o." But
the class of whom I am thinking have no treasures. Notwithstanding some
sort of conformity to the Christian Religion, conceived most likely
under the aspect of a compulsory moral code, there is nothing in their
experience that one can call a love of our Lord, no actually felt
personal affection for Him that makes them long to see Him. There were
those with whom they had intimately lived and whom they had loved and
who have passed through the experience of death, but in the years that
have passed they have become used to living without them and there is
no passionate longing to be with them again. There are no interests in
their lives which when they think of them they feel that they can carry
with them to the world beyond. Whatever they have succeeded in
accumulating in life is hardly to be regarded as heavenly treasure!

There then is the vital centre of the Christian doctrine of the world to
come,--that it is a life continuous with this life, not in bare
existence, but in the persistence of relations and interests upon which
we have entered here. At the center of that world as it is revealed to
us, is Jesus Christ, God in our nature, and about Him ever the saints of
His Kingdom, who are still human with human interests, and who look on
to the time when the fulness of humanity will be restored to them by the
resurrection of the body. The interests that are vital here are also the
interests that are vital there, the interests of the Kingdom of God. As
the Christian thinks of the life of the world to come he thinks of it as
the sphere in which his ambitions can be and will be realised, where the
ends of which he has so long and so earnestly striven will be attained.
His life has been a life given to the service of our Lord and to his
Kingdom, and it had, no doubt, often seemed to small purpose; it has
often seemed that the Kingdom was not prospering and the work of God
coming to naught. And then he looks on to the future and sees that the
work that he knows is an insignificant fragment of the whole work; and
he thinks with longing of the time when he shall see revealed all that
has been accomplished. He feels like a colonist who in some outlying
province of an empire is striving to promote the interests of his
Homeland. His work is to build up peace and order and to civilise
barbarous tribes. And there are days when the work seems very long and
very hopeless; and then he comforts himself with the thought that this