manifold the new outlets for activity, and the new inlets for the
surrounding glory and beauty; so incorruptible and glorious shall be
their new being. Here we live a living death; there we shall live
indeed; and that will be the crown, not only in regard to physical,
but in regard to spiritual, powers and consciousness.

But remember that all this full tide of life is Christ's gift. There
is no such thing as natural immortality; there is no such thing as
independent life. All Being, from the lowest creature up to the
loftiest created spirit, exists by one law, the continual impartation
to it of life from the fountain of life, according to its capacities.
And unless Jesus Christ, all through the eternal ages of the future,
imparted to the happy souls that sit garlanded at His board the life
by which they live, the wreaths would wither on their brows, and the
brows would melt away, and dissolve from beneath the wreaths. 'I will
give him a crown of life.'

It is a crown of 'glory,' and that means a lustrousness of character
imparted by radiation and reflection from the central light of the
glory of God. 'Then shall the righteous blaze out like the sun in the
Kingdom of My Father.' Our eyes are dim, but we can at least divine
the far-off flashing of that great light, and may ponder upon what
hidden depths and miracles of transformed perfectness and unimagined
lustre wait for us, dark and limited as we are here, in the assurance
that we all shall be changed into the 'likeness of the body of His
glory.'

It is a crown of 'righteousness.' Though that phrase may mean the
wreath that rewards righteousness, it seems more in accordance with
the other similar expressions to which I have referred to regard it,
too, as the material of which the crown is composed. It is not enough
that there should be festal gladness, not enough that there should be
calm repose, not enough that there should be flashing glory, not
enough that there should be fulness of life. To accord with the
intense moral earnestness of the Christian system there must be,
emphatically, in the Christian hope, cessation of all sin and
investiture with all purity. The word means the same thing as the
ancient promise, 'Thy people shall be all righteous.' It means the
same thing as the latest promise of the ascended Christ, 'They shall
walk with Me in white.' And it sets, I was going to say, the very
climax and culmination on the other hopes, declaring that absolute,