as indications of this life were only morbid and overstrained emotions.  As the Lord convinced His disciples that He had flesh and bones, so we may all convince ourselves and each other that this is an actual life; but in that case we must believe that, tho in a hidden way and not always present to our consciousness, yet it is always in existence, just as the Lord was still in existence even at the times when He did not appear to His disciples; and had neither returned to the grave, nor as yet ascended to heaven.  Only let us not overlook this difference.  In the case of Christ we do not apprehend it as a natural and necessary thing that during those forty days He led a life apparently so interrupted; but each of us must easily understand how, as the influence of this new life on our outward ways can only gradually become perceptible, it should often and for a long time be quite hidden from us, especially when we are very busy with outward work, and our attention is taken up with it.  But this is an imperfection from which as time goes on we should be always becoming more free.  Therefore always go back, my friends, to Him who is the only fountain of this spiritual life!  If, ever and anon, we can not find it in ourselves, we always find it in Him, and it is always pouring forth afresh from Him the Head to us His members.  If every moment in which we do not perceive it is a moment of longing, as soon as we become conscious of the void, then it is also a moment in which the Risen One appears to our spirit, and breathes on us anew with His life-giving power.  And thus drawing only from Him, we shall attain to having His heavenly gifts becoming in us more and more an inexhaustible, continually flowing fountain of spiritual and eternal life.  For this He rose from the dead by the glory of the Father, that we should be made into the likeness of His resurrection.  That was finished in His return to the Father; our new life is to become more and more His and the Fathers return into the depths of our souls; there they desire to make their abode; and the life of God is to be ever assuming a more continuous, active and powerful form in us, that our life in the service of righteousness may become, and continue even here, according to the Lord’s promise, an eternal life.

MASON

MESSIAH’S THRONE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

John Mitchell Mason, the eminent divine of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, was born in New York City in 1770.  He completed his studies and took his degree at Columbia College and thence proceeded to take a theological course at Edinburgh.  Ordained in 1793, he took charge of the Cedar Street Church, New York City, of which his father had been pastor.  In 1807 he became editor of the Christian Herald, and in 1821 was made president of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  He died in 1829.