s of Christians are as strong reasons for
believing in the perfect life of Heaven as their purities and virtues
are. We have a right to say mighty principles are at work upon Christian
souls--the power of the Cross, the power of love issuing in obedience,
the power of an indwelling Spirit; and is this all that these great
forces are going to effect on human character? Surely a seed so precious
and divine is somewhere, and at some time, to bring forth something
better than these few poor, half-developed flowers, something with more
lustrous petals and richer fragrance. The plant is clearly an exotic;
does not its obviously struggling growth here tell of warmer suns and
richer soil, where it will be at home?

There is a great deal in every man, and most of all in Christian men and
women, which does not fit this present. All other creatures correspond
in their capacities to the place where they are set down; and the world
in which the plant or the animal lives, the world of their surroundings,
stimulates to activity all their powers. But that is not so with a man.
'Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests.' They fit exactly, and
correspond to their 'environment.' But a man!--there is an enormous
amount of waste faculty about him if he is only to live in this world.
There are large capacities in every nature, and most of all in a
Christian nature, which are like the packages that emigrants take with
them, marked 'Not wanted on the voyage.' These go down into the hold,
and they are only of use after landing in the new world. If I am a son
of God I have much in me that is 'not wanted on the voyage,' and the
more I grow into His likeness, the more I am thrown out of harmony with
the things round about me, in proportion as I am brought into harmony
with the things beyond.

That consciousness of belonging to another order of things, because I am
God's child, will make me sure that when I have done with earth, the tie
that binds me to my Father will not be broken, but that I shall go home,
where I shall be fully and for ever all that I so imperfectly began to
be here, where all gaps in my character shall be filled up, and the
half-completed circle of my heavenly perfectness shall grow like the
crescent moon, into full-orbed beauty. 'Neither life, nor death, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature' shall be able to break that tie, and banish the child from the
conscious grasp of