Heavenly recognition is assured, and the sweet and pure affections formed here will be restored, perfected and ex- alted, and constitute a great deal of heaven's happiness. We shall not join a r n undistinguishable throng, but find that these sanctified affections that con- stitute the great values and verities of this life, are immortal.
''They here are tried and purified, Then find in heaven their perfect rest." Friends dear as life to each other, but long parted, broken and scattered fam- ilies, will there meet for an everlasting reunion in mutual bliss and glory. May we all be there, "Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth." —Prov. 27:1.
The Deepest Christian Need By Robert E. Speer
I S NOT the judgment of the world one of indifferent con- tempt for the man who is try- ing to save his own soul—his miserable soul—as I have sometimes read? And yet, what is a man's soul? It is the one thing inex- pressibly dear to God, for which, if there had been but one, He was content to give His Son, and this He has intrusted to the man as his own particular charge; I do not say his only charge, but the one clearly and solely committed to him to make t he most of. It is the talent which he is to multiply by diligent care; not t h at he may delight in it himself, but that he may present it to God through Jesus Christ. Because care of one's own soul by internal effort and discipline seemed selfish, men have rushed to the extreme of finding in ex- ternal action, in organized benevolence, in philanthropic effort, in love of the neighbor—and particularly of the neigh- bor's soul was naturally of not more ac- count than one's own—not merely the fruit of the Christian life itself. That the kingdom of God within one is an individual matter, primarily and in es- sence, and only in consequnce, and inci- dentally external, as all activity' is but a manifestation of life, and not life it- self—all this was forgotten. This I conceive to be the state of the Church now; I mean as an organization. This is what I note to be the great peril of the Church; and of our student Christian life, especially here in New England and in the Middle States. We are in danger of forgetting the Divine order and of going out with empty hands to feed the world. We must come back to Him by Whom alone the bread is given. Only in proportion as our own lives are rooted in the Divine reali- ties will there be any power In the min-
istry we try to perform in the world. Of all the men who have ever lived/St Paul was the richest in the great social output of his life. The whole world is only feeling now after those great ideals of his which are to constitute the prin- ciples of reorganization of all human life. Paul went to and fro through the world like a flaming firebrand, and a moral and social renewer, and yet this was the man who, when he came to deal with what was most central and funda- mental in his life, was not talking about the Roman Empire or the uttermost parts of the earth, but about his long- ing "that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him; * * * that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings." It was because the man was all shut up in the isolation and seclusion of a unique and separate life with Christ that he went out from that life to pour his up- heaving and regenerating influence over a whole, great world. If this seems to you nebulous and in- determinate, let us go on for a moment, for Saint Paul presses his thought for- ward into clearer outlines than these. "That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection." It is not a sec- ond thing that he is to know. The power of Christ's resurrection is not something detachable from Christ, so that he now has two objects of knowl- edge. He is simply analyzing what he means when he says, "The passion of my life is to know Christ,"' and. "I mean I want to know the power of His resurrection." This is the central thing in the Christian religion. It is a simple fact of comparative religion, and a sig- - nificant one, that Christianity is the only religion that makes anything of a Resurrection. No one of the other re- ligions reports a Man to have died and
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