real trust in Him at all times and under all circumstances. "Heaviness may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning."

The old Hebrew prophet cried: "Though He slay me yet will I put my trust in Him," and we in the fuller light of the Gospel echo the words of St. Paul, "I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

XXX.-A FUTURE LIFE

How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?-1 CORINTHIANS xv. 12.

'HE thought of the future life was at one time, perhaps,

over prominent in the popular conception of Christianity. Men tended to think of the Faith as though it were only concerned with provision for the future instead of being vitally concerned with every day and hour of our life here on earth. There is a danger now of running to the opposite extreme and ignoring the future life altogether in favour of the practical claims on this life.

Let us note, to begin with, that our bodies are not our life. They are only the instruments through which our life expresses itself in relation to the material things by which we are surrounded. The eye for instance, does not see. It is only an instrument, a more perfect telescope with living instead of dead lenses, through which the living person sees. So too even with the brain. It too is an instrument just as the eye is. It is not the brain that sees and feels and hears, but the living person who sees

and feels and hears through that wonderful instrument the brain. What life is really in itself the wisest man of science cannot tell us. He simply does not know, but he does know that, so far as human beings are concerned the life is, to a very considerable extent, independent of the body through which it acts, and our present state of knowledge gives us no right to assume that it cannot exist independently of it.

We may use the illustration-of course, it is only an illustration and therefore not exact of the electric light. Suppose you have electric light in your house and the light suddenly goes out. There may be at least three reasons for this

(1) Some one may have turned it off at the main switch.

(2) The filament in your particular lamp may be broken or worn out.

(3) The power house may have been destroyed.

It is clear that there is a great difference between these three. In the first instance the current only requires to be turned on again. In the second the lamp can easily be repaired. In the third the source of power is entirely gone, and your lamp is incapable of being revived.

The important point to note is that you do not assume that the power-house has been destroyed until you have satisfied yourself that the going out of the light is not due to one or other of many minor causes, because you know very well that the electric current can continue unchanged even though the lamp be gone out. Our body is like the lamp which is the instrument through which the electric current, itself invisible, manifests itself as light, and just as the light may fail, while the electric current continues unaffected, so we believe that life can continue though the body fail. In the case of the dead lamp all that is required is a new filament, not a new current, so in the case of our body, what is required is a new body not a new life. We all know that the current of our life can be suspended for hours, or for days, by an accident and yet return with undiminished vigour. We have no right to assume that

because it is suspended by what we call death, that the life of the person is thereby necessarily destroyed.

There are many reasons on the contrary for supposing that it is not. Though there is much in the constitution and progress of the world that we cannot understand, yet all science is founded on the presumption that there is a meaning and a purpose in it all if we could only find it out. Now, when we look at human life, we find that the most characteristic thing about it is its capacity to learn. All through his life man is learning both intellectually and spiritually. This power to learn is what distinguishes man most effectively from the beasts, who know by instinct, and who never seem to advance beyond a certain point. The dog of to-day, in spite of all that he has learnt from his association with man, does not appear to differ from the dog of 10,000 years ago, whereas man has made enormous strides in knowledge and in its application.

It is characteristic of man that he goes on learning all his life and we are obliged to ask the question, Why? If death be the end of life, what is the meaning or use of man's continuous growth in knowledge and experience just to have it cut short when it is beginning to be co-ordinated and become really useful? The co-ordination is an important point. When we begin to learn, our minds are full of a jumble of unrelated facts. It is only after we have learnt a great deal that these facts become coordinated, that we see them in their proper relation to other facts and begin to realise that knowledge is one great vast, inter-related whole. It is just at this point when knowledge is beginning to become real and beginning to be useful that men die. If there be no future life, then man's whole life is utterly irrational, for it ends mockingly just when its meaning and purpose are beginning to become clear. What sense would there be in nature producing a Plato or a Shakespeare just to destroy them as the wonderful product was nearing perfection?

If there be no future life, then life is not governed merely by an indifferent or neutral power. It is governed by an evil devil who delights in mockery and in the

destruction of all that is best and wisest. But this is not possible because there is far too much of good and beauty and wisdom inherent in life, to render such an idea conceivable. Hence we are driven back on the idea of a future life, as the only possible explanation of the way in which death cuts across man's intellectual and spiritual growth and development.

We cannot explain the world on any purely material basis. No doubt the difficulties of faith are great, but the difficulties of any consistent system of materialism are far greater. How for instance, on any materialistic basis, can we explain man's sense of beauty, a thing which pervades all nature, and yet has no existence apart from an intelligent mind to understand, and appreciate? How are we to explain man's power of prayer and the universal sense of its correspondence to something or some one outside of us to which it is a response? How can we explain the very idea of a future life so deeply engrained in all human beings? How could it have arisen from a human experience which was purely material?

Again, a future life is the only explanation of the great moral problem of the world and of human life. As Butler points out, there are abundant proofs of the moral government of the world. It is a fact on the whole that

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Virtue as such is rewarded, and Vice as such is punished," but what about those countless exceptions to this rule in which we find virtue persecuted and suffering even death, and vice triumphant and unpunished? A future life provides the only means by which the balance can be redressed and the apparent anomalies explained. Without a future life these exceptions render human life incomprehensible and make evil permanently victorious over good.

Finally, the belief in a future life has been the belief of all the best and noblest men and women in the world, not only among Christians but among all mankind. Above all it was the absolute conviction of Jesus Christ Who, looked at for the moment only, from the human point of view, was incomparably the wisest and most spiritually minded of all men that ever lived upon this earth. As

man it was His conviction that this human life was only the preparation for a fuller, greater, and deeper life to be lived hereafter with God. The point is important, though it is not on it that we base our belief in the future life. It is because we believe that this same Jesus Christ was in very truth the Son of God, that He died and was buried and rose again for us on the third day, that He opened the bars of death for all mankind and won for us everlasting life. It is because we surely believe all this that we can look forward calmly through the mists of death to the true life that is beyond and say: "Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift."

XXXI.-THE PROOF OF GOD

The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.-ROMANS I. 20.

T. PAUL here appeals to the natural world as demonstrating to man the power and the nature of God, and it is probable that it does so, but the evidence is not at first sight, clear and unmistakable. It would probably be true to say that there is no one single undeniable proof of God. We know that He exists, not from one single proof but from a number of quite different considerations which, taken all together, have what is called a cumulative, or piled up, result, the effect of which it is difficult to reject. We can only consider very briefly some of these lines of thought.

1. The Universal Consent of Mankind.-By this it is meant that, speaking generally, all the nations of the world believe and always have believed in God. There have been individual deniers of God among all people, but never a nation of atheists, for the atheism of the French