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instinct, and hungered for some tangible assurance of God's abid- ing grace.
When Adam sinned, the way to the tree of life was no longer open to him ; and this healthful sacrament became at once for- bidden fruit. In very mercy its use was forbidden to him, and put beyond his reach. Evidently its withdrawal has a peculiar solemnity about it : it is to save man from a fresh blunder and a new sin. The dream — that if only, by any means, he could retain the coveted assurance of God's love, all would be well, and all his disobedience would be neutralized, and all his sin forgotten — must at once be rudely broken. Even more than that, there is a dreadful possibility of his destroying all hope of restoration, if he rush in and claim the old symbol of God's love. For him to feed on the tree of life, when in a state of sin and anger and shame, would practically mean a second death.
But when we have washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, we have again as good a fitness to approach the tree of life as in primeval innocence. It is our fitness that constitutes our right. It is in being cleansed that the new right to come and eat is valid. Not unsullied innocence itself can come with surer step to have the bread of God's own life given to it than impurity that has been graciously cleansed away. The pardoned rebel, in his robes washed white, has a title to life as good as the angels, who have never defiled their garments.
I am going to a city
Where the living never die, Where no sickness and no sorrow can molest; From this body to release me He is speeding from on high; He will greet me and escort me to my rest.
Charles M. Alexander, the singer-evangelist, once told the following story of the origin of the hymn of which the above is the chorus : —
" I always like to know how hymns came to be written, and so I asked the man who wrote this hymn how he came to do so. He told me that a friend of his went from New York City to the country. He was far gone in consumption, but in the deceptive nature of the disease thought that he was growing better day by day, till one morning he said he was so much improved in health that he was returning to the city the next day. The writer of the
392 THE PRIVILEGES OF THE BLESSED
hymn went to see him in the afternoon, and found him in bed again. ' Why/ he said, ' I thought you were going to the city to- morrow ? ' The sick man's face lighted up, and he answered, * I'm going to a city, but it is a city where the living never die, and where no sickness and no sorrow can come.' After his death, his friend, remembering his words, wrote this hymn."
1. Access to the tree of life is a matter of right, not of reward. This we might illustrate by reference to the case of a pupil who is being promoted from a school of one grade to a school that is of a grade higher. He is promoted, not for the purpose of re- warding him for the faithful work he has done in the inferior grades, but because the superior grade is the place for him. He has acquired the " right " to a place in that grade. That pupils are sometimes promoted before they have acquired the right, and prematurely advanced out of consideration of favouritism, is un- doubtedly the fact, but advancement on such grounds invalidates the whole scheme of promotion and, in all ordinary relations, — in everything, one may say, except in religion, — is amenable to universal disapproval. Whether in schools or in matters of civil service, individual merit is regarded as the essential condition of promotion ; and to set up some other principle of preferment in matters of the future world, and to assume that there is some other legitimate title to the tree of life than simple individual right to the tree of life, and right to a residence in the celestial city, is to break with what we all recognize as justice in affairs of mundane experience, and to let our future condition be decided by a so-called system of Divine determination too arbitrary and evasive to be tolerated by any responsible human society. If, then, the pupil is promoted, it is not to reward him for his work ; and if he is not promoted, it is not to punish him for his lack of work. There is a place where he belongs, and in any well-regulated system of school administration the place where he belongs is the place where he will be kept or put.
2. But if the right is more minutely examined, it will be found to be —
(1) ^ right of promise. — " This is the promise which he promised us, even the life eternal " (1 John ii. 25). The promise is made sure by the washing of the robes in the blood of the Lamb.