uld rather keep in the
springtime--I do not want to reach unto the things that are before if
it must mean all this of pain."

To such comes the Master's voice: "Fear none of those things which
thou shalt suffer": You are right to be glad in His April days while
he gives them. Every stage of the heavenly growth in us is lovely to
Him; He is the God of the daisies and the lambs and the merry child
hearts! It may be that no such path of loss lies before you; there
are people like the lands where spring and summer weave the year
between them, and the autumn processes are hardly noticed as they
come and go. The one thing is to keep obedient in spirit, then you
will be ready to let the flower-time pass if He bids you, when the
sun of His love has worked some more ripening. You will feel by then
that to try to keep the withering blossoms would be to cramp and ruin
your soul. It is loss to keep when God says 'give'.

For here again death is the gate of life: it is an entering in, not a
going forth only; it means a liberating of new powers as the former
treasures float away like the dying petals.

We cannot feel a consciousness of death: the words are a
contradiction in terms. If we had literally passed out of this world
into the next we should not feel dead, we should only be conscious of
a new wonderful life beating within us. Our consciousness of death
would be an entirely negative matter--the old pains would be unable
to touch us, the old bonds would be unable to fetter us. Our actual
consciousness would have passed into the new existence: we should be
independent of the old.

And a like independence is the characteristic of the new flood of
resurrection life that comes to our souls as we learn this fresh
lesson of dying--a grand independence of any earthly thing to satisfy
our soul, the liberty of those who have nothing to lose, because they
have nothing to keep. We can do without anything while we have God.
Hallelujah!

Nor is this all. Look at the expression of abandonment about this
wild-rose calyx as time goes on, and it begins to grow towards the
end for which it has had to count all things but loss: the look of
dumb emptiness has gone--it is flung back joyously now, for
simultaneously with the new dying a richer life has begun to work at
its heart--so much death, so much life--for

"Ever with death it weaveth
The warp and woof of the world."

The lovely wild-rose petals that have drifted away are almost
for