o will pass.' He was a wise man. Let us go to his school and learn
his wisdom.

II. Now let me say a word, and it can only be a word, about the second
of the thoughts here, which I designated as the Rock, or the glad truth
of Faith.

We might have expected that John's antithesis to the world that passeth
would have been the God that abides. But he does not so word his
sentence, although the thought of the divine permanence underlies it.
Rather over against the fleeting world he puts the abiding man who does
the will of God.

Of course there is a very solemn sense in which all men, even they who
have most exclusively lived for what they call the present, do last for
ever, and in which their deeds do so too. After death is the judgment,
and the issues of eternity depend upon the actions of time; and every
fleeting thought comes back to the hand that projected it, like the
Australian savage's boomerang that, flung out, returns and falls at the
feet of the thrower. But that is not what John means by 'abiding for
ever.' He means something very much more blessed and lofty than that;
and the following is the course of his thought. There is only one
permanent Reality in the universe, and that is God. All else is shadow
and He is the substance. All else was, is, and is not. He is the One who
was, is, and is to come, the timeless and only permanent Being. The will
of God is the permanent element in all changeful material things. And
consequently he who does the will of God links himself with the Divine
Eternity, and becomes partaker of that solemn and blessed Being which
lives above mutation.

Obedience to God's will is the permanent element in human life.
Whosoever humbly and trustfully seeks to mould his will after the divine
will, and to bring God's will into practice in his doings, that man has
pierced through the shadows and grasped the substance, and partakes of
the Immortality which he adores and serves. Himself shall live for ever
in the true life which is blessedness. His deeds shall live for ever
when all that lifted itself in opposition to the Divine will shall be
crushed and annihilated. They shall live in His own peaceful
consciousness; they shall live in the blessed rewards which they shall
bring to the doers. His habits will need no change.

What will you do when you are dead? You have to go into a world where
there are no gossip and no housekeeping; no mills and no offices; no
shops, no books; no colleges an