d at any time, and anywhere. This throws light on the
fallacy of the current, narrow doctrine of a limited probation.
The oriental belief that the action of the present is the fate of
the future unquestionably covers a profound truth. Yet, if there
is always a future there must likewise always be a present, and
the right action in this may forever redeem that. Probation is
limited by no decree, only by the duration of free being.

Although the essential element in the idea of heaven is forever
the same, it may be regarded in three different aspects, or on
three different scales as an individual experience, as a social
state, as a far off universal event. Heaven, as a private
experience, is the harmonized intercourse of the soul with the
divineness in its surrounding conditions. Heaven, as a public
society, is the blessed communion of blessed souls, a complete
adjustment of the lives of kindred natures. Heaven, as a final
consummation, is the publication of the vindicated will of God in
the total harmony of the universe, all individual wills so many
separate notes blent in the collective consonance of the whole.

But, for all practical purposes, we may overlook this triple
distinction and think of heaven simply as the correspondence of
the life of the soul with those outward conditions which represent
the will of God. And towards this conclusion everything, in its
profoundest and most persistent tendency, is bearing. In spite of
interruptions and seeming exceptions, it is towards this that the
entire confluence of forces and beings gravitates and slowly
advances. The universal law of evolution, in which a scientific
philosophy has generalized its most comprehensive induction, is
but a history and prophecy of the progress towards a moving
equilibrium of the totality of worlds and intelligences, which can
eventuate only in a universal heaven, or unimpeded completion of
the creative design.

Do we not see all creatures tending towards the perfection of
their respective types, every improvement selectively taken up and
carried on, every deteriorating deviation eliminated, all errors
and failures doomed to perish or change into new conditions for
more hopeful attempts? This confirms the faith first based on the
deeper argument. For, since the will of God is the one persistent
reality, the one all evolving and all inclusive power of which
evil is only the distorted and shadowy negation, that opposition
to the will of God