and with youth, the people who are interested in what the young folks are thinking and doing, and who are trying to help to make the lives of younger people beautiful and happy and strong? Such people never really grow old. Their hearts keep sensitive to the life of the present through their fellowship with the young vital blood, the young hopeful hearts of the boys and girls with whom they associate. The mind keeps young naturally when because of sympathy one is constantly seeing life from the standpoint of youth. The standpoint is very important. Have you never noticed what a difference it makes with a picture where you stand to look at it? You have often seen a portrait that you could make ugly or beautiful; you could make the face look young or old, commonplace or noble, by your point of view. The picture is the same all the time, but your standpoint is different. Now I do assure you that that accounts for a great deal of the difference between men and women who, as age comes on them, grow old and discouraged at heart, or keep young and buoyant and hopeful and courageous. And there is nothing that will bless men and women so much, and give them such power to defy the almanac and realize the Psalmist's promise that the saints of God shall be like the palm trees that bear fruit in old age and are fat and flourishing till the last, as to live in that spirit of helpfulness that causes them to pour their own gathered resources into the lives of the new generation that is coming up, so that when the time comes for them to go home to heaven, and God sends down his chariot of fire as he did for Elijah (for such people always die victorious deaths like that) they will step into the chariot with great joy, knowing that they have left themselves behind to live again a still more glorious life in the young men and the young women whom they have blessed and enlarged and glorified by their generosity and kindness.

I think one of the finest things about Paul's life was the way in which he poured himself into young men. And one of the most interesting things, and one which shows the possibilities of humanity very clearly, is the fact that Paul was never particular about the kind of young man he began on. Paul was nearly two thousand years ahead of his time in the democracy of his spirit. Take, for example, two young men that Paul made immortal. One of them was Timothy. Timothy was an eminently respectable young fellow. His mother and his grandmother clear back were good. He belonged to the highest class of young man, and Paul gloried

in him. He dealt with him graciously and kindly, but earnestly, and made him a bishop in the end. I have no doubt that of all the people Paul ever knew on earth there were many ways in which Timothy was closer to him than anybody else. I can imagine Paul saying many times to himself, "If I had had a chance to be married and have a family like other men, I could not have asked a better thing than to have had a son like Timothy." And since that was impossible, Paul did the next best thing; he just emptied himself into Timothy, and after awhile, when Paul had finished his course and won his crown of glory, Timothy remained, and Paul lived again in the noble young man whom he had done so much to form.

But see another side of Paul; or, rather, the same side turned toward an entirely different type of young man. A young slave ran away from his master and drifted about from pillar to post until he finally turned up in Rome. And when he got to the end of his rope, like the poor prodigal among the swine, he ran across Paul. Paul was living a prisoner in his own hired house in Rome. He soon found out that this waif Onesimus had run away from Philemon, a man who had been converted under Paul's preaching, and he set to work to save the young fellow. I imagine he began with as much earnestness as if he had been struggling for the son of a prince, for in Paul's eyes he was better than that-a son of God. And day after day Paul poured out his love on that poor slave until he won his heart to himself and then won him to Jesus Christ. And he kept him there under his instruction for a long time, until out of that runaway tramp, wicked and hopeless, he had developed a noble Christian man. And then he sent him back to Philemon with one of the tenderest and most gracious letters that any man ever got from his friend. "I beseech thee," says Paul, "for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds: which in time past was to thee unprofitable, but now profitable to thee and to me: whom I have sent again: thou therefore receive him, as though he were mine own son; whom I would have retained with me, that in thy stead he might have ministered unto me in the bonds of the Gospel." And Paul continues to suggest to Philemon that God probably was in it all, and that the man who went away a servant, and a very poor one at that, was coming back a fellow man, a brother beloved. Yet all that transformation had come about because in the spirit of Jesus Christ Paul had poured himself into the young slave.

But it is not only through our own personal fellowship and association that we may reproduce ourselves again in the lives of other men. We may do so by building up schools, and hospitals, and all those great agencies by which youth and people in distress and need may be blessed and comforted and restored to their highest capability for work among men. If a man is wise who plants a tree that shall bear fruit after he is dead, which another shall eat and bless God for the man who planted it, how much more gracious and beneficent is the act of the man who by his money plants an academy, or a college, or a hospital or an orphan asylum, that shall be a tree of knowledge, or a tree of healing, or a tree of protection that shall grow and blossom and bear fruit through all the years of time. And generation after generation men who have eaten of the fruit of that tree will be made strong to go out to bless their fellowmen. And thus after a man has personally ceased to work in the world he shall still live. He shall nerve with strength the arm that is strong to do, and he shall inspire the eloquence that pleads with other lips for a nobler civilization, and he shall soothe the fevered brow of the invalid with a softer and more gracious touch than he ever knew while he lived. And so on and on, for thousands of years, in diversified ways, the money given with loving purpose will be carrying the good man's influence and blessing until, in the end, the little stream that was like the spring bursting from under the rock at the canyon head and modestly gurgling through the ferns, shall grow to be a great river of benefaction and blessing. Thus it is that not only immortality in heaven is within our reach, but earthly immortality, in so far as the earth shall last. And surely heaven will be sweeter to the man who has left something behind him to bless the old earth that has been his Alma Mater in fitting him for the skies.

