"Many of the Corinthians hearing believed and were baptized." "When the Samaritans believed, they were baptized, both men and women." This is our entrance into the door. We have now just entered into the church of Christ--into the family of God--it is God's house--we are at home in the Father's house, and naught will harm us if we live at home, if we are "obedient children not fashioning ourselves after our former lusts." The injunction comes to us here: "Add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge temperance, to temperance patience, to patience brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness godliness, and to godliness charity, and if these things be in you and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind and can not see afar off, and had forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure, for if ye do these things ye shall never fall. For _so_ an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." "Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life and enter through the gates into the city." Men in disobedience to the gospel feel, when they approach the cold Jordan of death, that every thing upon which they built their hopes is being swept away. Their thoughts, their treasures, their grandeur, their honors, their little world, their all, fails them here. They have lived at a distance from God, and now they tremble at the thought of approaching before him whose great mercy they have rejected. Death is a terror to sinful man--his afflictions are his darkest hours. It is not so with the Christian. To him death has no sting; over him the grave has no victory to boast, nor has the second death any power. He has unshaken confidence that every thing is safe in the hands of Jesus. What but obedience to the gospel of the blessed God will enable the child of faith, when flesh and heart fail to say, "Thou wilt show me the path of life; in thy presence is fullness of joy, and at thy right hand are pleasures forevermore." What then must be the happiness of fixing the heart on God, where there is nothing unlovely, nothing fickle, nothing false or dying. We may place our affections on the things of earth, and sooner or later we are severed from them. Here all is change, disappointment and consequent sorrow. It is not so in Heaven where all, is pure and immutable. From our best affections towards creatures up to the love of God there is a height as lofty as his ways and attributes are above the attributes and ways of mortals. No fear can haunt the mind that he may change in his character of love. He is beyond the reach of accident or change, perfect in goodness and power, and to those who trust in him, he is a sure and