A NEW ODE ON IMMORTALITY. 211 is a history. A "Little Maid," who could think of the dead only as the living, had suggested the problem: "A simple child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?" It could know nothing, experience had not contradicted nature, and "Heaven lies about us in our infancy;" for "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises in us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar, Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come And what has so lately come from God thinks as God thinks; to its thought, life and immortality are natural, not death. But the Ode needs a companion, one on the intimations of immortality from the hopes of Christian old age. The little child, lately come from God, can think of death only as a mode of life; the aged saint, about to return to Him, can conceive death only as a "going home." The one has the light in his soul of the glory lately left, the other of the glory soon to be won. Sainted age is a second and holier childhood-the end of life turned back into its beginning the reminiscence of the one changed into the life of the other, the heaven that lies about the infancy worked by experience into the very texture and essence of the spirit. A life lived in fellowship with God is not lived in vain. He who lives it discovers his affinity with God, knows that he may cease to walk with men, but not to be with and for his Father. To be and to feel loved of the Eternal, is to be assured that His eternity will be ours; to believe that we are sources of joy to Him, is to know that we shall rejoice in Him for ever. Our immortal hope does not then build on the instincts and anticipations of the human soul; it springs, victorious and confident, from our faith in Him who so loves us that He will not lose us from His love, for to lose us were to empty His bosom of its joy, His heaven of its beatitude. Blessed is that old man who has translated the unconscious faith of his childhood into the conscious faith of ripe and chastened age: "The Eternal God is my refuge, and underneath me are the Everlasting Arms." PART THIRD. 1. THE JESUS OF HISTORY AND THE CHRIST OF FAITH. II. CHRIST IN HISTORY. III. THE Riches of CHRIST'S POVERTY. "It is characteristic of the omnipotence of the Divine Nature that it should complete its works and manifest itself by some infinite effect. But no mere creature can be said to be an infinite effect, since by its very nature it is finite in the work of the incarnation alone does there seem to be an infinite effect of the Divine power, which, in the fact of God becoming man, has united things infinitely remote. Also in this work preeminently, the universe seems to be completed by the union of the last creature-man-with the first principle-God."-Thomas Aquinas: "Summa," Pars III. Ques. 1, Art. 3. "A kind of mutual commutation there is, whereby these concrete names God and Man, when we speak of Christ, do take interchangeably one another's room, so that, for truth of speech, it skilleth not whether we say, that the Son of God hath created the world, and the Son of Man by His death hath saved it; or else, that the Son of Man did create, and the Son of God die to save the world. "If therefore it be demanded what the person of the Son of God hath attained by assuming manhood: surely, the whole sum of all is this, to be as we are, truly, really, and naturally man, by means whereof He is made capable of meaner offices than otherwise His person could have admitted: the only gain He thereby purchased for Himself, was to be capable of loss and detriment for the good of others."-Hooker: "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book v. §§ 53, 54. "The founding of the Christian Society and the advance of the Church led to the development of those abstract principles which Christianity secures for the secular realm, especially for that side of it which is concerned with the self-consciousness of men. For the religious life presupposes the spirituality of man's nature and his capability of entering upon that life, the capability standing to the life as δύναμις το ἐνέργεια. By Christianity man is essentially determined as person, and this is the reason why slavery is entirely opposed to its spirit and is in and for itself abolished. For man, according to the Christian notion of him, is an object of the grace and purpose of God: God will have all men to be saved. Quite apart therefore from all special conditions, man in and for himself, and simply as man, has infinite worth; and it is just this infinite worth which abolishes all special claims arising from birth or country."--Hegel: "Philosophie der Geschichte," p. 345 (ed. 1837). THE JESUS OF HISTORY AND THE CHRIST OF FAITH. "Jesus Christ, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead."-Rom. i. 1–4. CHRISTIANITY is built on Christ. He made it at first, He makes it still. His blood was its seed, and His Spirit creates its flower. Without Him it would never have been, without Him it could not continue to be. The Founder is related to the religion as God to the world; in each case the transcendent passes into an immanent relation; creation becomes Providence— which is simply creative activity become ceaseless and permanent. The person of its Creator is at once the vital strength and primary difficulty of our Faith its vital strength, because setting as it were the heart of God living and transparent before the face of man, so making Divine love the intensest reality to men feeble and sense-bound; its primary difficulty, because bringing within the forms and conditions of nature a Person and therefore a system. essentially supernatural. As a simple matter of fact man's faith in the Fatherhood of God is the direct creation of Christ, never thought of apart from His |