CHAPTER IX. HEAVEN A S Α PLACE. "Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion, On the sides of the north, the city of the great King." THE ROYAL POET. "Call out from the future thy visions bright, From the world o'er the grave take thy solemn light, As it yet may be, in some purer sphere, No cloud, no parting, no sleepless fear; So my soul may bear on, through the long, long day, LET it be distinctly understood that we are not now receptive of the actual scenery of heaven, and Christians will cease from fruitless endeavors to grasp it. They will not, on that account, cease to regard heaven as a place. When the Ptole maic system was renounced, it was not decided that earth had no place, but only that it was otherwise placed than had been supposed. While, therefore, we abandon pretensions to what we have never possessed, because never given, let it be equally well understood that we are now receptive of the elemental ideas of that which will constitute the beauty and the attractiveness of heaven; that we are now capable of the emotions, in their inception, with which we shall be exercised upon our actual introduction to heaven. It is clear that our economy of life will be entirely changed. If there shall be a material economy in any degree resembling this present organization of earth, air, fire, and water, it will, in some important respects, be entirely unlike the present. At present accidents, resulting from the density of matter, and from the laws of gravitation, are inevitable. Under the present organization, the elements are hostile to man. In heaven, it is declared, there shall be no more pain, no darkness, no need of the sun, and no more sea. In heaven there can be no more decay, for into that holy place there entereth nothing which defileth; yet we are led to believe that there will be endless variety in scenery. But how this can be, without those changes which now are inseparable from decay, we are unable to conceive. If there be no decay, how can there be a renewal of vegetation? And if no renewal of vegetation, apparently there can be no succession of the seasons. And as our present enjoyment, and even our life itself, is completely formed upon the succession of the seasons, it becomes entirely plain that there must be a change so radical and so entire, as to baffle all present attempts to grasp the actual future. These truths once perceived, we are free to look out upon our heavenly home from a better point of observation. The Bible does not offer us a daguerreotype of heaven. Its aim is to raise within us the pleasantest and the loftiest conceptions of which we are capable. The features of the place will be exactly fitted to fill and satisfy our matured, exalted, sublimated, and indefinitely enlarged receptivity. Even now, the beauty of God's natural works far transcends our capacity to receive it. You have often been forced to exclaim: This is excessively, painfully beautiful! I cannot contain it! I am oppressed with over much joy! The Christian's heaven, even to its scenery, is entirely within the domain of faith. It is not on that account a whit the less real, not a whit the less accessible. The child of faith has the freedom of the place, and countless angels always ready to speed him thither. He cannot tell you the natural characteristics of its hills and valleys, its streams, or trees, or flowers, any more than he can analyze for you the Divine nature of the Lord of heaven; but his faith makes both the one and the other more real, more influential, and more entirely accordant with his inner life, than the most cherished scenery and companionship of earth. His heart turns towards heaven, as the flowers to the sun. Its impulse thitherward is prompted by every object that arrests his eye. You cannot count these helping friends. Analogy is one of these. Analogies lie in wait for him at every angle, at every turning, of the road; reclining on mossy banks, sporting in running streams, sailing on radiant clouds. Every object offers wings to a fairer land. There are days in every year in which the thoughtful soul is conscious of a fulness of being. The faculties are quickened into supernatural life. The sky then wears a purer, clearer, deeper blue; the clouds soar to a loftier height. They are no longer vapors exhaled from earth, but flakes of beauty let loose from heaven. There is music in the air, music in the soul, unwritten, unarticulated, too; but the heart is filled with it. Not Eolian strains alone, which, beautiful as they are, are often, like generaliza tions, too broad to touch the chords of human hearts; but, also, homelike variations on every cherished memory, and hallowed "tones of soul," gathered by the Great Master into a grand concert of all harmonious things. I have not a doubt that heaven possesses, to all intents and purposes, those characteristics of place which, to-day, have an immeasurable power of affecting and delighting your soul and mine. We survey the exquisite scenery which surrounds the homes of England with the feeling that the ideas, of which it is so fruitful, are imperishable. It is not that England is better than our own land, in consequence of being remote, that I am led to mention first the scenery of England. There are country places all around us that will not suffer by comparison with any abroad. But the traits which most interest us are so imbedded in the literature of the past, that we could no more divest ourselves of their influence than we could of the memories of our childhood. The flowers, the shrubs, the hedges, the trees, are more to us than representatives of their several kinds. They make up those muchvalued pictures which we treasure in the galleries of memory, not merely for what they represent, but also for what they suggest. And thus it is |