s from a poem by his wife
are inscribed upon his tombstone:

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep;
For still He giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.

But in such a sentence what possible meaning can be put into the
expression "His beloved"? Can we conceive of God as really loving us,
taking us into His secrets, using us in His purposes, letting us spend
and be spent in the fulfilment of His will, and then putting us to an
endless sleep? If Jesus leads us into the life with God which we
Christians know, He renders immortality indispensable if God is to
maintain His own Self-respect.

Others may do without everlasting life; to some an endless sleep may
seem welcome; life has been to them such a mistake and a failure, that
they would gladly be quit of it forever; but to followers of Jesus its
continuance is a passionate and logical longing. Ibsen puts into
Brindel's mouth the words: "I am going homewards. I am homesick for the
mighty Void; the dark night is best." Jesus acclimatizes man's spirit to
a far different home, and sets in his heart an altogether different
eternity. So insistent are the demands of our souls for the persistence
of life with our God in Christ, that "if we have only hoped in Christ in
this life, we are of all men most pitiable."

Already we have passed into Jesus' second great contribution toward
answering our question of the second life. He assures us of it because
of the character of the Father we come to know through Him. Jesus' faith
in His own resurrection was based on His personal experience of God. The
words from a Psalm, which the early Church applied to Him, sound like an
utterance some disciple may have overheard Him repeating:

Thou wilt not leave My soul in the grave,
Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy devoted One to see corruption.
Thou madest known unto Me the ways of life;
Thou shalt make Me full of gladness in Thy presence.

Love is stronger than death, and for Jesus God is love. It was this
which made Him "the God of the living." Jesus could not imagine Him
linking Himself with men, becoming the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of
Jacob, and allowing them to become mere handfuls of dust in a Hittite
grave. His love would hold them in union with Him forever. Jesus
"abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light _through the
gospel_"--through the good news concerning God. When He succeeds in
convincing us that the universe is o