ipants; the wedding feast with the unworthy guest; the wicked husbandmen refusing the tribute of the harvest; the barren fig tree; the pearl of great price which to-day so many decline to buy; and the ten virgins of whom five were foolish. But for all the various conditions and the hidden and devious progress, it is surely advancing, and so far as we are concerned the end is near. Many shall come from the east and from the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom, and the children of the kingdom, many at least who had opportunity and privilege which they despised, shall be cast out.' A sweet spirit, and a great scholar, the late Professor Edwin Hatch, of Oxford, closes his Hibbert Lectures with this sentence: "Though you may believe that I am but a dreamer of dreams, I seem to see, though it be on the far horizon-the horizon beyond the fields which either we or our children will treada Christianity which is not new, but old, which is not old, but new, a Christianity in which the moral and spiritual elements will again hold their place, in which men will be bound together by the bond of mutual service, which is the bond of the sons of God, a Christianity which will actually realize the brotherhood of men, the ideal of the first communities." That dream is to be realized only through the power 1 See Note 7. of a brighter though more distant vision, that of the resurrection life and the city come down from God out of heaven. As the Church comes to feel the actual presence of the living Christ leading his followers on, notwithstanding the pains and resistances of the present world, to the day, ever drawing nearer and becoming more real, when he shall come again to finish his work in bringing back from the dead the ten thousand of his saints clothed in the resurrection body, henceforth to know as they are known, the true adoption of the sons of God and the true brotherhood of men will be realized, and men will be eager to live it so far as they can in the life that now is. In short, a firm and illumined grasp upon the doctrine of the other life and the inheritance waiting to be revealed is the essential condition of the right understanding of this life and getting the best out of it. The testimony of the lay brother of the Carmelite friars, Brother Lawrence, ought to be the glad confession of every life: "I must in a little time go to God. What comforts me in this life is that I may see him by faith; and I see him in such manner as might make me say sometimes, I believe no more, but I see." 1 1 See Notes 8 and 9. |