and who look on to the time when the fulness of humanity will be restored to them by the resurrection of the body.  The interests that are vital here are also the interests that are vital there, the interests of the Kingdom of God.  As the Christian thinks of the life of the world to come he thinks of it as the sphere in which his ambitions can be and will be realised, where the ends of which he has so long and so earnestly striven will be attained.  His life has been a life given to the service of our Lord and to his Kingdom, and it had, no doubt, often seemed to small purpose; it has often seemed that the Kingdom was not prospering and the work of God coming to naught.  And then he looks on to the future and sees that the work that he knows is an insignificant fragment of the whole work; and he thinks with longing of the time when he shall see revealed all that has been accomplished.  He feels like a colonist who in some outlying province of an empire is striving to promote the interests of his Homeland.  His work is to build up peace and order and to civilise barbarous tribes.  And there are days when the work seems very long and very hopeless; and then he comforts himself with the thought that this is but a corner of the empire and that one day he will be relieved and called home.  There at the centre he will be able to see the whole fact, will be able to understand what this colony means, and will rejoice in the slight contribution to its upbuilding that it has been his mission to make.  The heart of the Christian is really in the Homeland and he feels acutely that here he is on the Pilgrim Way.  But he feels too that his present vocation is here and that he is here contributing the part that God has appointed him for the upbuilding of the Kingdom, and that the more he loves our Lord and the more he longs for Him the more faithfully and exactly will he strive to accomplish his appointed work.

They are right, those who are continually reproaching Christians with having a centre of interest outside this world; but we do not mind the reproach because we are quite sure that only those will have an intelligent interest in this world who feel that it does not stand by itself as a final and complete fact, but is a single stage of the many stages of God’s working.  We no more think it a disgrace to be thinking of a future world and to have our centre of interest there than we think it a disgrace for the college lad to be looking forward to the career that lies beyond the college boundaries and for which his college is supposed to be preparing him.  We do not consider that boy ideal whose whole time and energy is given to the present interests of a college, its athletics, its societies, and in the end is found to have paid so little attention to the intellectual work that he is sent there to perform that he fails to pass his examinations.  Christians are interested in this world because it is a province of the Kingdom of God and that they are set here to work out certain