they love excessively this present life. Hence with terrible emphasis does Jesus propose the law of perfection: "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." Luke adds the term "daily," "- let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

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This little term inserted by Luke has a deep meaning. It signifies that the carrying of the cross is not some exceptional event in the life of man, that he can perform, and then have done with it, but the perpetual tenor of the life of him who wishes to come close to Jesus. As we have said in commenting a previous chapter, the cross is the symbol of suffering. No man can live the life of man here on earth and escape suffering: it is our natural inheritance; but many suffer, and derive therefrom no spiritual profit. The whole world is filled with woe; every day we hear of those who in bitterness and in despair have committed self-slaughter. But this sorrow is not the taking up of the cross, and the following of Jesus. That which Jesus counsels is the voluntary, patient acceptation of affliction, in order to promote the high interests of our other life. Its foundation must be renunciation; hence Jesus states first that a man must deny himself.

Religious self-denial exists in various degrees. The supreme degree of it was manifested when the Son of God emptied himself of the glory that he had with his Eternal Father, and offered himself to suffer and to die in order that he might accomplish the redemption of man. His whole life was one grand act of self-denial. He chose the lowest station in life; he refused all human recognition of his deeds; he voluntarily gave up his life for the love of man. We have accepted his Gospel, and we thereby promise to follow him, and many of us make of our following a mere farce. The lives of Christians are so little in keeping with the grand ideal of Christ, that the pagans openly deride us, and declare that Jesus taught an impossible law, a high and excellent law, but unattainable by man. The ordinary motive that moves Christians is not Christian self-denial, but selfishness. Selfishness is the order of the day, and we readily fall into line with the vast army of worldly men who dominate our complex worldly life. But the words of Jesus can not change or pass away; they have fixed

one standard for the perfect life, and in the measure that we approach that standard; in that same measure, will our lives be perfect. To deny one's self is to go against what crude nature desires, and to take up and do what is naturally unpleasant. Crude nature reaches out after worldly advantage, worldly pleasure. Crude nature shrinks back from pain and death, and prizes this life. Crude nature minds the things of men, as Peter minded them, at the time that Jesus rebuked him.

The fundamental error of life is failure to appreciate what this life is, and what the other life is. The destiny that God has prepared for man is greater than man realizes. Man belongs not to this low order of being. He is a citizen of a better country, a fellow citizen of the angels, a dweller before the face of God.

This present life is a mere temporary probationary state; it was never intended that we should settle down here. There is nothing here that we can really call our own, for in a little while death will put forth his hand and tear us away from all that is here. How foolish then to make of this life the great object of living? Our life should be totally a preparation and an expectancy, and we live it as though it were the end of all our thought and labor. The more precious the thing is, the sadder is the waste thereof. Now there is nothing more precious than the results which we might accomplish by the right conduct of our lives. Let us lift our minds up to the Heaven of God, and witness there the angel of the living God keeping the records of all the good that man accomplishes. Behold the glory of the saints of God, who have fulfilled the proper purpose of this life. Behold Jesus the Master who has suffered and died on the cross, that he might enter into his glory. And their state is eternal. There is no growing old, no fear of death; for death has been eliminated from the new order of things. There is no weariness, no sickness, no pain, no sorrow, but an everlasting possession of life. This is life, the only thing that deserves the name of life, the only thing that God ever called life. In that realm of truth and life, the perfected being of man enjoys a grand perfect comprehension of truth. The best efforts of the greatest intellects of the world are but faint childish approximations compared to the

knowledge possessed by the saints of God. Love is the sweetest emotion of human life; and the life in Heaven is uninterrupted ecstatic love.

A pernicious error is to regard the life in Heaven as a cold fixed intellectual contemplation. On the contrary, Heaven is the perfect contentment of every power of our being. Body and soul reunited in that state live the fulness of life, and exercise the faculties proper to the nature of man.

Fearful doubt and distrust of Heaven have thus been expressed by a leading modern poet:

"Or if there be some other world with no bloom, neither rippling sound, nor early smell,

Nor leaves, nor pleasant exchange of human speech;

Only a dreadful pacing to and fro of spirits meditating on the

sun;

A land of bared boughs and grieving wind;" etc.

