the dew of life, one prayer will sweep us back to Palestine, and standing among the circle of the Apostles we shall listen to his voice, 'Love one another as I have loved you.' 'Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.'

And day being hallowed thus, do not omit to make holy the night. For whether we sleep a dreamless sleep, as if sleep had given us for the time to the arms of his brother death, or wander in the land of 'footless fancies,' where the brain and its servants, having escaped from their master, will, play at their wild pleasure, like things without a soul, we need the presence and protection of God. In dead sleep who can tell where the spirit has been, what worlds it has seen, what lessons it has received, what thoughts have become entwined with it-thoughts of which we are not conscious, but which appear like strangers afterwards, we cannot tell from whence, within the brain.

Hallow these possible voyages by committing your spirit into the hands of God.

But still more we need His watchfulness, or, since He is always watchful, our suppressed consciousness of it, when sleep opens the ivory gate, and we flitter through the fairy life of dreamland..

It is not beauty alone which we encounter there, but mystery more mysterious than that of earth; strange words which seem to be warnings; impressions so vivid that they stamp the day; pain and pleasure so sharp that we cry or dread to dream again; noble thoughts, pure shapes of the imagination, which, unremembered in detail, yet leave behind an inspiring sense of the

infinite things the soul may do; temptations to sin, cruel and impure thoughts, terror even and horror which open to us more dreadful depths of guilt and pain than we can realise awake.

Take, by the power of prayer, through this wild land of dreams, the sanctifying presence of One who loves us. Claim it every night, and it will attend to hallow the fancies of sleep, to save us from the baseness of dreamfear, to call back the wandering fancy from impurity. For prayer, continually lived in, makes the presence of a holy and loving God the air which life breathes and by which it lives, so that, as it mingles consciously with the work of the day, it becomes also a part of every dream.

To us, then, it will be no strange thing to enter Heaven, for we have been living in the things of Heaven. They have even here become realities, and when we step across the drawbridge of death, it is no foreign land we enter, but our native Home. Only the communion with our Father which we have felt here through prayer, shall there be so profoundly greater that prayer will be no more, and praise be all in all.

IMMORTALITY.

'For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.'-Luke xx. 38.

THERE is a common reason for the perverse denial of immortality. It is, that man, when living solely for this world, cannot believe in a world to come. He who is blind has no conception of the stars. He who is without passion cannot believe in enthusiasm. He who lives for himself cannot believe in self-devotion.

And he who is living a base life cannot believe in a noble one. If his soul is plunged in the sensual, he cannot realise the spiritual. When his whole energies are given to this world, he cannot conceive or possess the world to come. There are, then, thousands of men calling themselves Christians, to whom immortal life is merely a name, to whom their little life is indeed 'rounded with a sleep.'

They

Practically, they disbelieve in immortality. may even inwardly go further, and deny it to themselves, should the question intrude upon their pleasure. But they do not deny it before the world. Something holds them back from boasting of their unbelief; a consciousness that they have thrown aside a noble thing, a regret which will steal in, that now they can

no longer aspire beyond their present life. Unable to realise immortality themselves, they yet shrink from an open denial of it with a sense of shame and degradation. But still more, it becomes a dreadful thing to them, if they have any sensitive reverence left for the sorrow of Mankind, to throw doubt upon this doctrine. If true, it is so precious that it seems the race might bear any suffering provided it was its fate at last; if it is only held to be false and not proved false, a man may well doubt whether, on his own judgment alone, he should proclaim that he holds it false. There is a devotion to one's own truthfulness which is, in certain circumstances, intolerable cruelty to others, and, in spiritual matters, where proof has not been attained, unless we clearly feel that to disclose our opinion is good for man, we are only Pharisees anxious to placard our honesty when we loudly proclaim our negations in public or in private. Truthfulness without charity is a vice and not a virtue, as love without truthfulness. to moral right becomes idolatry.

And men in general have felt this, and when they disbelieved in immortality have held their tongue.

Moreover, they have refrained, because they insensibly felt that the denial of immortality is practically atheism. Clinging still to the notion of a God, they connect with Him their ideas of right and wrong. He is their source, and He allots their sanctions. But no one can long continue to believe in and to love a God who is assumed to give us these ideas, and then so forgets all about His gift and His creature as to plunge obedience and disobedience into the same nothingness;

or who by wilfully annexing annihilation to all human lives alike, proclaims that in His eyes, Tiberius, rotting to a shameless death in Caprea, is on the same level with the Saviour dying on Calvary for the Truth. One must feel that such a God would be wicked. He would deny that very morality which we imagine He has implanted in us. We should be obliged to deny His existence in order to retain our morality. To disbelieve in immortality is to disbelieve in God: with the fall of the one, falls the other.

And this also men have felt, and I know no instance where the denial of immortality has not led directly to atheism. Men did not like to realise, by putting their denial of immortality into speech, that they did not practically believe in God at all.

But these motives have now ceased to operate, at least to the same extent. Matters have taken a new phase. Immortality is boldly or quietly denied, not only by impure and selfish men, but by men of culture and of a high morality. It is accompanied, as it must necessarily be, by latent or overt atheism, as a cause or a result of the denial.

What are the particular causes of this denial at present? One is the prevalence of certain theological views which, once largely accepted, are now felt to be repugnant to the moral sense. Good men, some among the best and holiest of the race, have held these views, and lived and died by them. And it is a strong proof that theological opinions have no necessary connection with goodness that these men have been so good. It proves also that we cannot judge the morality of one time, so far as it relates to the morality of