himself from all the toys of earth, laid aside the splendors of royalty, and gave up, for a time, his life in the world, that he might hear the clods fall over him which should at some time cover his head, and let himself be buried alive for a while, and then returned from the grave, and passed the remaining short span of time in pious contemplation - what was his object other than through these external means to be thrilled through and through by this feeling of death, that he might comprehend more perfectly the meaning of that life which was to be further meted out to him here below?

But we do not need these external means. In the spirit it is that we are to die and to rise again. And this is the unconquerable, delivering energy which we derive from the life and death of noble men who have joyfully lived and joyfully gone to their death for some grand thought, that we live and suffer with them, feel that we die with them, and then realize the eternal life whose beginning we know, and whose continuance we believe in. He who loses his life gains it. He who has once given up his life, released from this world, and looked upon death, he is saved and lives, lives eternally. Who will harm thee with vain illusions or with violent threats? Thou hast thrown down all the superstructure of thine own life and built it up again, and thou art born anew, and art free. Thou hast not thrown away thy life from a contempt of earthly existence, and to bend thy neck in spiritless dejection to unknown powers; thou hast attained life afresh in its everlasting beauty, as a holy and free possession in spite of all tyrannous edicts and unholy powers. Thou hast died, and thou livest again, joyous and free.

Be faithful. Learn that all your work is done for God. Slight nothing. Have the same evidence of your salvation that the little servant girl had, who, when asked how she knew she was converted, said, "Because I sweep under the mats — S. S. Workman.

THE PURIFYING BY FIRE.

THE process, continually going on, by which all else is eliminated and the true and the good purified and confirmed, is often spoken of as a fire which tries and purifies. There is a result wrought out which demonstrates the reality and immanent force of the just, the pure, and the divine. The ordinances of the universe are from everlasting to everlasting, and finally assert themselves over all serving, all pretense, and unreality, over all lies and superficial attempts to enthrone wrong and evil in the life of the individual and the world. The Bible is full of these assertions in general statements, and in particular facts in the history of persons and in the broader sphere of national events. It asserts continually the principles of righteousness; of fidelity to divine laws; of obedience to commands which express the nature of the divine attributes; an unsleeping, ever-active power of love and wisdom that manifests itself in overturnings, in judgments, in consuming potencies which no cunning can elude and no strength resist. In this sense it is said that God is a consuming fire; that the fan is in the hand of the winnower to blow away all the chaff; that the knife is in the grasp of one who shall prune away every dead limb and every parasitic growth; that the great harvester shall gather the wheat and burn up the tares; that the refiner sits at the refining crucible, and the washer shall purify with the fuller's soap, until the genuine metal shall gleam free of all base alloy, and the cloth shall be cleansed from all defilement.

We do not see this process because we are blinded by custom, dazzled by the external forms of things, and swept along in our own atmosphere of passion, fear, preoccupied feeling and thought. Our horizon is limited by the narrow range of days and years, and cannot take in the vast sweep of the ages and eternities in which God lives as an eternal now, with whom there is only the proceeding faith of everlasting rectitude and love. We live in the element of time, and in it

must necessarily be the successive appearances manifesting themselves wherein are embodied the hay, the dross and stubble that confront our gaze and often fill up the whole sphere of our vision. Because we see the huge heap seemingly undisturbed to-day, and to-morrow we lose out of sight those divine principles which are at work silently and irresistibly, to undermine the evil, to uproot the noxious, to overthrow the baseless, to consume the perishable, and sweep away the useless and bury the dead.

