The Church is to wait; that means to watch, to expect, to be ready. This is what the Apostle said. This is what the Son of God Himself said and still says to-day. He affirms we do not know the hour. He exhorts us to watch. The affirmation and the exhortation hold for this hour. If therefore the Son of God be not incarnate falsehood; if He seek not to play with my heart and make me a spectacle to the lost souls of the pit as well as to the mockers among men--He means what He said. If He meant what He said, then He means that any day, and any hour of the day so far as I know I may meet Him at any turn of the road. And what would that mean if He should come to-night or to-morrow? I have told you what it would mean to me. What would it mean to you, to some of you who have so much invested in Laurel Hill, in that white and beautiful city of the dead, by the banks of your winding river? When I was a boy my father took me there and I watched as the winds rippled through the long grasses, and I could hear the wash of the river below, I was startled and sometimes shivered as I walked under the shadow of tall monuments, carved figures, and by stately tombs of marble. And once I started back and broke into tears at the sight of the sculptured form of "Old Mortality" bending above a slab with chisel and mallet in hand--and I suppose is there still, grown older in his stony face because more stained with the passing years. What would it mean to you whose loved ones are lying in that cemetery or any other of the sleeping places of the dead? Ah! it would mean the home-coming, the greeting, the rapturous kiss and hand-clasp of recognition, the joy of that heaven life that shall know no end and that immortality that shall compensate for all the weariness and the heartache of the mortal path here below. Yes! it would mean to those of us who by faith in Christ Jesus are children of the living God, the gathering to our arms again of those who have left us and for whom our arms still ache to enfold them once more. And O my soul! it would mean the seeing of Him whom our soul loveth and who unfailingly has loved us; it would mean that boon of boons--seeing Him face to face. Do you wonder the Holy Spirit who is the finger of God has written over against the word "hope," that qualification, "blessed," and affixed to it the demonstrative, "that," so it doth read: "That blessed hope"? And yet! and yet! there are men who call themselves the ministers of Christ who would blot out that hope and take away the vision of it from our souls.