rom room
to room, always adding some new touch for the comfort and surprise of
the eagerly expected children. If God, like a grieved and indignant
father whose sons have preferred other company to his, had dismantled
and locked the rooms that once were ours, Christ has made our peace, and
has given to the yearning heart of the Father opportunity to open these
rooms once more and deck them for our home-coming. With the words of
Christ there enters the spirit a conviction that when we pass out of
this life we shall find ourselves as much fuller of life and deeper in
joy as we are nearer to God, the source of all life and joy; and that
when we come to the gates of God's dwelling it will not be as the
vagabond and beggar unknown to the household and who can give no good
account of himself, but as the child whose room is ready for him, whose
coming is expected and prepared for, and who has indeed been sent for.

This of itself is enough to give us hopeful thoughts of the future
state. Christ is busied in preparing for us what will give us
satisfaction and joy. When we expect a guest we love and have written
for, we take pleasure in preparing for his reception,--we hang in his
room the picture he likes; if he is infirm, we wheel in the easiest
chair; we gather the flowers he admires and set them on his table; we go
back and back to see if nothing else will suggest itself to us, so that
when he comes he may have entire satisfaction. This is enough for us to
know--that Christ is similarly occupied. He knows our tastes, our
capabilities, our attainments, and he has identified a place as ours and
holds it for us. What the joys and the activities and occupations of the
future shall be we do not know. With the body we shall lay aside many of
our appetites and tastes and proclivities, and what has here seemed
necessary to our comfort will at once become indifferent. We shall not
be able to desire the pleasures that now allure and draw us. The need of
shelter, of retirement, of food, of comfort, will disappear with the
body; and what the joys and the requirements of a spiritual body will be
we do not know. But we do know that at home with God the fullest life
that man can live will certainly be ours.

It is a touching evidence of Christ's truthfulness and fidelity to His
people that is given in the words, "If it were not so, I would have told
you"--that is to say, if it had not been possible for you to follow Me
into the Father's pr