It is the unapproached glory of the life of Jesus that it was based upon the eternally true, real, and divine. It is the embodiment of spiritual laws, and so overleaps all ages and all times. However doubtful it might look to others, the life object of Jesus was plain to him. Others might look at the outward failure, but he looked at the real success. He had been faithful to the revelation of the Father's will, and had borne witness to the eternal truth. The narrow views, the selfish expedients, the exclusive religionism of his time, were put away, and he was willing to die, if death were appointed, in fidelity to the spiritual truth, so real to him, of God as the Father of all. He did not enact part all clear before him, but won his way through temptations, struggles, doubts, and fears, as we may learn from the statements of his times of conflict, of earnest prayer, and terrible agony. It was a real life, wherein the deepest spiritual laws were brought out in actual development upon the earthly plane, and the Divine Spirit found for itself expression in human conditions and states. It seemed to have no definite result, as men look at results, but to Jesus himself it was sufficient that from moment to moment he bore witness to the truth. That truth was no formula to be expressed in words as we too often think, a something which can be grasped once for all, but it was a living fidelity to the highest inspirations and the purest and most universal loves. Each day and each hour brought its own word and work, but the whole culminated in that one last endurance, that final patience, that resolute fidelity, and interior resignedness to the Divine Will.

So in a humbler form does many a man's long discipline

and state require one crowning act of fidelity in which are gathered and summed up all past victories and faiths; and he feels that this is, as it were, the end and object of all. But no man ever proves faithful here who has not been faithful before. Each day brings its own testimony, its own work, and its own call.

We often ask what is the object for which we are to live, and we know well when we discern the laws of goodness and truth that are at the foundation of all the manifold appearances of this earthly existence. If we set before us any definite outward results as the life object, we shall inevitably be disappointed, and feel that life is but an illusion. Every life, even the humblest, is based upon a relation to everlasting principles of truth and goodness, which must have recognition and sway, if there is to be any accomplishment of the two purposes of our being. These principles manifest themselves under some form to all, and only he knows wherefore he lives who is faithful to them.

Because he was so entirely true here, Jesus was true to the world. He knew that the Father was with him, and to do his will, whatever that might be, he felt was the duty and glory of his life. When the last hours came near that was still his work. The vision of a harvest ready for the reaper's sickle had faded from his sight. The sight of thousands. pressing into the kingdom no longer greeted his eye, and even his few chosen ones forsook him and fled tremblingly away. But he was still composed and reliant. His work was the same as ever. The everlasting truth shed its brightness in upon his spirit, and it was for him to be faithful then, as ever, to that which it required.

This persistent living in realities of spiritual truth may be, and ought to be, the grand end of every human soul. There is truth to be lived up to and embodied in all the relations and doings of life. Some spiritual fidelity may be manifested in each thought and act. He who proposes this as the chief object of his existence can never fail of extracting good from each experience, and of preserving a courageous heart in each crisis of trial and disappointment and seeming loss. The

desolate spirit is comforted, and the weary gains new strength. He who feels that his life may be the unfolding and development of everlasting and divine truth has an object that will content every ambition and fill out every desire.

There is one word, which, were it not abused and encrusted by the technicalities of a formal theology and a conventional religionism, would best express the process that is going on in every aspiring and truth-seeking person, the word "regeneration." In it is embodied the removal from low and earthly estimates, the dawning upon the soul of higher ideals, the birth into purer and nobler states, the rising into loftier mounts of vision, the enkindling of holier affections, and the transition from deceiving shows of sensous allurement into the enduring realities of the spiritual kingdom. It is to become more and more freed from all which the pure principle of universal love, truth and righteousness rejects and condemns.

The question for each one to ask is, what there is in his thought, doing, feeling and purpose which cannot abide the searching and purifying fire of the everlasting and ever-acting laws of truth and love. What is there, not merely opposed to what is right and good, but what is there that takes hold of the eternal and gives fellowship with the divine and imperishable? What is there which will abide the passing away of youthful strength and bloom, the sad accumulation of earthly woes and disappointed hopes? What is there which looks beyond the frivolous and casual enjoyments of the fleeting hours, the excitements of pleasure, of ambition, of business, or even the charms of natural relationships, and innocent, social satisfactions and joys? There is a fire to try every man's work, and only that shall remain which is the pure gold of truth and love.

It sounds like extravagant enthusiasm to him who has never recognized the reality of the spiritual life, but it is the statement of a real fact in the process of regenerative experience, when a Frenc nobleman says, "I felt to what a state of nothingness the soul must be brought, I beheld myself as if encompassed with whatsoever the world loves and pur