God. Your child, your friend, your brother, your sister, is living, and can never die.

You who are in doubt and in distress because of doubt, who say the creed with half faith, until byand-bye you do not say it at all—not in uncertainty, but in certainty is the ultimate condition of the human soul. God will not let His children go in darkness and wandering always, He keeps the light and the truth as the real home of His children's souls. Be perfectly sure that if you keep your hearts entirely honest and true in the midst of doubt, the time will come when the truth will be absolutely clear to you, and you will look back and know that your doubt was an incident and an episode, while certainty is the continuous experience of life. In that you doubted, you doubted unto sin once, but in that you knew, you knew unto God.

And you who are living in sin learn that it is not necessary that sin should be perpetual; learn that it has but a weak hold upon your nature, because it is an intruder, a foreign thing that has no right there. Learn from Easter day that the deepest truth of life is holiness and not sin. Lift yourselves up, claim your heritage in God and Christ, drive out the tyrant, drive out the sin which has no business in your life.

Not our own sins only, but the great, flagrant sins of the world; this cruelty treading down the helpless under the heels of the powerful, this self

indulgence, this foulness, making a great mass of corruption out of what ought to be the garden of God-shall there not be something in Easter day that shall make us strong to fight it all—the certainty that not wickedness but goodness is what belongs in the world, that sin and death are an intrusion, and that light and law and holiness are the real possessors of this world!

THE ETERNAL LIFE.

"And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent."-ST. JOHN xvii. 3.

WHEN Jesus said these words the transitoriness of life was pressing upon Him and His disciples. The words are part of the prayer which He prayed to His Father at the table of the Passover Supper. He had told His disciples that He was to leave them. All their life together was hurrying to its end. Have you never heard suddenly that some state of things which had lasted long, and been full of happiness, was to be broken up? And do you remember how everything belonging to it flashed into sudden brightness? The association, the sympathy, over which the knife was hanging, never seemed so dear; the comfortable surroundings had never seemed so necessary as now in the prophecy of their removal. A sickening, despairing sense of instability seemed to come over you and to cloud everything. Nothing seemed permanent or trustworthy. If you remember that you know how these disciples felt. Life had been shattered into dust, or melted into

mist, for them

by Jesus' words. And then, when life seemed. frailest and most unreliable, they heard Him praying these very words to God: "This is life eternal".

The assertion of a sort of life, something in life, which lasted and did not go to pieces-the calm reminder that in the midst of all unstableness there was in man's thought and being that which could not perish, but must go on for ever, must have come in very solidly and nobly. So often, when we are most conscious of mortality, when disease is triumphing over that which disease can touch, when the ruins of what was fairest are all about our feet, a single word, the least reminder of that which is immortal, restores us, puts strength into our feeble knees again, and courage into our frightened hearts.

What is it, then, whose eternity Jesus proclaims so confidently? When everything else stops, what is it that goes on? When everything else decays, what is it that is imperishable? What is the core of permanence in this nebulous and shifting life? Jesus says it is the knowledge of God and of Himself-"To know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent". Now, remember that the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ must mean, and in the Bible always does mean, a personal relationship with God and Christ. It is not mere absolute knowledge. Man cannot know God absolutely, but only as God relates Himsel

to him. It is what He is to us, not what He is in Himself, that we may know of God. So that to know Christ and God is to have to do with Christ and God in the way of love and service. And Jesus says that the permanent part of our life— that which is eternal, that which must last, and cannot perish-is the part which has to do with God. Is not that His meaning?

Here is a very clear and simple test of all our life. Our houses must decay. What is there in them that will last? That which had to do with God. Not their bricks and mortar, but the tempers and the hearts that were cultivated in them. Our institutions will perish-even the systems of our Churches and the machineries of all our sacred things. But that which really knew God in them, the spiritual life which they enshrined no tooth of time can touch. Our friendships have a promise of permanence only as they are real spiritual intimacies knit in with one common union to God. The closest earthly ties, of husband and wife, of father and child—I know no reason to believe that they can outlast this natural state save as they themselves are more than natural, and bind the spirits to each other. Everywhere the body of things shall perish, and the soul, which alone knows and has conscious relations with God, lasts. Everywhere this is the only life eternal, to know God.

There is, then, something which is eternal if