Those are two things we do not know.  But there are two things we do know.  We shall be like Him, and when we are like Him, we shall see Him as He is.  We shall be like no imagination of Him, no deteriorated or imperfect conception of Him; but when we come to see Him in all the regal splendor of His character, with all the love, all the justice, all the purity, all the divine glory which is adumbrated and shadowed here because our eyes could not look upon it and still live—­when we come to see Him in all the glory of that divine character, we shall be like Him—­we shall be like Him.

BROOKS

THE PRIDE OF LIFE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Phillips Brooks was born at Boston, Mass., in 1835, graduated at Harvard in 1855 and studied theology at the P.E.  Seminary, Alexandria, Va.  He was elected rector of the Church of the Advent, Philadelphia, in 1859, and three years later to that of Holy Trinity in the same city.  In 1869 he became rector of Trinity Church, Boston, and was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891.  He died in 1893.  He was in every sense a large man, large in simplicity and sympathy, large in spiritual culture.  In his lectures to the students at Yale he spoke of the preparation for the ministry as being nothing less than the making of a man.  Said he: 

“It cannot be the mere training to certain tricks.  It cannot be even the furnishing with abundant knowledge.  It must be nothing less than the kneading and tempering of a man’s whole nature till it becomes of such a consistency and quality as to be capable of transmission.  This is the largeness of the preacher’s culture.”  Doctor Brastow describes him thus:  “The physical equipment was symbol of his soul; and the rush of his speech was typical of those mental, moral, and spiritual energies that were fused into unity and came forth in a stream of fiery intensity.”

BROOKS

1835—­1893

The pride of life[1]

[Footnote 1:  Published for the first time by the kind permission of William G. Brooks.]

The pride of life.—­1 John ii., 16.

John is giving his disciples the old warning not to love the world, that world which then and always is pressing on men’s eyes and ears and hearts with all its loveliness and claiming to be loved.  “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world....  For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”