like a halo upon them, comes of their feeling sure that God loves them, and of their loving all God’s creatures in return. It was this Love that fascinated their hearers; when the words of Paul, notwithstanding that his speech—so they said—was contemptible, went to the hearts of Greeks and Barbarians, as we know they did, what he touched them by was this magic of Love. A word about the nature of that Hope which nestled in the Apostles’ hearts must end my book. If their Master doubted, whether, when He should come at the last, “He should find Faith upon the earth;” what, it may be asked, could this Hope of the Apostles have been? Now, that these words of Christ were not spoken in despondency is clear enough for many reasons, but this one reason, that they caused no despondency to the hearers would, to my mind, be sufficient of itself. What this saying tells us is, that we are not to look for Christ’s Kingdom in the shape of a perfected community existing at the last upon the earth. Science and observation seem to point in the same way. Men are never so selfish and so regardless of others as when they are pushing for place in a crowd. Now this globe can only yield food for a time, it must be exhausted of its stores, and even, it would seem, of its reproductive powers, at last; and a half-regenerated humanity would be apt to degenerate back again when they were struggling for standing room and for bread. To take another point; though science has not settled the future of this planet of ours, yet opinion leans greatly towards our system’s having an end. But, if we accept Christ’s teaching, Man need not come to an end together with the fabric of the world. The earth is only the spot upon which he is reared and put to proof. Those who come out of the trial we believe to be removed, perhaps after an interval, to another kind of life elsewhere; so that, though this outer fabric of the world may perish, Man, we may believe, will survive, not in a material but in “a spiritual body”(347) whose nature of course we cannot know. Thus the Human episode in the great Epic of Existence, may, as far as life upon this planet goes, come to an end, but the Humanity for which the Christian labours and for which Christ died, will exist for ever; for the Spirits of just men made perfect will have been garnered from age to age into abodes prepared for them from the first. And though Christ, in His wisdom, be sparing of utterances about that which is winnowed away, yet there are not wanting analogies justifying hope.