out the grave probability, to say the
least of it, that in a very real sense this life may be the sole
probation time for man. But this does not shut out the question of the
poor bereaved mother by the side of her dead son. "If any soul has not
in penitence and faith definitely accepted Jesus Christ in this life is
it forever impossible that he may do so in any other life?"

I answer unhesitatingly, God forbid! Else what of all the dead
children down through the ages and all the dead idiots and all the
millions of dead heathen and all the poor stragglers in Christian lands
who in their dreary, dingy lives had never any fair chance of knowing
their Lord in a way that would lead them to love Him, and who have
never even thought about accepting or rejecting Him? "Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do right?" Shall not the loving Father do His
best for all? Our Lord knew "that if the mighty works done in
Capernaum had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented."
Does He not there suggest that He would take thought for those men of
Tyre and Sidon in the Unseen Land? Does He not know the same of many
gone unto that Unseen from heathen lands and Christian lands, who would
have loved Him if they knew Him as He really is and who have but begun
to know Him truly in the world of the dead--of many who in their
ignorance have tried to respond to the dim light of Conscience within
and only learned within the veil really to know Him the Lord of the
Conscience, "the light which lighteth every man coming into the world"
(St. John i. 9).

Here is no question of encouraging careless, godless men with the hope
of a new probation. Here is no question of men wilfully rejecting
Christ. The merry, thoughtless child--the imbecile--the heathen--had
no thought of rejecting Christ. The poor struggler in Christian lands,
brought up in evil surroundings, who though he had heard of Christ yet
saw no trace of Christ's love in his dreary life--he cannot be said to
have rejected Christ. The honest sceptic who in the last generation
had been taught as a prominent truth of Christianity that God decrees
certain men to eternal Heaven and certain men to eternal Hell not for
any good or evil they had done but to show His power and glory, and who
has therefore in obedience to conscience frankly rejected
Christianity--can he be said to have rejected Christ?

The possibility in this life of putting oneself outside the pale of
salvation