Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LAYING HOLD ON ETERNAL LIFE O man of God . . . lay hold on eternal life. -- / Timothy vi: n, 12. On previous Sunday afternoons we dwelt on the noticeable fact that to many serious men, and to some who were not serious before, the essentially spiritual nature of our present life has been emphasised in the last three years. Whatever men may be searching for, the great, just God is searching and discerning the spirits of mankind; and very many have recognised that we are being searched by Him. That is one sign of our times. It is more and more perceived that in this awful time the community that will be defeated, if there be defeat, will be the town of Bunyan's allegory -- the town of Mansoul. "One watchword through our armies, One answer from our lands -- No dealings with Diabolus So long as Mansoul stands." So much for the life that now is. But how about the next life? What do we know of that? This The Holy War. Poem by Rudyard Kipling, in Christmas number of Land and Water. question also is being asked, and it is in natural sequence to the other. If we can no longer separate the everlasting life of spirits from the brief, elusive, brittle fragment of it that is spent in the form of flesh: if "temporal" and "eternal" are no such antithesis as we used to make of them: if it is as spirits that we live here, and as spirits that we pass beyond: if in these gruesome days the consciousness of eternity is really entering a little into our daily habits of thought and feeling, while sanguinary death is taking so many that we care for into that near, next world: if the vast majority of our human race of spirits are already yonder, and just now our youth are to be gathered thither in millions, while it is mostly we older ones that linger here a little l...