claim them now.' If we do that, the infidelity of the infidel, that is, his negations, will slowly share the fate of all negations; and the scattered truths he teaches, taken into Christianity, find in it their vital

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