Neither have we any assurance that the perfections of the mind survive the day of death.  We spend a great deal of time on the mind, for this is an age of intellectual enthusiasm.  My experience has not been different from the experience of others.  My mother taught me at home until I was ten; then my parents sent me to the public school until I was fifteen; then I spent two years in an academy preparing for college; then four years in college and then two years in a law school.  After nearly twenty years of schooling I took part in my last “Commencement,” and then I began to learn, and have been learning ever since.  I have accumulated something of history, something of science, a bit of poetry and philosophy, and I have read speeches without number.  I have accumulated a large amount of information on politics and politicians that I know I shall not need in Heaven, if Heaven is half as good a place as I expect it to be.  How much of the intellectual wealth that we have so laboriously acquired can we carry with us?  We do not know.

But we know that that which is spiritual does not die—­that the heart virtues will accompany us when we enter the future life.  In the parable of the Tares, Christ explains that, just as the tares and the wheat grow together until the harvest, so the righteous and the unrighteous live together in this world, but that on the day of judgment they shall be separated.  Then shall the righteous “shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”  We have no promise that the body will shine even as a star, or that the mind will shine even as one of the planets, but the sun in its splendour is used to illustrate the brightness with which those will shine who are counted righteous in that day.

I esteem it a privilege to be permitted to present the claims of the Larger Life to which Jesus, the Christ, calls all of the children of men.  Why will one choose a life that is small and contracted, when there is within his reach the life that is full and complete—­the Larger Life?  Why will he be content with the pleasures of the body and the joys of the mind when he can have added to them the delights of the spirit?  How can he delay acceptance of Christ’s offer to ennoble that which he has, and to add to it the things that are highest and best and most enduring?  This is the life that Christ brought to light when He came that men might have life and have it more abundantly.

VI

THE VALUE OF THE SOUL

The fact that Christ dealt with this subject is proof conclusive that it is important, for He never dealt with trivial things.  When Christ focused attention upon a theme it was because it was worthy of consideration—­and Christ weighed the soul.  He presented the subject, too, with surpassing force; no one will ever add to what He said.  Christ used the question to give emphasis to the thought which He presented in regard to the soul’s value.