destruction of his being, and not even an interruption of its
continuity. Everything that was of any real advantage to him was to be
his after as before. The change was clear gain. Everything good was to
be just as it had been, only better. Nothing was to be dropped but what
it was progress to lose, and whatever was kept was to be heightened.

How strongly does that view express the two thoughts of the _continuity_
and _intensifying_ of the Christian life beyond the grave! And what a
contrast does that simple, sublime confidence present to many another
thought of death! To how many men its blackness seems to be the sudden
swallowing up of the light of their very being! To how many more does it
seem to put an end to all their occupations, and to shear their lives in
twain, as remorselessly as the fall of the guillotine severs the head
from the body. How are the light butterfly wings of the trivialities in
which many men and women spend their days to carry them across the awful
gulf? What are the people to do on the other side whose lives have all
been given to purposes and tasks that stop on this side? Are there shops
and mills, or warehouses and drawing-rooms, or studies and
lecture-halls, over there? Will the lives which have not struck their
roots down through all the surface soil to the rock, bear transplanting?
Alas! for the thousands landed in that new country, as unfit for it by
the tenor of their past occupations, as some pale artisan, with delicate
fingers and feeble muscles, set down as a colonist to clear the forest!

This Paul had a work here which he could carry on hereafter. There would
be no reversal of view, no change in the fundamental character of his
occupations. True, the special forms of work which he had pursued here
would be left behind, but the principle underlying them would continue.
It matters very little to the servant whether he is out in the cold and
wet 'ploughing and tending cattle,' or whether he is waiting on his
master at table. It is service all the same, only it is warmer and
lighter in the house than in the field, and it is promotion to be made
an indoor servant.

So the direction of the life, and the source of the life, and the
fundamentals of the life continue unchanged. Everything is as it was,
only in the superlative degree. To other men the narrow plain on which
their low-lying lives are placed is rimmed by the jagged, forbidding
white peaks. It is cold and dreary on these ic