at shall render impossible such awful orgies of death
as this present war, than for the peace of a land that lieth afar. Men
think of the immortality of their influence, rather than of what they
themselves will be doing five hundred years hence, and of the social
order that shall prevail in the earth in the year 2000, rather than of
the social order of the celestial country.

Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of. But death is
always man's contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without
regretted partings. And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us
under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more
than an interval between ourselves and the tomb. To every thoughtful
person the question is forced home, "If a man die, shall he live again?"

What did Jesus Christ contribute towards answering our question?

He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to
the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely
rich it is, He kindled in us the passion for the second life, and
rendered immortality indispensable for Christians.

Christ enhances every man's worth in his own eyes. We find that we mean
so much to Him and to His God and Father, that we come to mean
infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man
feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it
hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is
when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor
trifles he cares for--his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his
newspaper--that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined,
that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or
sublime--immortality among the rest. When a man rises in his aims and
looks at the weal of the universe, and the harmony of the soul with God,
then we feel that extinction would be grievous." And it is just this
uplift into a new outlook that men find in Jesus Christ. A Second
Century Christian, writing to his friend, Diognetus, characterizes
Christianity as "this new interest which has entered into life." We look
upon each day with a fresh expectancy; we view ourselves with a new
reverence. The waste wilderness within, from which we despaired of
producing anything, must under Christ's recreating touch become an Eden,
where we feel

Pison and Euphrates roll
Round the great garden of a kingly soul.

B