take our orders from headquarters to which we have to
report. Men in our colonies get their instructions from Downing Street.
The officials there, appointed by the Home Government, think more of
what they will say about them at Westminster than of what they say about
them at Melbourne. So we are citizens of another country, and have to
obey the laws of our own kingdom, and not those of the soil on which we
dwell. Never mind about the opinions of men, the babblements of the
people in the land you live in. To us, the main thing is that we be
acceptable, well-pleasing unto Him. Are you solitary? Cultivate the
sense of, in your solitude, being a member of a great community that
stretches through all the ages, and binds into one the inhabitants of
eternity and of time.

Remember that this citizenship in the heavens is the highest honour that
can be conferred upon a man. The patricians of Venice used to have their
names inscribed upon what was called the 'golden book' that was kept in
the Doge's Palace. If our names are written in the book of gold in the
heavens, then we have higher dignities than any that belong to the
fleeting chronicles of this passing, vain world. So we can accept with
equanimity evil report or good report, and can acquiesce in a wholesome
obscurity, and be careless though our names appear on no human records,
and fill no trumpet of fame blown by earthly cheeks. Intellectual power,
wealth, gratified ambition, and all the other things that men set before
them, are small indeed compared with the honour, with the blessedness,
with the repose and satisfaction that attend the conscious possession of
citizenship in the heavens. Let us lay to heart the great words of the
Master which put a cooling hand on all the feverish ambitions of earth.
'In this rejoice, not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather
rejoice that your names are written in heaven.'

II. Then the second idea suggested by these words is the possession of
the life which is life indeed.

The 'Book of Life,' it is called in the New Testament. Its designation
in the Old might as well be translated 'the book of living' as 'the book
of life.' It is a register of the men who are truly alive.

Now, that is but an imaginative way of putting the commonplace of the
New Testament, that anything which is worth calling life comes to us,
not by creation or physical generation, but by being born again through
faith in Jesus Christ, and by receiving