the pain which may have preceded it, can have no moral effect, or work any moral change.  Moral change, that is to say change of character, can only go on in life.  Dying is a physical operation, not a moral act.  At death the possibility of change of character has stopped, so far as this life can be the

sphere of it.  Life, not death, may be accompanied by cleansing, life on this side of death, and life on the other side of death, but not death, which is between, the mere transition from life to life, from one mode of life to another.

The soul, therefore, after death begins just where it left off, just as life left it, no better, no worse.  It passes into the unseen world, pardoned, it may be, by God’s mercy, but yet no other than it was before it left the body.  Even God’s pardon does not change the character, nor yet remove the tendency to sin.  That still remains, alas! even in the penitent.  The consequences of our acts follow upon our acts, and form our character.  As there is uniformity in the law of cause and effect in the realm of nature, so, in morals, is it the case with what we do.  Let a man yield to a temptation:—is he as strong against that temptation after he has yielded to it as he would have been if he had not yielded to it?  We know that

he is not.  We know, by our own experience, that it needs a far greater and more strenuous effort to withstand the same temptation after previous yielding, than it did before.  A man may repent and be pardoned, but he is what his sin has made him, weak and frail and prone to sin again.  God’s pardon has cancelled his guilt, but it has not removed his tendency, nor the moral consequences, which sin has wrought upon his character.

This then is what is meant when it is said that the soul, which has received the gracious pardon of God before it left the body, is still, when it is launched into the Intermediate Life, clouded and disfigured with the stains and imperfections which it had contracted in this life.  But God, Who has begun the good work of cleansing in this life, will carry it on in the life unseen, until the soul be made perfect in the day of Jesus Christ.

Who of us, the best of us, does not feel within him the bitterness of the lingering

poison, which sin has deposited in his heart?  The holier a man is, the more he is conscious of his sinfulness.  To the end of life this must be so; for there is no reaching perfection here.  Those, chiefly, who have made most progress in the struggle against sin here, know how hateful it is.  The higher men rise here in the divine life, the more they discern their imperfections, because they can better measure them by the measure of God’s perfections.  Each loftier level is but a new standpoint from which to lift the eyes, and view the peaks which soar upward towards infinite elevations.  For God is holiness itself; and holiness is infinite, because God is infinite.