LIKE A TREE 17 



pose," Mr. Moody said, "you should go out there 

 some time and find that stake had rotted out, 

 how would you know you were converted?" 



It is not what happened to us long years ago. 

 Life is not a question of twenty-five or ten years 

 ago. Life is a question of today. What kind of 

 a man are you now, alive or dead ? Alive to God, 

 in Jesus Christ, with the great energies of life 

 throbbing up through your being that is to live, 

 and anything else is to die. It is easy to kill a 

 man's soul; yet it is impossible if his life is hid 

 with Christ in God, the Ever-Living One. 



I said the tree is immortal. Two kinds of im- 

 mortality there are. You have gone out into one 

 of the great California groves, have you not, and 

 coming perhaps as a stranger and unacquainted 

 with it, you have stumbled into a kind of mystic 

 circle, a magic circle; here is a great ring of 

 trees, giant growths themselves, but they stand in 

 perfect circumference, about an even space, almost 

 like holy ground ; so wonderful is it, this ring of 

 trees of life about you. Instinctively you say 

 the Druids would have held this a sanctuary and 

 rejoiced to hold their worship here. Well, be a 

 Druid ! Get a scientific basis for your worship, 

 as you discover that once, in ages gone by, a 

 great tree grew there, and when the great tree 

 had lived its life, it disappeared, and up from the 

 circle of its roots, out yonder, and yonder, and 

 yonder, all around, came up the fresh young 



