but one; and they fumble at that one in vain. God will not lose His
child in the grave.

That love, we may be very sure, will not foster in us hopes that are
to be disappointed. Now, it is a fact that the more a man feels that
God loves him, the less is it possible for him to believe that that
love will ever terminate, or that he shall 'all die.' In the lock of
a canal, as the water pours in, the vessel rises. In our hearts, as
the flood of the full love of God pours in, our hopes are borne up
and up, nearer and nearer to the heavens. Since it is so, we must
find in the fact that the constant and necessary result of communion
with Him here on earth is a conviction of the immortality of that
communion, a very, very strong guarantee for ourselves that the hope
is not in vain. And if you say that that is all merely subjective,
yet I think that the universality of the experience is a fact to be
taken into account even by those who doubt the reality of the hope,
and for ourselves, at all events, is a sufficient ground on which to
rest. We have the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ. We have the fact that wherever there has been earthly
experience of true communion with God, there, and in the measure in
which it has been realised, the thermometer of our hopes of
immortality, so to speak, has risen. 'God is love,' and God will not
bring the man that trusts Him to confusion.

And may we not venture to say that, contemplating the analogous
earthly love, we are permitted to believe that that divine Lover of
our souls desires to have His beloved with Him, and desires that
there be no separation between Him and them, either, if I might so
say, in place or in disposition? As certainly as husband and wife,
lover and friend, long to be together, and need it for perfection and