attainment. This means a hand on the helm, an arm at the oar, an eye on the chart, while the anchor awaits an emergency. God very wisely placed the glory of mind at the goal of intelligent investigation. Study is the mind's stimulus, and achievement its greatest joy. And the same divine goodness would reveal any essential truth, which by its nature was beyond man's powers of discovery. And yet with all their studying, ancient sages only guessed at moral truth. Here they needed that one who knew its influence, without the delays and disappointments of experiment, should announce what was beyond, and how, if desirable, it might be attained. David felt the need. Destiny was crowding him, and he knew not in the darkness where to place his feet, till the wave of a mysterious wand made a rift in the overshadowing mist. Then in his joy he cried out, "Thou wilt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory." God's counsel expresses His will, and is therefore good, perfect, and acceptable. This life with its varied experiences cannot disclose the wisdom of this will; but as the soul among the possible ten thousand plans finds the one which shines brighter and brighter even to the perfect day; as from the eternal heights it regards the wisdom of God's plan disclosed, it will join a chorus of the saved in ascribing wisdom to Him whom we should serve. Moore caught a glimpse

of this peerless wisdom:

"Go wing your flight from star to star,
From world to shining world, as far

As the universe spreads its flaming wall.
Count all the pleasures of all the spheres,
And multiply each by thousands of years:

One moment in heaven is worth them all."

TRANSITION TO THE LIFE BEYOND.

BY LYMAN ABBOTT, D. D., NEW YORK.

It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.—HEB.

ix 27.

1. It is very clear that the New Testament teaches that there is a future state, and that this world is not all, nor the greater part, of our existence. We are here standing in the vestibule of life. We

are the seed in the ground, just beginning to sprout. There are possibilities in us which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart conceived. It is true of man that, when the Spirit of God is playing upon him, he comes into a certain sense of what it is to be a son of God; but it is also true that "we know not what we shall be ;" there is a future larger, grander, more glorious than we can conceive of-transcendent above all knowledge. We cannot comprehend it our thought of heaven must seem to God as the Indian child's thought of a palace seems to us. If you undertake to give to the little child a conception of the pleasure that comes through literature, or through the study of language or science or philosophy, what conception can you give him? are like the little child; we know not, nor can we know, what God hath in store for those that love Him.

2. We may know from the New Testament teaching that the future state is a spiritual life. It is not a state in which the enjoyments of this life are to be reproduced in larger measure. It is not a state in which the skies are brighter, the flowers sweeter, and the music more ecstatic. That was the Mohammedan notion, and it is the notion of a great many Christian people to-day; but it is not the New Testament notion. The New Testament teaching is, I think, that, when we die, we have done with the body. We lay it away in the grave, and that is the end of it; it is a castoff garment. The old pagan notion was that there could be no future life of the soul without a future life of the body as well; they accordingly embalmed the bodies of their dead-buried the horse with its rider. When they thought of the departed, they connected him altogether with a physical organization, and imagined that the body must enter the future state, or the soul could not. This pagan notion has been engrafted in the Christian creed, but it is not to be found in the New Testament. Men say, Cannot God gather back again the various particles of the human body that have been scattered after burial, here and there, over the earth? Is He not able to gather these particles together and make out of them the same old body? Yes! I do not know that God cannot do this. But is God shut up to do this? Is there no recreative power in God to give the spirit a more glorious body for the larger and grander existence of the future?

3. Christ has already passed through the door into which His dis

ciples are to enter. The New Testament does not speak of a Christ that is to enter by and by into glory; it does not recognize Christ as existing in an intermediate state; it declares that Christ has already entered into His glory. After Christ had risen and was walking on the way to Emmaus, He met some of His disciples: they were talking of His crucifixion, death, and burial, and were disheartened because of what had occurred. Jesus said: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into glory?" He was not, by and by, to enter in; but, through suffering, He had already entered in. When Stephen was about to be stoned, he lifted up his eyes and beheld the Son of God standing at the right hand of His Father. He was not asleep; He was not in some mysterious prison-house, waiting till His release should come; He was already standing on the right hand of God.

