there is a thirst for life. Everything that clogs, impedes,
or retards life we hate; sickness, imprisonment, death, whatever
diminishes, enfeebles, limits, or destroys life, we abhor. Happiness
means abundant life, great vitality finding vent for itself in healthy
ways. Great scope or opportunity of living to good purpose is useless to
the invalid who has little life in himself; and, on the other hand,
abundant vitality is only a pain to the man who is shut up and can spend
his energy only in pacing a cell eight feet by four. Our happiness
depends upon these two conditions--perfect energy and infinite scope.

But can we assure ourselves of either? Is not the one certainty of life,
as we know it, that it must end? Is it not certain that, no matter what
energy the most vigorous of us enjoy, we shall all one day "lie in cold
obstruction"? Naturally we fear that time, as if all life were then to
end for us. We shrink from that apparent termination, as if beyond it
there could be but a shadowy, spectral life in which nothing is
substantial, nothing lively, nothing delightsome, nothing strong. That
state which we shrink from our Lord chooses as a condition of perfect
life, abundant and untrammelled. And what He has chosen for Himself He
means to bestow upon us.

Why should we find it so hard to believe in that abundant life? There is
a sufficient source of physical life which upholds the universe and is
not burdened, which in continuance and exuberantly brings forth life in
inconceivably various forms. The world around us indicates a source of
life which seems always to grow and expand rather than to be exhausted.
So there is a source of spiritual life, a force sufficient to uphold all
men in righteousness and in eternal vitality of spirit, and which can
give birth to ever new and varied forms of heroic, holy, godly living--a
force which is ever pressing forward to find expression through all
moral beings, and capable of making all human action as perfect, as
beautiful, and infinitely more significant than the products of physical
life which we see around us. If the flowers profusely scattered by the
wayside are marvels of beauty, if the bodily frame of man and of the
other animals is continually surprising us with some new revelation of
exquisite arrangement of parts, if nature is so lavish and so perfect in
physical life, may we not believe that there is as rich a fountain of
moral and spiritual life? Nay, "the youths may f