of
Avernus" were the type of joy.

Does the road wind up hill? Most certainly, and thereby it leads on into
the purer light, the fairer radiance, the wider view. Does one prefer to
go down hill into some dark ravine or deep mountain gorge? It is a great
fallacy that it is the hardship of life to live in the best instead of
in the worst. It is the way of the _transgressor_ which is hard--not of
him who endeavors to follow the divine leading. The deeper truth is that
the moment one commits all his purposes and his aspirations into the
Divine keeping he connects himself by that very act with a current of
irresistible energy; one that reinforces him with power utterly
undreamed of before.

There is no limit to the power one may draw from the unseen universe.
"It is possible, I dare to say," says a thoughtful writer, "for those
who will indeed draw on their Lord's power for deliverance and victory,
to live a life on which His promises are taken as they stand and found
to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at
peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to see the will of God in
everything, and to find it not a sigh but a song. It is possible in the
world of inner act and motion to put away all bitterness, and wrath, and
anger, and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible, by
unreserved resort to divine power, under divine conditions, to become
strongest at our weakest point; to find the thing which yesterday upset
all our obligations to patience, an occasion to-day, through Him who
loveth us and worketh in us, for a joyful consent to His will and a
delightful sense of His presence. These things are divinely possible."

One very practical question that cannot but confront the world at the
present time is as to whether there is any relation between religion, in
its highest and most inclusive and spiritually uplifting sense, and the
possibility of communication between those in this life and those who
have passed through the change we call death and have entered on the
next round of experience. It is a fact--albeit a rather curious and
unaccountable one--that organized religion, as a whole, has been largely
opposed to the idea of possible communication between what is currently
termed the living and the dead. Yet when one focusses the question to a
matter of personal individuality, it does not stand the test. Take, for
instance, the revered name of a man who was universally recognized as
o