CHRIST RECEIVING THE KISS OF JUDAS

"Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?"-Luke 22:48.

The last supper of Jesus with his disciples, a feast destined to live in poetry and art and human life as no other feast the world had ever seen, was over. The closing hymn had been sung. Jesus had led his disciples away into the Garden of Gethsemane, and there

the awful pressure of the weight of the world's sins had bowed his shoulders, and he had prayed in anguish so terrible that the bloody sweat was its outward expression. The angel had come and ministered unto him, and the great soul had gathered its forces together in that supreme submission, "Not my will, but thine, be done." Christ had come back to his disciples, and as they aroused themselves after slumber, ashamed that in their sorrow and the heavy foreboding of coming disaster they had not been able to keep awake and be of some comfort to him whom they loved, there was a sudden excited outcry. The noise of clanking swords and marching men bursts on the stillness of the garden. The light of torches flashes through the darkness, and there approach the priests and the soldiers, led by Judas, to arrest Jesus as though he were a criminal.

Judas had gone out hurriedly from the Passover table, angry and uncomfortable from the knowledge that his treachery was already discovered by the Lord; and having found his fellow conspirators and gotten his price, he comes back with the blood-money in his pocket, rubbing the silver pieces over and over between his fingers and letting them clink together to keep up his courage as he shuffles along in the weird light of the torches carried by the soldiers.

As they drew near Judas said to the captain of the guard that he would indicate who was the right person for them to arrest by giving him a kiss. Strange, is it not, that Judas should have added the horror of that caress to the treachery of the betrayal of Jesus? One would naturally suppose that even Judas himself would have shuddered at doing a thing like that. It illustrates to what extent the current will carry a man when he has once yielded himself to it. Here is a man who at the first, so far as we know, had no fault in him except this one false spot of greed. He loved money; he liked to have it about him; he liked to have it pull heavy in the bag; he liked to pour it out on the table and see it shine; he liked to stack it up in piles and see the piles grow taller. And this grew on him; grew on him even while he was the treasurer of Jesus Christ. One would naturally think that in association with Jesus it would be impossible for a man to cherish such feelings. Christ was the soul of generosity; he poured out himself and everything he had on the poor and the suffering and the needy; yet Judas, living in that atmosphere, grew greedier every day, until he bargained off

his generous, whole-souled, loving Lord himself for thirty pieces. of silver.

We ought to learn from this study of Judas that it is not safe for us to presume too much on the fact that we belong to a Christian family, or that we are members of a Christian church, or that we are engaged as Christians in carrying on the business affairs of the kingdom of God. We may do all that and yet be utterly out of harmony with the spirit of the cause with which we are associated. Noah's carpenters built the ark and then were drowned themselves. King Hiram headed the subscription list for Solomon's temple and never got any good of it. And Judas was the treasurer of Jesus Christ for three years, and got meaner all the time, until finally he betrayed his Lord with a kiss.

Ah, but that kiss! Why did Judas do that? It has always seemed to me that that was the blackest cloud in all the gloomy sky of that dark deed.

It is possible that Judas selected this method of betraying Jesus without any reference to its appearance, but only because it was a certain way of fulfilling the foul contract to which he had committed himself. He had probably become so accustomed to formality and hypocrisy that the terribly wicked look of this act did not even occur to him. It is an awful thing to do sacred deeds in a formal, heartless way. Little by little, possibly, Judas had lost his interest in Christ as the Messiah; his goodness had lost power over Judas; and he had lived on with him not because he loved him, but because he had a comfortable job as treasurer, and it gave him a chance to handle money, which was the chief and growing passion of his soul. No doubt he thought that in order to keep his place he must show the same affection as the others, and so he went on pretending that he loved Christ long after real affection had died out of his soul. And he had become so accustomed to giving this hypocritical kiss that the monstrousness of it in this deed of betrayal did not now appeal to him. God help any of us from falling into formality in our dealings with Jesus! If we do not love him, heaven save us from kissing him before the multitude and thus bringing that heart-searching inquiry of Jesus to the Master's lips again, with our name there instead of the other, "Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?"

Have you ever tried to picture the attitude of Jesus in receiving that kiss from Judas? Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, in her most.