But remember that all this full tide of life is Christ’s gift.  There is no such thing as natural immortality; there is no such thing as independent life.  All Being, from the lowest creature up to the loftiest created spirit, exists by one law, the continual impartation to it of life from the fountain of life, according to its capacities.  And unless Jesus Christ, all through the eternal ages of the future, imparted to the happy souls that sit garlanded at His board the life by which they live, the wreaths would wither on their brows, and the brows would melt away, and dissolve from beneath the wreaths.  ’I will give him a crown of life.’

It is a crown of ‘glory,’ and that means a lustrousness of character imparted by radiation and reflection from the central light of the glory of God.  ’Then shall the righteous blaze out like the sun in the Kingdom of My Father.’  Our eyes are dim, but we can at least divine the far-off flashing of that great light, and may ponder upon what hidden depths and miracles of transformed perfectness and unimagined lustre wait for us, dark and limited as we are here, in the assurance that we all shall be changed into the ’likeness of the body of His glory.’

It is a crown of ‘righteousness.’  Though that phrase may mean the wreath that rewards righteousness, it seems more in accordance with the other similar expressions to which I have referred to regard it, too, as the material of which the crown is composed.  It is not enough that there should be festal gladness, not enough that there should be calm repose, not enough that there should be flashing glory, not enough that there should be fulness of life.  To accord with the intense moral earnestness of the Christian system there must be, emphatically, in the Christian hope, cessation of all sin and investiture with all purity.  The word means the same thing as the ancient promise, ‘Thy people shall be all righteous.’  It means the same thing as the latest promise of the ascended Christ, ’They shall walk with Me in white.’  And it sets, I was going to say, the very climax and culmination on the other hopes, declaring that absolute, stainless, infallible righteousness which one day shall belong to our weak and sinful spirits.

These, then, are the elements, and on them all is stamped the signature of perpetuity.  The victor’s wreath is tossed on the ashen heap, the reveller’s flowers droop as he sits in the heat of the banqueting-hall; the bride’s myrtle blossom fades though she lay it away in a safe place.  The crown of life is incorruptible.  It is twined of amaranth, ever blossoming into new beauty and never fading.

II.  Now look, secondly, at the discipline by which the crown is won.