How wonderfully Emerson unfolds the magic possible to a day. "One of the illusions," he says, "is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. _Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year._ No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. There are days which are the carnival of the year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked, and pining: to-day 't is inconceivably populous; creation swarms and meliorates." The speculative idea that immortality is an achievement rather than a gift is not new, but whenever it is formulated, as in a recent sermon by Rev. Doctor Parkhurst, it startles many people and arouses antagonism, so far as it is not truly understood. Yet it has its deepest aspects of spiritual truth, and it is the idea constantly, persistently, and most impressively taught by Saint Paul throughout the entire gospels. We are constantly besought to _lay hold_ on the eternal life; to press forward toward immortal things; to be renewed in the spirit; to "put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness; to follow Him, who is the Life, the Truth, the Way." The entire teaching of the gospels is one forcible system of active and unfaltering endeavor in the growing achievement of spirituality, which determines Immortality. It is the exact accountant--measure for measure. So much spirituality, so much immortality. Nor does this assertion partake in the slightest degree of the nature of a metaphysical problem, to be comprehended only by the theologian and the philosopher. It is the most simple, clear, and direct of propositions. We all accept Saint Paul's assertion that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven. So far as one lives only in the processes of the physical life he is not living the life of those spiritual energies which alone lay hold on immortality. There is a certain degree of intelligent consciousness that is inseparable from this physical life; an intelligence that buys and sells, and bargains and calculates on the physical plane, and is sufficient to produce a certain rational status of life. There are not wanting individuals who never rise above this plane. They may, and often do, acquire possessions and even power on the limited plane of the outward life; they may even have some formal and ceremonial religious observances which they mistake for Christianity, but which are the framework ready and able to inspire them if filled with the spirit, but which, to them, remain empty and dead. The man whose body, simply, occupies his church pew on Sunday, and who on Monday proceeds to cheat his neighbor, is not, we will all agree, the man who has really entered into the true privileges offered by the Church. The sacrament of Sunday must become the consecration of Monday.