and the throne of serene self-mastery over Our spiritual enemies; and the golden harp, and the endless song, which do but speak of abounding happiness, in that form of it which is, of all others, the most innocent, the most thrilling, the most intense.

4. To say that there is anything "dull, gross, selfish, sensual" here, is surely an abuse of words. But if you cannot rest in these emblems, there is yet a more excellent way. If you still sigh,—

"O for a nearer insight into heaven,

More knowledge of the glory and the joy
Which there unto the happy souls is given,
Their intercourse, their worship, their employ ;
For it is past belief that Christ hath died
Only that we unending psalms may sing;
That all the gain Death's awful curtains hide
In this eternity of antheming-"1

-if you say this, do not fear;-there are other conceptions of heaven which do not deal in imagery at all. What may be the physical conditions of

1 Poems by T. Lynch.

Heaven we cannot tell, and perhaps the very phrase may be meaningless of that place where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God.1 But so far as Heaven is a place at all, its fundamental conception is that it is a place where sin is not. "Without are dogs."2 No guilty step may pass the gates of pearl, no polluting presence fling shadows on the golden streets. They who live there are the angels, and just men made perfect, and the spirits of the saints in light. And if we ever get there, we shall be as they; for to be there is to see the face of God, and to see the face of God is to be changed into the same image from glory to glory. life's stains shall have been purged away; and the gold shall be mixed with dross no longer; nor the fine gold dim. There is no slander there; no envy, no hatred; no malice; no lies. murder there, nor wounds, nor war. drunkenness is not in that city of

There

There is no

The filth of

God. No

8 2 Cor. iii. 18.

C

bleared and blighted crowds, degraded out of the semblance of humanity, crawl like singed moths, round the flaring houses of multiplied temptations. There are no hearts depraved, corrupted, eaten out by lust; no victims of man's brutal selfishness, no witnesses of his utter shame. Ah, my brethren, which of us all looking back does not sigh, 'I am not all that I might have been; I might have been noble, and I have not been noble; I might have been kind, and I have not been kind; I might have been pure, and I have not been pure'? Would you not think it almost a Heaven if, without giving you anything fresh at all, God would but give you back what once He gave? If he would but restore to you the sweet innocent childhood He once bestowed, that having learnt now that sin is anguish, and that good is best, you might not ravage the fair vineyard of your life, or lay waste its inner sanctities? Ah no! perhaps not, for you feel that you might only fall again; only be a prodigal again ; only be weak and base and vile again, only despair again of what

you feel to be sweetest, and barter for the degraded present the future immortality. But oh, to have been disenchanted utterly, for ever, from the low aims of the world! oh, to have been set free for ever from the yoke of habit and the power of temptation! oh, to desire only, and to do only what is good, without evil being ever present to us! oh, to do perfectly, what here we have but imperfectly attempted! oh, to be, what here we have only seemed to be or wished to be! oh, to be honest, true, noble, sincere, genuine, pure, holy to the heart's inmost core! Is not that Heaven? is it dull, gross, sensual, selfish, to sigh for that? Is it not a state rather than a place? is it not a temper rather than a habitation? is it not to be something rather than to go somewhere? Yes, this, this is Heaven. What more we know not. In other stars, amid His countless worlds, for all we know God may have work for us to do. Who knows what radiant ministrations; what infinite activities; what neverending progress; what immeasurable happiness;

what living ecstasies of unimaginable rapture, where all things are lovely, honourable, pure; where there is no moral ugliness; where repulsive squalor, and degraded art, and insane desire, and loathly vice, and pinching selfishness, shall be no more; where boyhood shall not so live as to make its own manhood miserable; where manhood shall not so live as to make old age dishonourable; where old age shall not so live as to make death ghastly. This, this is heaven! And why should we not believe that the God who is so good to us hath such good things in store for all who love Him? All the good and true, all the pure and noble, shall be there :

"To Milton's trump

The high groves of the renovated earth
Unbosom their glad echoes; inly hushed,
Adoring Newton, his serener eye

Raises to heaven."

And all on earth who have ever been high and sweet and worthy, out of every tribe, and kindred, and nation, and language,-ten thousand times ten