n. "Because I live ye shall
live also," He said. But what is it to live? Certainly, something far
above and beyond mere existence. Life, in its true sense, is to know
God. This is the life eternal. No one can "know God" save in just the
degree to which he lives God's life,--the divine life,--and in the
degree to which he is living the divine life does he live the life
eternal. The life eternal may be lived to-day as well as after death, in
some vague eternity. The life eternal is simply the life of spiritual
qualities. It is the life in which truth, honor, integrity, sacrifice,
patience, and love abound, and in which all that is selfish and false is
cast out. Now, however exalted a definition of the present, daily life
this may seem to be, it is in no sense an impossible one. The more
exalted is one's standard for the perpetual quality of his life, the
more stimulating it becomes. The exalted ideal inspires; the low
standard depresses. An invincible energy sweeps instantly through the
atmosphere to sustain him who allies himself with his noblest ideals. A
force that disintegrates and baffles sweeps down upon him who abandons
his nobler ideals, and substitutes for them the mere selfish, the
commonplace, or the base. The "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" is
no merely abstract phrase or trick of rhetoric. Every hour is an hour of
destiny. Every hour is an hour of choice. Legions of angels are in the
unseen world surrounding humanity. Not one thought, one aspiration, one
prayer, is unheard and unnoted. No conditions or circumstances are
sordid or material unless he whom they invest make them so by sordid and
material thought; by turning away from that life of the spirit whose
very reality is made and is tested by these circumstances. "All the
conditions of life are raised," says Doctor Bushnell, in the extract
quoted above, "by the meaning He has shown to be in them, and the grace
He has put upon them." Might not one, with profit, dwell for a moment
upon this statement?

There is a current sweeping through latter-day life and reflecting
itself largely in miscellaneous literature, to the effect that what the
writers are pleased to call "success in life" is achieved by
self-reliance; that a man must believe in himself; and the final triumph
is illustrated as that of the man who begins as an errand boy at two
dollars a week and ends as a multi-millionaire. Between these two points
in space the arc of success subtends, ac