CHAPTER VI.

HEAVEN A S A STATE.

"The soul goes to Hades possessing nothing else but its discipline and education; which are said to be of the greatest advantage or detriment to the dead in the very beginning of his journey thither."-PLATO.

"What have I left, that I should stay and groan?

The most of me to heaven is fled;

My thoughts and joys are all packed up and gone,
And for their old acquaintance plead.
O, show thyself to me,

Or take me up to Thee!"

HERBERT.

THERE are many expressions in common use to the effect that man has a life which is superior to, and independent of, mere locality. The term absent-minded is applied to one whose thoughts and feelings are absorbed by something out of his visible physical sphere. It is sometimes said that "home is where the heart is;" and, again, that "the mind is its own place:" by all which it is understood that the body may be, and often is, in one place, while the mind is in another. And much more might be adduced in illustration

of the fact, that we are at present fully conscious of a state of being, as well as of a place; and that that state is oftentimes of immeasurably greater interest to us than the place we inhabit. He who tells us that Napoleon once lived at Malmaison or Fontainbleau, tells us an insignificant fact; but he who gives us the letters which he wrote, the conversations he sustained, the enterprises he conceived, discloses to us the true life of the emperor.

You have often endured the discomfort of a conscious incompatibility of sentiment with one into whose society you have fallen. Physically, you were near. As related to town limits, you were in the same ward and street; but, measuring from some central truth in science, taste, or morals, you were wider asunder than the poles. It has happened to you in one and the same place; for example, at a gathering of friends for social enjoyment, to hold successive converse with an inferior, an equal, and a superior. Of how small account was place just then, in comparison with the successive states of which you were conscious. There was, first, the consciousness of what you knew yourself to be, absolutely, upon the scale you recognize, and by which you regulate your life. Then you were conscious of

the position assigned you, consciously or unconsciously to himself, by the person with whom you were conversing, and whose scale you could not but recognize in its essential variations from You were conscious of your own your own. mental furniture, and equally aware of your neighbor's more ample or more limited resources. At one hour of the evening, the proximity of an unusually shrinking and diffident man will have convicted you of a want of modesty; in the next, the unblushing assurance of another, has made you feel that you are a very girl, with too little courage to declare your soul your own. Another hour may thrust you into circumstances, and compel a course of action, which, to your neighbor, may seem absolutely audacious. You have met with persons whose intellectual and spiritual nature seemed a region of repose; and, again, with others, who, like Noah's dove, appeared to find no place for the sole of their foot.

You have, perhaps, had occasion to make the attempt, to bring two or three, or more, persons to harmonize with yourself, on the simplest question of manners, morals, or politics. Prior to this attempt, it had scarcely occurred to you to conceive, that there could be motives for the difference you discover, which you could not

immediately overpower, by a proper presentation of your own. But no sooner did you make the attempt, than you discovered that you were not denizens of the same planet, to say nothing of being citizens under one government; that you belonged not even to the same solar system; that your revolutions were not around any common

centre.

It were easy to multiply illustrations of this fundamental fact, which was too obvious even to a heathen philosopher, to permit him to doubt, that man's possible future condition subsists in personal qualities resulting from discipline and education.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the very commencement of his ministry, gave honor and prominence to this truth. Blessed, he says, are the poor in spirit.

Were place as momentous as we are ever apt to imagine, he had surely said: Blessed are the dwellers in the plain, on the mountain, or by the sea; blessed is a southern climate, or a northern ; a land of springs, or of vines and olives. But no, not a word of these; not even, blessed is he who is born or dwells in Judea: but, blessed is he who, in his inmost soul, is consciously poor, destitute, in want. It is a condition predicable

of the millionaire and of the beggar; of the man of various and ample gifts, or of the man of one talent, be he of one land or of another, of one age or of another. The blessedness is affirmed of him who is conscious "there is a wealth, a spiritual wealth, which I do not possess. Whatever I may have attained is as nothing in comparison with that which remains to be acquired." This is an improvable condition, for the subject of it is never for a moment self-satisfied; he will never provoke the Lord to jealousy, for he will never set up an idol in the temple of the Holy Ghost; he will never worship self in the garb of any admired attainment. His motto is ever ever" Excelsior; or, in the words of Paul: "This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." Now, this man is truly blessed. He has blessedness in possession as well as in prospect. He possesses one of the elements of heavenly happiness. He has that without which heaven could be no heaven to him, the spiritual appetite for the feast that will be perpetual.

Unthinking persons often volunteer the assertion: "There will be no prayer in heaven." It