XXXVI. What in response to Jesus' love for us should we gladly do? Confess his name and serve his cause. MATT. 10:32, 33. HE moral sequel of privilege is duty. The Christian ideal is to show one's faith by one's works and one's priv ilege by one's service. He who has, is expected to give, and he who is taught, to teach others. The disciple of Jesus must go and make other disciples. And he who has been enriched out of the divinest of lives, should himself bear the treasure which is his, to other hearts. One of the reasons why we are expected to show our obligation to Christ is the simple sense of justice. When one has been helped, he owes recognition to his helper. When he has been enriched, gratitude and honesty both impel him to acknowledge his debt. It is counted but a very small virtue to admit our obligations, but a very grave fault to deny and repudiate them. Any man or woman who has been brought to the light of a larger and diviner life by the word and spirit of Jesus owes it to him to be publicly counted among his friends and his followers. Another reason is the duty we Owe one another. Those who are striving in a common cause ought to stand together, to make common interest, to join in common efforts. The friends of Jesus Christ ought to know one another, to sustain one another, to be in loving sympathy. The Christian Church is an inevitable organization. It is a necessary outgrowth of this obligation of the followers of Jesus to be in visible fellowship with one another, and to join in the common recognition of their debt to Jesus and their love and loyalty to him. Stand, soldier of the cross, Thy high allegiance claim, And vow to hold the world but loss For thy Redeemer's name. Edward H. Bickersteth. XXXVII. What is our ground of faith that we shall live after our bodies die? We are children and heirs of our Heavenly Father. HE very fact that we can talk about "our" bodies implies there is a real self, which is not the body, but which possesses the body and is separate from it. The self of which we are conscious; the self which we love in other men; the self which we miss when they pass from our sight in death; this self is not a thing of flesh and blood. It is a force, a life, a spirit, belonging in an entirely different realm from the body. We love, not features, but a disposition; not pounds of flesh; but affections and their manifestation; not a form, but a character. The basis of a belief in immortality is a belief in the soul as the real and durable thing about our personality. Only as we believe in our own souls, in the real life they lead, in the value they have to themselves and to others and to God, shall we be able to believe in immortality. There is no external evidence or witness which is at all comparable to that which comes from a recognition of the soul itself. The weightiest evidence which Jesus gives to the soul's deathlessness, is himself. When Paul says, "If the dead rise not, then is not Christ risen," he plants his faith and ours on the firmest foundation. It is impossible, in a rational universe, to conceive that such a nature can perish. To believe in annihilation at death is to believe that that mind is extinguished, those affections cold, that will destroyed. And such a conclusion is appalling. When we get a true idea of what our sonship means, as we see it manifested in Jesus Christ, we cannot doubt our immortality because we cannot doubt his. Let go the breath! There is no death To the living soul, nor loss, nor harm. Not of the clod Is the life of God; Let it mount as it will from form to form. Charles G. Ames. XXXVIII. How has our heirship of immortality been confirmed to us? By the resurrection and reappearance of Christ. — I Cor. 15:20. HE new faith in immortality, which is characteristic of our modern life, is traceable directly to the grave of Jesus. It was there and in what happened there, that a new faith was born in the hearts of the disciples, a belief that he had overcome death, that he was with them again, that as he lived they should live also. The world has not built its belief in his resurrection out of any philosophy or any theory of life: it has built its philosophies and its practical doctrines on a belief in his resurrection. Because men believe that Jesus survived the death of the cross, and reappeared in some way to his friends, and still lives with God in the supreme life of the unseen world, they live in trust and they die in peace; they bear the yoke of sorrow and hardship and they maintain a serene and victorious courage; they forswear the body and its appetites, and they learn to make the higher world of love and truth and service and sacrifice, their proper |