rying about what particular body I
shall have over there. According to the scientists the body changes
every seven years. If that be true, I have done little more than
exchange an old body for a new one during the more than sixty years that
I have lived. I had a baby body and a boy's body, then the body of a
young man, and so on until I am now well along with my ninth body. I do
not know which one of these will be best for me in the next world, but
I know that the God who made this world and gave me an existence in
it will give me, in the land beyond, the body that will best serve me
there.
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
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