sent. We may have a present Christ and a present Heaven. The
Christian life is not all aspiration; it is fruition as well. We have to
seek, but even whilst we seek, we should be conscious that we possess
what we are seeking, even whilst we seek it. Do you know anything of
that double experience of having the things that are above, here and
now, as well as reaching out towards them?

I am afraid that the Christian life of this generation suffers at a
thousand points, because it is more concerned with the ordering of the
outward life, and the manifold activities which this busy generation has
struck out for itself, than it is with the quiet setting of the mind, in
silent sunken depths of contemplation, on the things that are above. Oh,
if we would think more about them we should aim more at them; and if we
were sure that we possessed them to-day we should be more eager for a
larger possession to-morrow.

Dear brethren, we may all have the risen life for ours, if we will knit
ourselves, in humble dependence and utter self-surrender, to the Christ
who died for us that we might be dead to sin, and rose again that we
might rise to righteousness. And if we have Him, in any deep and real
sense, as the life of our lives, then we shall be blessed, amid all the
divergent and sometimes conflicting nearer aims, which we have to
pursue, by seeing clear above them that to which they all may tend, the
one aim which corresponds to a man's nature, which meets his condition,
which satisfies his needs, which can always be attained if it is
followed, and which, when secured, never disappoints. God help us all to
say, 'This one thing I do, and all else I count but dung, that I may
know Him, and the power of His Resurrection, and the fellowship of His
sufferings, being made conformable unto His death, if by any means I may
attain unto the Resurrection from the dead!'

WITHOUT AND WITHIN

'Them that are without.'--COL. iv. 5.

That is, of course, an expression for the non-Christian world; the
outsiders who are beyond the pale of the Church. There was a very broad
line of distinction between it and the surrounding world in the early
Christian days, and the handful of Christians in a heathen country felt
a great gulf between them and the society in which they lived. That
distinction varies in form, and varies somewhat in apparent magnitude
according as Christianity has been rooted in a country for a longer or a
shorter tim