it may be, but alive in a strange country.  He feels that he is about to pass into a state of being in which he will find his finer interests not lost but intensified.  At the center of his religious expression is a personal love of Jesus and a martyr’s death would mean immediate admission to the presence and love of His Master.  He would—­of this he had no shadow of doubt—­he would see Jesus, not the spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus Who is God Incarnate, whose earthly life he had gone over so many times, Whom he felt that he should recognise at once.  Death was not the breaking off of all in which he was interested but was rather the fulfilment of all that he had dreamed.  And this must be true always where our interests are truly Christian interests.  It is no doubt true that we find in Christian congregations a large number of individuals whose attitude toward death and the future is purely heathen.  They believe in survival, but they have no vital interest in it.  I fancy that there are a good many people who would experience relief to be persuaded that death is the end of conscious existence, that they do not have to look forward to a continuous life under other conditions.  And this not at all, as no doubt it would in some cases be, because it was the lifting of the weighty burden of responsibility for the sort of life one leads, because it was relief from the thought of a judgment to be one day faced, but because the world to come, as they have grasped its meaning, is a world in which they have no sort of interest.  Our Lord in His Presentation of the future does actually point us to the natural human interest by which our affection will follow that which we do in fact value.  “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  But the class of whom I am thinking have no treasures.  Notwithstanding some sort of conformity to the Christian Religion, conceived most likely under the aspect of a compulsory moral code, there is nothing in their experience that one can call a love of our Lord, no actually felt personal affection for Him that makes them long to see Him.  There were those with whom they had intimately lived and whom they had loved and who have passed through the experience of death, but in the years that have passed they have become used to living without them and there is no passionate longing to be with them again.  There are no interests in their lives which when they think of them they feel that they can carry with them to the world beyond.  Whatever they have succeeded in accumulating in life is hardly to be regarded as heavenly treasure!

There then is the vital centre of the Christian doctrine of the world to come,—­that it is a life continuous with this life, not in bare existence, but in the persistence of relations and interests upon which we have entered here.  At the center of that world as it is revealed to us, is Jesus Christ, God in our nature, and about Him ever the saints of His Kingdom, who are still human with human interests,