human life out of the
thick, coarse medium of earth and lift it up into the pure rarefied air
of Heaven, and there is no refraction; it runs straight on. Straight on!
The given direction continues; and in whatever direction my face is
turned when I die, thither my face will be turned when I live again.

Do not you fancy that there is any magic in coffins and graves and
shrouds to make men different from their former selves. The continuity
runs clean on, the rail goes without a break, though it goes through the
Mont Cenis tunnel; and on the one side is the cold of the North, and on
the other the sunny South. The man is the same man through death and
beyond.

So the one link between sonship here and likeness to Christ hereafter is
this link of present, strenuous effort to become like Him day by day in
personal purity. For there is another reason, on which I need not dwell,
viz., unless there be this daily effort on our part to become like Jesus
Christ by personal purity, we shall not be able to 'see Him as He is.'
Death will take a great many veils off men's hearts. It will reveal to
them a great deal that they do not know, but it will not give the
faculty of beholding the glorified Christ in such fashion as that the
beholding will mean transformation. 'Every eye shall see Him,' but it is
conceivable that a spirit shall be so immersed in self-love and in
godlessness that the vision of Christ shall be repellent and not
attractive; shall have no transforming and no gladdening power. And I
beseech you to remember that about that vision, as about the vision of
God Himself, the principle stands true; it is 'the pure in heart that
shall see God' in Christ. And the change from life to the life beyond
will not necessarily transform into the image of His dear Son. You make
a link between the present and the future by cleansing your hands and
your hearts, through faith in the cleansing power of Christ, and direct
effort at holiness.

III. Now I must briefly add finally: that this self-cleansing of which I
have been speaking is the offspring and outcome of that 'hope' in my
text. It is the child of hope. Hope is by no means an active faculty
generally. As the poets have it, she may 'smile and wave her golden
hair'; but she is not in the way of doing much work in the world. And it
is not the mere fact of hope that generates this effort; it is, as I
have been trying to show you, a certain kind of hope--the hope of being
like Jesus