that is life itself,—­its origin, its evolution and its intention.  We can do many wonderful things,—­but we cannot re-animate the corpse of a friend!  Christ could do this, being Divinity incarnate,—­but we can only wring our hands helplessly, and wonder where the spirit has fled,—­that spirit which made our beloved one speak to us, smile, and exchange the looks which express the emotions of the heart more truly than words.  We want the ‘Soul’ we loved!  The inanimate clay, stretched cold in its coffined rest, is a strange sight to us.  We do not know it.  It is not our friend!  Our friend was the ‘Soul’ that lived in the clay,—­the ‘breath of God’ that moved our own ‘Soul’ to respond to it in affection and tenderness.  And we instinctively know and feel that though this breath of God’ is gone from us, it cannot be dead.  And ‘lost’ is not an expression that we would ever apply to it, because we hope and believe it is ’found’—­found by its Creator, and taught to realise and rejoice in its own immortality.  All religion means this,—­the ‘finding’ of the Soul.  The passion of our Saviour teaches this,—­His resurrection, His ascension into Heaven, symbolises and expresses the same thing.  Yet, in the words of Christ Himself, it would nevertheless seem, that the ‘Soul’ divinely generated and immortal as it is, can be ‘lost’ by our own act and will.  ’What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ I venture to think the text implies, that in the very attempt to ’gain the whole world,’ the loss of the soul is involved.  I am not going to detain you here this morning with a long exordium concerning how some of you can and may, if you choose, play havoc with the priceless gift God baa bestowed upon each one of you.  I only desire to impress upon you all, with the utmost earnestness, that it is idle to say among yourselves ‘We have no souls,’ or ’The soul is an unknown quantity and cannot be proved.’  The soul is as and actual a part of you as the main artery is of the body,—­and that you cannot see it, touch it, or put it under the surgeon’s dissecting knife is no proof that it is not there.  You might as well say life itself does not exist, because you cannot see its primaeval causes or beginnings.  The Soul is the centre of your being,—­the compass of your life-journey,—­the pivot round which, whether you will or not, you shape your actions in this world for the next.  If you lose that mainspring of motive, you lose all.  Your conduct, your speech, your expression in every movement and feature all show the ungoverned and ungovernable condition in which you are.  God is not mocked,—­and in many cases,—­taking the grand majority of the human race,—­neither is man!”

He paused.  The congregation was very quiet.  He felt, rather than saw, that Maryllia’s eyes were fixed upon him,—­and he was perfectly aware that Lady Beaulyon,—­whom he recognised, as he would have recognised an actress, on account of the innumerable photographs of her which were on sale in the windows of every stationer in every moderate-sized town,—­was gazing straight up at him with a bright, mocking glance in which lurked a suspicion of disdain and laughter.  Moved by a sudden impulse, he bent his own regard straight down upon her with an inflexible cool serenity.  An ugly frown puckered her ladyship’s brow at once,—­and she lowered her eyelids angrily.