Such a conception of being appeals to nothing within us. It chills to death the hope that longs for some state of active being; that longs for an existence wherein our beings may expand, and enjoy the delightful activity of our powers that instinctively shrink back from a state of mere passivity. The very instinct of immortality within us includes the desire of action. Men much tossed about in life, men long unhappy, marked for sorrow, tired with the anguish of long years, readily accept the thought of rest in the grave. Perhaps they care not to think of the nature of the existence beyond: they are so weary that rest seems the one thing desired. This thought perversely applied has moved men to die by their own hand. But such are not the thoughts of healthy minds. Sorrow and overwork derange a mind so that its conceptions are morbid and untrue. The normal healthy mind loves and hopes for immortal life and immortal action. God has implanted that yearning, and he will fully content it. There is peace in Heaven, there is freedom from all painful exercise of energy; but there is also there a state of activity befitting that high state. The perfection of being is action; hence God is eternal act. God has not revealed to us the nature of the state of Heaven; he has left that to be accepted on faith. He has

told us that there we would know God. "Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that when he (God) shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is." I. John III. 2.

Is it not enough for us to know that we shall be like unto God? We are promised fulness of knowledge, fulness of love following this knowledge, exemption from every sorrow (Apoc. VII. 16), eternal life. We are promised possessions: "He that overcometh shall inherit these things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son."-Apoc. XXI. 7. Infinite power, the power that created all things, the power that created us and gave us our capacity for happiness, has pledged itself to make us happy beyond the power of finite mind to comprehend, and yet we look forward with a certain feeling of terror at the very state of existence in which God has promised us perfect felicity. We find many things that give us a certain happiness here on earth. This is only because God has so ordered things that we may enjoy them. Every thing that pleases us is by God's ordination. And if this be thus ordered in this imperfect order of things, shall we distrust God's power or his will to give us a higher order of happiness in the perfect state of being to which we tend? It is not strange that we show a certain dread of the journey to eternal life, for that way leads through the gates of death. Neither are we censurable for a strange feeling akin to homesickness when we contemplate our final removal from all our associations here. But that which is unreasonable and grievously sinful is deliberately to represent eternal life in such manner that checks the aspirations of the soul. We can have no true conceptions of the state of being in Heaven, for that is not yet revealed; but against that uncertainty we have our Creator's promise of perfect felicity, and on that promise the soul should rest with perfect faith that the omnipotent being who created us will find a means to content all our proper longings. If when the thought of Heaven seems not human enough, we turn our thoughts to contemplate the promise of God, and God's power and love, the strange fear will pass away, and we shall hope

with a rightful hope. This is the life that Jesus promises that a man shall find, by losing this present life.

By playing on the word life, Jesus proposes a striking antithesis. We must not insist on the mere letter of his expression. The mere letter seems a paradox, but the paradox is removed by adverting to the sense of the word life.

The man who would save his life is the man who inverts the plan of God, and settles down in the possession of the present life. For God such a man substitutes this world; and for the life in Heaven he substitutes the enjoyment of the present order of things. He loves life; but with a wrong love. He mistakes the preparation for life, for life itself; and perverts this earthly existence from its proper purpose, making of it the goal of all his hopes.

"For indeed we

We have not the fixing of the exact degree of that worldworship that entails eternal reprobation; but the words of Jesus establish that the tendency to over-value this present life and its possessions makes directly against success in our life in Heaven. The Lord is not condemning the instinctive love of life that is innate in the heart of man. Even the great St. Paul testified that he felt this love of life: that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life."-II. Cor. V. 4. This is a profound exposition of the vital question of our life and our destiny. To love life is not wrong; but it is wrong not to look beyond the horizon of our present life to the life that is given in recompense for good done here.

Holy Scripture uses in many predications a language of its own. In the language of Scripture often an unusual sense is given to a word, in order to strengthen an antithesis. So here the effort to save one's present life that results in the loss of the other life is that use of this life that obscures the consideration of the other, and which prevents the soul's aspiration upward to better things.

On the contrary, he who holds his course steadfastly towards the other life; he who considers this present life as merely a time of labor and waiting; he who has risen above the excessive love of this time-vesture of decay; he who is ready