b might as well
try to understand the life of the butterfly, or the chick in the shell
the life of the bird. To know what Christ revealed, this is the birth to
life eternal. To know that love and holiness are the governing powers in
conformity with which all things are carried onward to their end; to
know what God is, that He is a Father who cannot leave us His children
of earth behind and pass on to His own great works and purposes in the
universe, but stoops to our littleness and delays that He may carry
every one of us with Him,--this is life eternal. This it is that subdues
the human heart and cleanses it from pride, self-seeking, and lust, and
that inclines it to bow before the holy and loving God, and to choose
Him and life in Him. This it is that turns it from the brief joys and
imperfect meanings of time and gives it a home in eternity--that severs
it in disposition and in destiny from the changing, passing world and
gives it an eternal inheritance as God's child. To as many as believed
Christ, to them He gave power to become the sons of God. To believe Him
and to accept the God He reveals is to become a son of God and is to
enter into life eternal. To be conquered by the Divine love shown us; to
feel that not in worldly ambition or any self-seeking, but only in
devotion to interests that are spiritual and general, is the true life
for us; to yield ourselves to the Spirit of Christ and seek to be
animated and possessed by that Spirit,--this is to throw in our lot with
God, to be satisfied in Him, to have eternal life.

The earthly work of Christ, then, being finished, He asks the Father to
glorify Him with His own self, with the glory He had with Him before the
world was. It seems to me vain to deny that this petition implies on
Christ's part a consciousness of a life which He had before He appeared
on earth. His mind turns from the present hour, from His earthly life,
to eternity, to those regions beyond time into which no created
intelligence can follow Him, and in which God alone exists, and in that
Divine solitude He claims a place for Himself. If He merely meant that
from eternity God had conceived of Him, the ideal man, and if the
existence and glory He speaks of were merely existence in God's mind,
but not actual, His words do not convey His meaning. The glory which He
prayed for now was a conscious, living glory; He did not wish to become
extinct or to be absorbed in the Divine being; He meant to continue