ve the fullest present enjoyment out of
it,--this man is losing his life; it comes to an end as certainly as the
seed that is eaten. But he who devotes his life to other uses than his
own gratification, who does not so prize self that everything must
minister to its comfort and advancement, but who can truly yield himself
to God and put himself at God's disposal for the general good,--this
man, though he may often seem to lose his life, and often does lose it
so far as present advantage goes, keeps it to life everlasting.

The law of the seed is the law of human life. Use your life for present
and selfish gratification and to satisfy your present cravings, and you
lose it for ever. Renounce self, yield yourself to God, spend your life
for the common good, irrespective of recognition or the lack of it,
personal pleasure or the absence of it, and although your life may thus
seem to be lost, it is finding its best and highest development and
passes into life eternal. Your life is a seed now, not a developed
plant, and it can become a developed plant only by your taking heart to
cast it from you and sow it in the fertile soil of other men's needs.
This will seem, indeed, to disintegrate it and fritter it away, and
leave it a contemptible, obscure, forgotten thing; but it does, in fact,
set free the vital forces that are in it, and give it its fit career and
maturity.

Looking at the thing itself, apart from figure, it is apparent that "he
that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this
world shall keep it unto life eternal." The man who most freely uses his
life for others, keeping least to himself and living solely for the
common interests of mankind, has the most enduring influence. He sets in
motion forces which propagate fresh results eternally. And not only so.
He who freely sows his life has it eternally, not only in so far as he
has set in motion an endless series of beneficent influences, but
inasmuch as he himself enters into life eternal. An immortality of
influence is one thing and a very great thing; but an immortality of
personal life is another, and this also is promised by our Lord when He
says (ver. 26), "Where I am, there shall also My servant be."

This, then, being the law of human life, Christ, being man, must not
only enounce but observe it. He speaks of Himself even more directly
than of us when He says, "He that loveth his life shall lose it." His
disciples thought they had n