The heart and flesh cry out for God. They cry out for immortality. Not only does the Spirit from the heavenly land say to every toiling, yearning, anxious soul, "Come up hither," but every soul that is striving upward has in it, if not a vocalized aspiration, yet a mute yearning--a voice of the soul--that cries out for heaven, "As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God!" On such a day as this, then, in a community of moral feeling, how blest is the truth which comes to us, that we are not as the beasts that die; that we are as the gods that live! That for which we were made is immortality; and our journey is rough, straight, sharp, burdensome, with many tears. Our journey is not to the grave. I am not growing into old age to be blind, and to be deaf, and to be rheumatic, and to shrink a miserable cripple into the corner, shaking and tottering and forgetting all that I ever knew. The best part of me is untouched. The soul; the reason; the moral sense; the power to think; the power to will; the power to love; the power to admire purity, and to reach out after it--that is not touched by time, tho its instrument and means of outer demonstration be corroded and failing. No physical weakness touches the soul. Only the body is touched by sickness. And shake that down! Shake it down! Let it go! For, as the chrysalis bursts open, and the covering which confines the perfected insect is dropt, that he may come out into brightness of form and largeness of life, so this body is but a chrysalis; and when we break through it, we rise on wings by the attraction of God, and by the propulsion of our own inevitable desire and need, and are forever with the Lord. CHAPIN NICODEMUS: THE SEEKER AFTER RELIGION BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN, Universalist divine, was born in Union Village, Washington County, N. Y., in 1814. He began his very successful ministry 1837 in Richmond, Va., subsequently he preached in Charlestown, Mass., from which place he was called to the pastorate of the Fourth Universalist Church in New York City. His preaching attracted large congregations, and he was generally regarded as one of the greatest preachers of this country. He spoke from a manuscript, using no gesture, but his magnetic personality never failed to drive his message home. He published numerous volumes of sermons and lectures. He died in 1880. CHAPIN 1814-1880 NICODEMUS: THE SEEKER AFTER RELIGION _There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night._--John iii., 1, 2.