guide us into the right way, but we know full well that we may resist and defy His Spirit. By His power He adjusts external nature to our needs, but we may use the gifts of nature wisely or foolishly as we will. This absolute freedom of action on our part is no whit interfered with by the action of God, either in striving to influence us, or in subsequently making us recognise that if we yielded to His impulses we have had His blessing, or that if we rejected them we brought evil on our heads. What He really does is to teach us through His Spirit, first by good impulses and by the lesson and example of Christ, and next by the consequences of our actions as the Holy Spirit at last reveals them to us.

Even regarding mere worldly affairs we are constantly liable to blunder, for our knowledge is limited, our foresight imperfect, our sagacity often at fault. But is it not in the experience of every one that we have been many a time saved from grave mistake by some trivial incident, or turn in our thoughts, or new idea coming into our minds which has altered our intentions or prevented them from taking effect? These things cannot be blind chance, they are the working of the Spirit of God on the spirit of man.

CHAP. XI] COMFORT OF GOD'S HELP

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So we are brought to the conclusion that in all things in life, great and small, God is in communion with us. We may not be in communion with Him. That depends on ourselves, and if we are not we are rebels, as were the angels that fell. But if we seek to enter into that communion we may say with St. Paul,1 If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?' All things on earth as well as all things in heaven. For on earth He fed the hungry, He stilled the storm, He healed the sick, He raised the palsied, He made the blind to see and the deaf to hear, He brought the widow's son from the dead, He cast out the spirits of evil from the souls and bodies of men. He is here still, though He is also risen; His power is as omnipotent, His love as infinite, and His word still abides, 'I will not leave you comfortless, I will come unto you.'

Think what such assurances are to us. We are on earth, subject to all the incidents of mortal life, the thorns and briers that grow up so readily and constantly in the world, the fight with Nature that absorbs all our energies, and which has been Rom. viii. 31, 32.

and is so incessant that it has grown into the scientific dogma, 'the survival of the fittest.' We are mortal, and that word tells us that we have but a brief span of existence, and that our lives are tried by maladies, and saddened by the frequent loss of those dearest to us. We are set amidst temptations of evil, and surrounded by the wicked, and mournfully conscious how powerful are our foes within and without, and how feeble our own powers of resistance. How can we hold up against all these adverse, depressing, potent influences? We should have neither strength nor hope, but in the aid of God. But we do have that aid. If only we make our utmost effort to walk in His laws, to trust in His promises, to lift up our hearts in love to Him and in prayer for His blessing, we have the absolute certainty that at every moment, waking or sleeping, in health or sickness, in joy or sorrow, in abundance and in want, He is beside us, and His Spirit is within us. Beside us, to turn every suffering and grief to our good; within us, to teach, to guide, to defend us, and through all chances and changes to restore us to that likeness to Him in which He created us.

CHAPTER XII

HEREAFTER

WHITHER goes the soul of man when it leaves the body? In the body it is bound by all the laws of matter, it is tied by gravity to the surface of the earth or dragged into the depths of the sea; imagination may lead it into unknown freedom, but we know that this is but a dream, and it is rounded by death. Yet we are convinced that this world is not our souls' eternal prison, though on every demand to see its future abode and scope falls the baffling veil of darkness and silence.

Yet through the gloom there shine steadily some guiding rays which, though they do not even outline the land, yet show there is land beyond the deep. Freedom from bondage to the body means release from all the restraints imposed on matter. The laws of gravity and of motion, the mathematical demonstrations and limitations of optics and electricity and chemistry will no longer hedge

in our actions and perceptions; we may therefore believe that our spirits will know by intuition, and will range beyond the bounds of earthly sense. So much is inherent in the mere idea of freedom from the physical body. And if we know not the places where, at least we have been permitted to know something of the manner how.

For that the disembodied spirit will yet retain in its appearance some resemblance to the body it had left we learn from the Resurrection of Christ Himself. The disciples, when their eyes were opened, were able to recognise their Lord by His person and His voice, nay even by the wounds on His hands and feet and side; nor only by sight, for He bade them handle Him and see, that He had still the semblance of the body, flesh and bones,' and He took food along with them, though afterwards the bodily semblance was seen to ascend into the sky. So also in the Transfiguration, the selected disciples were able to recognise the persons of Moses and Elias, no doubt from their conventional tradition. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus both of these individuals, and also Abraham, are spoken of as retaining a recognisable identity. In the forewarnings of the Judgment Day, good men and 1 Luke xxiv.; John xx., xxi.