tever local name or in connection with whatever Church communion, _He
stands in the midst_, this crowned Christ of the Patmos Revelation.

Our eyes need treatment. The hinge of the eyelid is in the will and in
the heart. A bended or bending will opens the eye. A brooding heart
opens it yet more in spirit vision. Then we shall see Him, _as He is
now_ in our midst, waiting our obedience.

Those forty days between the resurrection and the ascension are seen to
be illustrations of this. One can see through this Revelation sight that
this is one of the chief things the Master is teaching as He still
lingers on earth in His resurrection body.

Along the old Emmaus road, gathered about the evening meal in the
twilight, twice in the upper room at Jerusalem, He appears to little
groups of His faithful followers. Their hearts are burning with the
thought of Him, they are talking with both tongue and eyes about Him.
But that He is in their midst is the last thing to come into their
minds. Then their eyes are opened to see Him in their midst. It was a
forty-days' session in their training school. Then He said quietly as
His bodily presence goes up into the blue: "Lo! _I am with you all the
days until the end._" Their mission and His presence are inseparably
linked.

And it is striking again to note how John's Gospel ends. The others
describe the Ascension. John begins his Gospel with Jesus in the bosom
of the Father before the world was, and ends with Him walking and
talking with a little group of fishermen along the shore of the waters
of Galilee's Lake.

This is what the Church needs to-day, a sight of Christ _as He is now_.
Nothing else can save its life. And nothing less can save its mission
from utter impending failure.

And yet while the distinctive message here is for the Church, it is an
individual message, too. It is for each of us. I am the Church, as much
of it as I am, counted as one. You are the Church. The Church is made up
of you and me and the rest of us. I must take this message for as much
of the Church as I am. The Man of Fire is depending on me to be a
candlestick for His light. It is on me He is patiently waiting to obey
as fully as He means I should.

And on you.

A recent incident is told of a man whose name is a familiar one in the
financial world, who died a few years ago. He was the executive head of
one of our country's great railways. And a man of remarkable largeness
of insight and grasp, and