WHAT IS HEAVEN?

commerce and advancement. And how plain it is, from Christ's teachings and sacrifices here, that just that blessed change must come in a society where His spirit would be the unresisted law. We should hope to be freed from sin. And who could doubt that He who left heaven and came into the world on purpose to cleanse and deliver it from sin would banish it forever from that heaven which is fashioned after His own likeness, and is the fruit of His own spirit? No night, no tears, no suffering, no sin,-what better marks than these could there be of a world where the compassion of the Son of God reigns without limit and without restraint?

Observe, in the next place, how this doctrine harmonizes with the fact that the Scripture representations of the heavenly world differ so much from each other. They differ because they are not literal but figurative; they are figurative because their object is not to inform the understanding but to animate the affections and inspire a glorious hope; and, for the same reason, these images are not made to be consistent with one another. God designs that we shall expect and desire the heaven He has prepared, not because we know in detail what is there, but because we trust Him, and believe that it is a world where the law of Christ has unobstructed and perfect sway. To kindle and sustain in us that faith, His Word represents heaven under images which, in their natural sense, are quite incompatible with each other. It is a city of gems and gold, it is an open country with trees and running water, it is a world with no more sea and it is a sea of glass, it is a house and it is an innumerable multitude of worshippers on a mountain top, before the throne. These are the helps applied to our feeble spiritual sense, through the imagination,

which is the faculty most easily reached and moved, according to the whole practice of Revelation, from end to end. But we are not left to these uncertainties of the imagination. Underneath these there is a fixed and solid substance of revealed truth. To this truth every separate image points, exhibiting some one or another of its attractive faces. The truth itself is, that of that society of redeemed souls, glad in their infinite joy, Jesus Christ is the centre, the light, and the life. There is no discord or division there, because He is love,-and there, as it is not here, every spirit and the whole place take their law and temper from Him. Nothing that is defiled or that maketh a lie enters there, because He is pure and true. If the memory of the miseries of this life remains at all, such recollections will not be painful; the knotted problems will all be loosened and dissolved in the celestial chemistry of some strange, new light; for He has pledged Himself that there shall be no pain there. No sick-beds; no watching all night for the last breath of your child; no anxious question what that secret symptom means which looks like the beginning of the end; no broken friendships; no lost love; no aching heart; no bitterness of a rebellious and profligate child; they shall hunger no more. There will be no wretchedness of unfulfilled desire, of failure to do right, of unanswered affection, of baffled aspiration and poor performance, because, having chosen Him before all, and got clear of all the earthly competitions and shortcomings, we shall have enough in having Him, and shall be satisfied with His likeness.

It is another and very practical blessing of the same doctrine that it makes large room for the differing notions and differing degrees of sensibility that Christian men may have, according to their constitutions and cir

doing of His will. Some of the most Christians I have

cumstances, about that next world. If you find your mind less disposed to dwell upon the pleasures there than the duties here, that need not trouble the conscience, provided only your devotion to your Lord is undivided, and your life is consecrated to the That, rest assured, is the main thing. godly, self-sacrificing, and Christlike ever known have never said very much about what is to come after death. Heart and hands and mind were all too busy doing the Master's work here, where it needs to be done so much, day by day. Other Christians dwell largely on that future, and gather a needed refreshment from the labor or the endurance of the present by anticipating the glory that is to be revealed. Of these, again, some fasten on one and some on another of the scriptural aspects of that coming world, for their consolation and encouragement, just as the Spirit of inspiration, suiting the supply to every necessity, intended they should. You meet these diversities constantly in the biographies of saintly men. Robert Hall said once to Wilberforce, "My chief conception of heaven is rest." "Mine," replied Wilberforce, "is love,-love to God, and love to every bright and holy inhabitant of that glorious place." Now Robert Hall spent a great part of his time under acute bodily anguish, and no wonder he longed for rest. Wilberforce, a man whose whole energies, in parliament and private life, were given to efforts for the realization of the law of love in legislation and society, naturally thought of the better country as a social state founded on the same principle. Intellectual Christians may long for the wider knowledge, when they shall see no more as through a glass, but face to face. Gentle natures, reading all secrets and learning all truth through their hearts, long and thirst for such measures of

affection as they have waited for and never found among men. The evening before he died, the devout and profound German student, Spener, a reformer of his time, court preacher of Dresden, and one of the founders of the University at Halle, asked for the reading of the seventeenth chapter of St. John, saying that it never could be comprehended in this world, but that he was now glad to be going where all would be explained. Poor people may very well think of the abundance so often promised them in the resurrection,-like a woman in consumption I knew of, lying under a few rags on a heap of straw, who answered to the visitor's question, "Is this all you have?" "It is all, except Christ. It will do well enough; I shall exchange it very soon for His unspeakable riches." Strong-handed and enterprising people may wonder whether there will be enough to do there, and turn right eagerly only to the prospect of running on the active errands of their King. The parents of dead children cannot help looking day and night, to see the sweet faces and kiss the bright foreheads that are missing.

In all these varieties of expectation we find only the permitted, harmless workings of a law of our nature. They remind us of one of the serious sayings of Charles Lamb, that "the shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our constitution." They run into danger, and encourage irreligion, and undermine faith, only when they tempt us to put anything else in heaven before Him who alone opens it to us, or makes it what it is; when they dispose us to insist on anything whatever as essential to our future peace save what He may see fit to give us, or when they hide the one real and certain glory there behind mortal forms. It is a false and not a true Christianity which tells us first to be sure and get to

heaven, sending us to Christ only as a means to get there and be happy. True Christianity calls us first to Christ, for what He is, and then tells us in its gracious promises that if we follow Him faithfully we shall be with Him where He is forever, satisfied to awake in His likeness.

No doubt, sad thoughts may pass through some of your minds about some of the dead, and anxious thoughts about some of the living, as to where this truth of the Gospel may leave them, and with what a gulf of separation between. For the first, we had better dismiss them, committing all the departed, and the more so, the more we loved them,-in faith, in hope, in charity, to Him who mercifully has all judgment assigned to Him, because He is Son of man, and has borne our infirmities. For the others, our anxious thoughts of the living that we love best, lest there should be some dreary separation hereafter from them,-only let these beget in us more faithful intercessions for them, more consistent and blameless lives to convince them, more of Christ reflected in our daily dispositions and conduct to draw them after Him. There is something excellent in the quaint saying of one of the most heavenly-minded of men :-"If I ever come to heaven, I may very likely see three wonders there: the first, that I shall miss many persons whom I expected to meet; the second, that I shall meet there many I never expected to see; the third, and the greatest wonder of all, that I shall be there myself." But, after all, this doctrine is not one that we can use to the best advantage for other men. It searches, it warns, it ought to purify and quicken ourselves. For, construct whatever other theory of immortality we may, so far as we look to revelation for our guide, and to Him who alone brings life and immortality to light, we have no glimpse or ray of light on any other