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speaks,) and whereby God and Christ represent and manifest themselves to saints on earth.

And as our knowledge shall receive immense and surprising improvements by these new methods of discovery, so I think it shall, in due proportion, advance our holiness, or conformity to God the Fa ther, and his brightest image Christ Jesus; for we cannot behold them in such a manner without a glorious transformation into their likeness, as I have hinted already.

. When a soul that hath a new nature given it by sanctifying grace, is placed in the immediate view and presence of God the most holy, it will ever be growing into a greater degree of nearness and love; and it will be powerfully changed more and more into the likeness of God himself, as a needle, when placed within the reach of a loadstone's attractive power, ceases not its motion till it be joined in perfect union, and itself acquires the virtues of that wonderful mineral.

Nor is it possible in heaven that we should advance in knowledge and holiness without an equal improvement in felicity and joy. On earth indeed we are told, "he that will live godly shall suffer persecution; and he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow," 2 Tim. iii. 12. and Eccles. i. 18. But as heaven is high above the earth, so are the customs and the blessings of that state superior to this; for there are no present sorrows to be known, nor any future to be feared and holiness has no enemy there. All things round the saint shall have a tendency to promote this blessedness.

The spirit of a good man released from the body, and ascending to heaven, is surrounded with thousands and tens of thousands of blessed spirits of the human and angelic order: when it gets within the coufines of the heavenly country, it sweetly and insensibly acquires the genius and temper of the inhabitants; it breathes, as it were, a new air, and lives, and thinks,

and acts just as they do. It shines and burns with new degrees of knowledge, zeal, and love, and exults in the transporting communications of the same joy.

How vastly shall our understandings be improved by the kind narratives and instructions of the saints that arrived at heaven before us, and by converse with the ministering angels?

You will say, perhaps, that we shall have no need of their teaching when we get to heaven, for we shall be near to God himself, and receive all immediately from him.

But hath the scripture any where excluded the assistance of our fellow-spirits? God can teach us here on earth immediately by his own Spirit, without the use of books and letters, without the help of prophets and ministers, men of like passions with ourselves; and yet he chooses rather to do it in an instru或 mental way, and makes his creatures in the lower world the means of our instruction under the superior influence of his own Spirit: and why may he not use the same methods to communicate knowledge to the spirits that newly arrive at that upper world?

There we shall see the patriarchs of the old world, and prophets of the old dispensation, as well as the apostles and evangelists of Christ and his gospel. There we shall be conversant with those blessed angels whom he has used as ministers of his vengeance or his mercy to persons and churches, families and nations: and they will not be unwilling to inform us of those great and surprising transactions of God with men.

There we shall find a multitude of other eminent saints before and after Christ.

Adam doubtless will take a peculiar pleasure in acquainting all his happy posterity with the special form and terms of the covenant of innocency; he shall tell us the nature of the tree of knowledge and of life, and how fatally he fell, to the ruin of his unborn offspring. Unhappy father, transmitting iniquity

and death down to his children! But with what im, mense satisfaction and everlasting surprise he views the second Adam, his Son and his Saviour, and stands in adoration and transport, while he beholds millions of his seed that he once ruined, now raised to superior glories, above the promises of the law of works, by the intervening influence of a Mediator? Enoch, the man that walked with God, and Elijah, the great reformer, shall instruct us how they were translated to heaven, and passed into a blessed immortality without calling at the gates of death. Noah will relate to his sons among the blessed, what was the wickedness of the old world before the flood, that provoked God their Maker to drown them all; he shall entertain us with the wonders of the ark, and the covenant of the rainbow in all its glorious 'colors. Abraham, the father of the faithful, and the friend of God, shall talk over again with us his familiar converse with God and angels in their fre quent apparitions to him, and shall tell us how much the promised seed transcends all the poor low ideas he had of him in his obscure age of prophecy. For we cannot suppose that all intimate converse with our father Abraham shall be forbidden us, by any of the laws or manners of that heavenly country, since heaven itself is described by our sitting down as at one table with Abraham, and dwelling in his bosom," Matt. viii. 11. and Luke xiv. 15. and xvi. 23.

There Paul and Moses shall join together, to give us an account of the Jewishl aw, and read wondrous and entertaining lectures on the types and figures of that economy, and still lead our thoughts to the glorious antitype with surprising encomiums of the blessed Jesus. Paul shall unfold to us the dark places of his own writings, better than he himself once understood them; and Moses shall become an interpreter of his own law, who knew so little of the mys tery and beauty of it on earth himself.

There we shall acquaint ourselves with some of the ancient fathers of the christian church, and the martyrs, those dying champions of the faith, and honors of the christian name. These will recount the various providences of God to the church in their several ages, and show the visions of St. John in the book of the Revelation, not in the morning twilight of prophecy, but as in the light of noon, as a public history, or as an evening rehearsal of the transactions of the day. The witnesses themselves shall tell us how they prophesied in sackcloth, and were slain by the man of sin; how they rose from the dead in three days and a half, and how the church was at last reformed from the Popish mysteries of iniquity and superstition. Cranmer and Ridley, Calvin and Luther, and the rest of the pious reformers, shall make known to us the labors and sufferings of their age, and the wonders of pure christianity, rising, as it were, out of the grave, and throwing off the chains, the darkness and defilements of antichrist: and those holy souls, who labored in the reformation of Great Bri tain, while they relate the transactions of their day, shall perbaps inquire and wonder why their successors put a stop to that blessed work, and have made no further progress in a hundred and fifty years.

Did one of the elders near the throne give notice to the apostle John concerning the martyrs, Rev. vii. 14." These are they which came out of great tribulations, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb;" and shall we not suppose, that the happy spirits above tell one another their victories over sin and temptation, and the powers of this world? Shall not the martyrs, who triumphed in their own blood, and overcame satan and antichrist by the blood of the Lamb, and the word of their testimony, shall they not make it known to the inhabitants of the upper world, and tell it to the honor of Christ, their captain and their King, how they fought, and died, and conquered?

Methinks I hear these noble historians rehearsing their sacred tragedy! How they entertain a bright circle of listening angels and fellow-spirits with their own glorious and dreadful story, dreadful to suffer, and glorious to relate.

Shall it be objected here, that all the glorified saints cannot be supposed to maintain immediate discourse with those blessed ancients? Can those ancients be imagined to repeat the same stories perpetually afresh, to entertain every stranger that is newly arrived at heaven?

I answer, that since one single spirit, dwelling in flesh, can communicate his thoughts immediately to five or six thousand hearers at once by his voice, and to millions more successively by books and writings, it is very unreasonable to suppose, that spirits made perfect and glorified have not a power of communicating their thoughts to many more thousands by immediate converse; and it is past our reach to conceive what unknown methods may be in use amongst them, to transmit their ideas and narratives in a much swifter succession, than by books and writings, through all the courts of heaven, and to inform all the new comers, without putting each happy spirit to the everlasting labor of a tiresome repetition.

Though every saint in heaven should not be admitted to immediate and speedy converse with those spirits of renown in past ages, yet doubtless those glorious minds have communicated their narratives, and the memoirs of their age, to thousands of that blessed world already, and from them we may receive a repetition of the same wonders with faithfulness and exact truth. History and chronology are no precarious and uncertain sciences in that coun try.

It is very probable indeed, that we shall have more intimate nearness to, and more familiar communion with, those spirits that were of the same age and place with ourselves, and of the same church or family; for

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