ng of a dead
tree, is the collapse of a dead church!

There is the same story to tell of some people. They have a name that
they are living, but they are practically dead. For what is it,
according to the New Testament, which makes one live, and when is it
that one comes to die? "To be carnally minded," answers St. Paul, "is
death, and to be spiritually minded is life." "He that heareth my
sayings," answers Jesus, "hath passed from death into life." What a
wonderful word is that! It is not a promise that the true Christian
shall some day, when his body dies, pass into an eternal life. It is
an announcement that when one enters into the spirit of Christ he
passes, now, in this present world, from all that can be fairly called
death, into all that can be rationally called life. Under this New
Testament definition, then, a man may suppose himself to be alive and
healthy, when he is really sick, dying, dead. A man may perhaps, as he
says, see life, while he may be really seeing nothing but death. Or a
man may be, as we say, dying, and be, in the New Testament sense, full
of an abundant and transfiguring life.

{104}

And so it becomes an entirely practical question, which one may ask
himself any morning, "Am I alive to-day, or am I dead? Is it only that
I have the name of living, a sort of directory-existence, a page in the
college records, a place in the list of my class, while in fact there
is dry-rot in my soul? Or is there any movement of the life of God in
me, of quickening and refreshing life, of generous activity and
transmissive vitality? Then death is swallowed up in victory, and I am
partaking even in this present world of the life that does not die."

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XLII

THE OPEN DOOR

_Revelation_ iii. 8.

A few years ago, at the first service of the college year, one of our
preachers took for his text this message to the church at Philadelphia:
"Behold, I have set before thee an open door;" and it has always seemed
to me to represent with precision the spirit of our worship here. We
have abandoned the principle of compulsion. We do not force young men
of twenty to come here and say their prayers. We simply set before
them an open door. The privilege of worship is permitted to them from
day to day, and religion stands among us, not as a part of college
discipline, but as the supreme privilege of a manly human soul.
Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Indeed, this
s