esence and find a favourable reception there, I
would have told you this long ago. I would not have taught you to love
Me, only to have given you the grief of separation. I would not have
encouraged you to hope for what I was not sure you are to receive. He
had all along seen how the minds of the disciples were working; He had
seen that by being admitted to familiarity with Him they had learnt to
expect God's eternal favour; and had this been a deceitful expectation
He would have undeceived them. So it is with Him still. The hopes His
word begets are not vain. These dreams of glory that pass before the
spirit that listens to Christ and thinks of Him are to be realised. If
it were not so, He would have told us. We ourselves feel that we are
scarcely acting an honest part when we allow persons to entertain false
hopes, even when these hopes help to comfort and support them, as in the
case of persons suffering from disease. So our Lord does not beget hopes
He cannot satisfy. If there were still difficulties in the way of our
eternal happiness, He would have told us of these. If there were any
reason to despair, He Himself would have been the first to tell us to
despair. If eternity were to be a blank to us, if God were inaccessible,
if the idea of a perfect state awaiting us were mere talk, He would have
told us so.

Neither will the Lord leave His disciples to find their own way to the
Father's home: "If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again,
and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."
Present separation was but the first step towards abiding union. And as
each disciple was summoned to follow Christ in death, he recognised that
this was the summons, not of an earthly power, but of his Lord; he
recognised that to him the Lord's promise was being kept, and that he
was being taken into eternal union with Jesus Christ. From many all the
pain and darkness of death have been taken away by this assurance. They
have accepted death as the needful transition from a state in which much
hinders fellowship with Christ to a state in which that fellowship is
all in all.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] "That ye love _one another_" is the twice-expressed commandment.

[14] "Any Church that professes to be _the_ Church of Christ cannot be
that Church. The true Church refuses to be circumscribed or parted by
any denominational wall. It knows that Christ is repudiated when His
people are repudiated. Not even a