es it as lying at the
heart of what is right and true in mankind, that we should 'seek' for
ourselves 'glory, honour, and incorruption'--the glory and honour which
abide {109} eternally. It is plain that he would have us pay no heed
to that truly unnatural modern altruism which would disparage and
depreciate this motive of a right self-love, and which would treat the
desire for eternal happiness, and fear of eternal loss, as a base and
unworthy element in religion. No doubt it is not the only motive. It
is not even the characteristically Christian motive. But it is a
natural and legitimate motive all the same. It is an inextinguishable
consciousness in us that we were meant for blessedness.

But, once more, the only true happiness is moral happiness: it is a
'glory and honour' springing out of the man's character and belonging
to it: it is a happiness that is in this sense deserved. True, the
servant of God in heaven will always feel that what he is receiving is
infinitely beyond his deserts, and that his deserts are what God has
wrought in him, not he himself. None the less the reward springs out
of and belongs to what God has actually made him to be. Heaven is not
a happy place in such a sense that we could be made happy by being 'put
there' by an arbitrary fiat of God. It is fellowship with God, the
All-holy; and God's holiness is intolerable, it is 'devouring fire and
{110} everlasting burnings,' to those who are not morally like Him.
Here lies the reason why a heaven is not possible to moral beings
without the accompanying possibilities of a hell. For the moral
possibility of acquiring the holy character involves the opposite moral
possibility: and it does not lie in the moral nature of things that the
bad character should receive anything except what it deserves--the
'indignation and wrath' which God, because He is God, must express
towards the sinful, wilful character, and which to the character itself
means 'tribulation and anguish.' This, St. Paul says positively, must
be the lot of 'every soul of man that doeth evil.' It is this
inevitably two-sided law that a large part of the kindly-disposed world
to-day are trying to get rid of, or to forget, on its severe and dark
side. But it is in fact a law that works even more necessarily and
inexorably than physical laws, inasmuch as it is the expression of
God's necessary moral being. God cannot 'let us off' the punishment of
our sins, which is only the