om. To-day see what
confronts us, bread riots in Spain and in Italy, thousands of people
hungry for food. And yet, if we would give ourselves to the development
of the resources of this planet instead of to their destruction, this
fair earth could support a hundred times its present population in
plenty and in peace. There shall be no more famine in that kingdom the
gospel of which we preach.

Then, when men have lived out their lives, learned their lessons, and
stand where the shadow grows thicker, so that we try in vain to see
beyond, what then? We preach a gospel of life, of an eternal hope. We
believe that death, instead of being the end, is only a transition, the
beginning really of the higher and the grander life. We cannot look
through the gateway of the shadow; but we catch a gleam of light beyond
that means an eternal day, when the sun shall no more go down. This we
believe.

And we do not partition that world off into two parts, the immense
majority down where the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever, and
only a few in a city gold-paved and filled with the light of peace.
Rather we believe it is a human life there just as here, that we are
under the law of cause and effect, that salvation is not a magical
thing, that we are saved only in so far as we come into accord with the
divine law and the divine life. And, if anybody says we preach an easy
gospel because we eliminate an arbitrary hell, let him remember we
preach a harder gospel, a more difficult salvation, not a salvation
that can be purchased by a wave of emotion or by the touch of priestly
fingers, a salvation that must be wrought out through co-working with
God in the building of human character, a salvation that is being
right.

This is our gospel; but it is a gospel of eternal and universal hope,
because we believe that every single soul is under doom to be saved
sometime, somewhere. We preach the inevitable results of law-breaking,
are they to last one year, five, a hundred, a thousand, a million, ten
millions? There is no possibility of heaven except as people are in
perfect accord with the divine law and the divine life; for that is
what heaven means. You can no more get heaven out of a disordered
character than you can get music out of a disordered piano. This
salvation which we preach is the constituent element of life. You
cannot have a circle if you break the conditions of a circle. You
cannot have a river if you break the conditions