It is a common notion that the dead lie in an unconscious state until the centuries have rolled away, or that they enter, halfclothed, half-prepared for the future life; that they remain in their prison-house waiting for the time when the final judgment shall be made known. I do not think this is Scriptural teaching. I think the New Testament teaches that they that die in Christ follow their Christ and enter into glory with their Christ. The old Jews, in Old Testament times, believed as the pagans believed. Life seemed to them full of exultation and joy, but they who died went down into Hades, in which there was no joy, no life, there to await the final judgment-day. But the New Testament repudiates this idea of an intermediate state, clearly and distinctly. When Jesus went to Bethany and found the sisters sorrowing over the death of Lazarus, and Martha said to Him, "If Thou hadst been here my brother had not died," He began to give them consolation by saying, "Thy brother shall rise again." Martha saith unto Him, "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." They held the faith that was common in their time, that there was to be a long state of unconsciousness. They had laid Lazarus away in the tomb, to sleep the last long sleep, and they thought that by and by he should rise again. Jesus said: "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." When one has this faith in Christ, there is no break in life; no cessation of existence; no

long, dreary sleep; life flows on in one continuous current into the great ocean of eternity.

Christ said to the thief who hung upon the cross near Him, "To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise." Paul says, “To die is gain ;" and just before his execution, writing a letter to his friend Timothy, he says, "Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown." Not in the future is there to be one, but from that moment the crown awaits him. When he would stimulate the faith of those to whom he wrote, he said, "Ye are come to Mount Sion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect” -men who have already entered into the presence of God. John, in his vision on the isle of Patmos, beheld men who had come out of every tongue and tribe and nation, standing around the throne of God in heaven, singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. The heaven of the Bible is always in the present tense. The music has begun; they that have gone forth from us have entered into glory. "It is appointed unto men once to die, after this the judgment;" not, after death a long, dreary, intermediate sleep, and after this the judgment. Men have been accustomed to picture a great judg ment-day, in which the dead, numbering hundreds of thousands and thousands of thousands, rise and stand in their places before one great throne and are called up, one after another, and judged one by one. It is estimated that one birth and one death take place every moment-you cannot conceive of any judgment that would take less time; accordingly the judgment-day would last as long as the human race lasted before it. What if that day has already dawned, even though its sunset hour has not yet come? What if you and I are standing before the throne of God, being judged to-day just as much as we shall ever be judged? What if Christ sits on His throne to-day, placing the sheep on His right hand, and the goats on His left? What if Christ is to-day separating those who, by patient continuance in well doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, from those who are contentious and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness?

It is a solemn thought to me that I am not far from my judg ment-day; nay, that I am in my judgment-day, and any moment I may step over the border line. That day is not in the far

future The friend gone from my side has already gone through nis inquisition. Those that have gone-father, mother, beloved -they have not gone down into the grave to wait there; they are not in a prison-house, waiting there; if they were sons of God, they have gone to Christ to be sharers in His glory. They have not been taken away in the midst of their usefulness, but they have entered a broader field of activity; they have already entered into Christ's glory, and are kings and priests unto Him. And I, too, look up; I behold a great multitude which no man can number, not in graveyards and cemeteries and beneath the sea, not huddled together in some dreary prison-house waiting the hour of release and redemption, but standing before the throne and the Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands, and crying with a loud voice, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb.

THE CHRISTIAN'S GAIN BY DEATH.

BY REV. ZEPHANIAH MEEK, CATLETTSBURG, KY.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.-PHILIPPIANS i. 21.

PAUL, a servant of Jesus Christ, stands up in his representative character and exclaims: "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." His language, therefore, becomes the language of every true disciple of the Saviour. In this brief and pointed sentence the apostle recognizes the fact of a personal providential care and oversight, so much so that life, with all its blessings, its joys and its sorrows, depends upon the will of Christ. As much as if he should say: As I have no power over my own life, and cannot determine its duration, neither have I a desire upon the subject ; for whether I live I live unto the Lord, or whether I die I die unto the Lord. Therefore, whether I live or die, I am the Lord's."

66

1. What is it to live? The body, of itself, is pulseless, lifeless, and only has life and vigor in connection with the soul, which is the active, essential principle. This life, or rather this stage of life, is dependent upon this mysterious union of soul and body.