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sk and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you." So spake the Savior. "We know," says Paul, "that all things work together for good to them that love God. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is my sting? O grave, where is thy victory? For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me
A CROWN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS,
which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." "These things saith He that holdeth the Seven Stars in his right hand: Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." These are a few of the bright promises held out to us in the Book of Life. Are we not blest? "The joys of heaven," says Bishop Norris, "are without example, above experience, and beyond imagination, for which the whole creation wants a comparison; we an apprehension; and even the Word of God a revelation." "Heaven," says Shakspeare, "is the treasury of everlasting joy." "By heaven we understand a state of happiness," says Franklin, "infinite in degree, and endless in duration." With man's finite mind man solaces himself with
PICTURES OF PARADISE
mortal in their scope. He is not to be blamed for this, for it is God's will to let him grope in darkness a few short years. But man's imagination in all earthly things conjures up that which is far beyond the earthly reality, leaving him a prey to dissatisfaction. How good to believe that our imagination finds in heaven a field where all our most beautiful ideas, collated, joined and woven together into a whole, fail to approach the true glories of the home in the far skies which our kind Father, taking us in His arms, will open before us. "How should we rejoice," says Sir Robert Hall, "in the prospect,
THE CERTAINTY, RATHER,
of spending a blissful eternity with those whom we loved on earth; of seeing them emerge from the ruins of the tomb and the deeper ruins of the fall, not only uninjured, but refined and perfected, 'with every tear wiped from their eyes,' standing before the throne of God and the Lamb, 'in white robes and palms in their hands, crying with a loud voice, Salvation to God that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb, for ever and ever!'
WHAT DELIGHT WILL IT AFFORD
to renew the sweet counsel we have taken together, to recount the toils of combat and the labor of the way, and to approach, not the house, but the throne of God in company, in order to join in the symphonies of heavenly voices, and lose ourselves amid the splendor and fruition of the beatific vision!" Dr. Dick supposes that the soul may find endless employment in beholding "those magnificent displays which will be exhibited of the extent, the magnitude, the motions, the mechanism, the scenery, the inhabitants, and the general constitution of other systems, and the general arrangement and order of the universal system comprehended under the government of the Almighty."
THIS IS ENTIRELY IN REASON.
So far as we are able to judge, there is absolutely no limit to the universe of stars. We are as sure of the law of gravity as we are of the existence of heaven. We build larger telescopes each year only to behold additional millions of stars, each star, possibly, the larger on account of our being able to see it at all. We absolutely know that one star is larger than our sun by 324 times. The moon is about nine times around the earth away from us. The sun is larger than the track of the moon around the earth by 167,000 miles in every direction. If you had a ball which would just fit in the track of the moon, and stuck it all full of pins 167,000 miles long, you would have the size of the sun.
SIRIUS, THE STAR,
is 324 times as large as the sun, and so are many other stars. Now, the most distant star in the largest telescope cannot be at the edge of the universe. Why? It must be in the middle. It must be balanced by exactly as much attraction on one side as another. There must be, above, below, beyond that star, the same stupendous array of worlds, and each relatively outer star, aye, even the star on the farther side of that outer star, must in its turn, be held in the same magnificent and awful suspension. So forever. We actually have Infinity forced on our reason. Eternity is the correlative and co-existent necessity of infinity. Infinity, Eternity, Immortality, become the solemn Trinity confronting the physical as well as the spiritual world! God has even ordained that, when you move your hand, you affect the farthest of His worlds. Can you not grasp the idea that, in reason, the universe is boundless? Why, then, in reason, shall it not be our infinite pleasure to study God's plans forever? I know of no greater pleasure which I could conceive. Those who ask for evidences,
AS THEY ASK FOR BREAD AND CHEESE,
expecting these great truths to be clear to their clotted minds, cannot even be brought to believe a house-fly has 25,000 eyes, constructed each on the plan of our own? They will hardly believe an unseen force flows through the magnetic needle, turning it to the north. If they had refused, with the same logic, to believe that A was A when they had to so believe in order to learn at all, they would now be groping in that stupid illiteracy, which, by a parity of reasoning, they so richly deserve.
SHALL GOD WEIGH OUT ARCTURUS FOR US,
to exhibit His power or its magnitude? Shall He speak to us, and not only kill us with his softer syllables, but send our nicely-balanced earth whirling in toward the sun, and all because some fool hath said in his heart there is no God? No. Our reason and our Oldest Record both point to Eternity as our proper life, the ripening of our soul, our comprehension of the infinite, and our better worthiness to praise God's holy name.
CONCLUSION.
No author of a work calculated to elevate the mind and ennoble the ambitions of mankind could aspire to a higher climax; no writer of a series of admonitions, in escaping "a lame and impotent conclusion," could rest more calmly than he who, having built his tower upon the solid duties of to-day, peers out with the great lenses of Religion, into the hopes of the future—
"Past flaming bounds of place and time,The living throne, the sapphire blaze,Where angels tremble while they gaze."
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