hateful with selfishness. We think of the Church's often absurdly needless divisions, the backwardness of its thought, the coldness of its devotion, the inefficiency of many of its methods, the want of consecration in a host of its members, the imperfections and limitations of the best and most earnest of them; and we do not really expect any marked advance; we hardly anticipate that the Church will hold its own. Would not our Lord chide us, "O ye of little faith! all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations"? "There are diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh all in all."

The Church exists to make the world the Kingdom of God. In the holy city of John's vision there is no temple, for its whole life is radiant with the presence of God and of the Lamb. In the final order there will be no Church, for its task is finished when God is all in all. Meanwhile the Church has no excuse for being except as it continually renders itself less and less necessary. It has to lose itself in sacrificial service in order to save itself. It must never ask itself, "Will

the community support me?" but "Can I inspire the community?" As it seeks to do God's will, it can count on Him for daily bread; a more luxurious diet would not be wholesome for its spiritual life. It exists only to spend and be spent in bringing the children of God everywhere one by one under the sway of His love and presenting them perfect in Christ, and in putting His Spirit in control of homes, industry, amusements, education, government, and the whole life of human society, until we live in "realms where the air we breathe is love."

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE EVER

LASTING

Various factors combine to make it hard for men today to believe vividly in life beyond the grave. Our science has emphasized the closeness of the connection between our spiritual life and our bodies. If there be an abnormal pressure upon some part of the brain, we lose our minds; an operation upon a man's skull may transform him from a criminal into a reputable member of society. It is not easy for us to conceive how life can continue after the body dies. Diderot put the difficulty more than a century ago: "If you can believe in sight without eyes, in hearing without ears, in thinking without a head, if you could love without a heart, feel without senses, exist when you are nowhere and be something without extension, then we might indulge this hope of a future life."

Our modern view of the universe no longer leaves us a localized heaven and hell, and we have not the lively imaginations of those older generations to whom the unseen world was as real as the streets they walked and the houses in which they lived. One goes into such a burying place as the Campo Santo at Pisa, or reads Dante's Divina Comedia, and the painters who adorned the walls with frescoes depicting the future abodes of the blessed and the damned, and the poet who actually travelled in thought through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, were as keenly aware of these places as of neighboring Italian towns. We lack a definite neighborhood in which to locate the lives that pass from our sight.

Religious authority is based, today, upon experience, and obviously experience can give no certain knowledge of things future. We are disposed to treat all pictures of the life to come, whether in the Bible or out of it, as the projections of men's hopes. They are such stuff as dreams are made on.

And at present we are absorbingly interested in the advance of our world's life; we dream of better cities here, rather than of

some golden city beyond our horizon; we care far more intensely for lasting earthwide peace that shall render impossible such awful orgies of death as this present war, than for the peace of a land that lieth afar. Men think of the immortality of their influence, rather than of what they themselves will be doing five hundred years hence, and of the social order that shall prevail in the earth in the year 2000, rather than of the social order of the celestial country.

Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of. But death is always man's contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without regretted partings. And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more than an interval between ourselves and the tomb. To every thoughtful person the question is forced home, "If a man die, shall he live again?"

What did Jesus Christ contribute towards answering our question?

He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely rich it is, He kindled in