One man in hell—think of it. One man who might have been united with God in an influx of inexhaustible new life lifting him from order to order of glory—that is what the Christian sees and what leads him, or has led him often, to describe such a loss in terms from which we shrink to-day. But if we learn to see what it is the Christian means, can we say that he goes too far? Or shall we not say that if we had at our command words fit to depict his meaning they would go even farther? No doubt we see plainly the absurdity of material fires and the religious and psychological falsity of the picture of human beings vainly desiring God, when we know that, as has been said by a great Christian, 'the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him, with half that certainty, as God, the Source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.' But the fact remains that to lose life in 'the second death,' to pass out of all fellowship whether with man or God, to shrink into an ever-shrivelling creature who cares for nothing outside its ever-narrowing and concentrating self-love, is for any live, loving, healthy-minded man or woman as terrible and repulsive a fate as ever a painter or poet or theologian of old times attempted to describe. Yet it seems reasonable enough. If we will not live we shall not live. If God, the Christian says, is permitted by us to reconcile us with himself, he will reconcile us. If we do not bar out his fountains of life they will live in us as well-springs. We are wholly dependent upon receiving more of his life, but we cannot be compelled to receive it. We may even decline freedom and lose what we had of it, employing it amiss; it is not an inalienable character stamped upon us. We have grown into enough of it to be able to refuse to have more. 'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.' ------- CHAPTER X A religion that is not founded in nature is all fiction and falsity, and as mere a nothing as an idol. _William Law._ The gain or the loss of life—this is what the Christian religion calls us to face. Will you be a slave to the life you have and in the end lose it, or at least all that makes it worth living? Or will you, in the liberty wherewith Christ makes you free, take up your heritage of more life in union with him?