with love, can believe that anything can ever come to destroy that communion.  What have faith, love, aspiration, resignation, fellowship with God, to do with death?  They cannot be cut through with the stroke that destroys physical life, any more than you can divide a sunbeam with a sword.  It unites again, and the impotent edge passes through and has effected nothing.  Death can shear asunder many bonds, but that invisible bond that unites the soul to God is of adamant, against which his scythe is in vain.  Death is the grim porter that opens the door of a dark hole and herds us into it as sheep are driven into a slaughter-house.  But to those who have learned what it is to lay a trusting hand in God’s hand, the grim porter is turned into the gentle damsel, who keeps the door, and opens it for light and warmth and safety to the hunted prisoner that has escaped from the dungeon of life.  Death cannot touch communion, and the consciousness of communion with God is the earnest of the inheritance.

It is so for another reason also.  All the results of the Divine Spirit’s sealing of the soul are manifestly incomplete, and as manifestly tend towards completeness.  The engine is clearly working now at half-speed.  It is obviously capable of much higher pressure than it is going at now.  Those powers in the Christian man can plainly do a great deal more than they ever have done here, and are meant to do a great deal more.  Is this imperfect Christianity of ours, our little faith so soon shattered, our little love so quickly disproved, our faltering resolutions, our lame performances, our earthward cleavings—­are these things all that Jesus Christ’s bitter agony was for, and all that a Divine Spirit is able to make of us?  Manifestly, here is but a segment of the circle, in heaven is the perfect round; and the imperfections, so far as life is concerned, in the work of so obviously divine an Agent, cry aloud for a region where tendency shall become result, and all that it was possible for Him to make us we shall become.  The road evidently leads upwards, and round that sharp corner where the black rocks come so near each other and our eyesight cannot travel, we may be sure it goes steadily up still to the top of the pass, until it reaches ’the shining table-lands whereof our God Himself is Sun and Moon,’ and brings us all to the city set on a hill.

And, further, that divine seal is the earnest, inasmuch as itself is part of the whole.  The truest and the loftiest conception that we can form of heaven is as being the perfecting of the religious experience of earth.  The shilling or two, given to the servant in old-fashioned days, when he was hired, is of the same currency as the balance that he is to get when the year’s work is done.  The small payment to-day comes out of the same purse, and is coined out of the same specie, and is part of the same currency of the same kingdom, as what we get when we go yonder and count the endless riches to which we have fallen