doms of our Lord and of His Christ. That God, after having permitted the wilful disobedience of men to overspread the earth with confusion and misery during many thousands of years, should glorify himself by rendering it in long and splendid contrast the manifestion of righteousness and felicity, can excite no surprise. But when we read that at the termination of the Millennium Satan, loosed from his prison, shall find the nations of the earth prepared for a new outbreak of rebellion against the Most High', we are astounded. Yet may not this overwhelming demonstration that sin, when once it has implanted itself in any class of beings, can be eradicated by no power but that of the Holy Spirit of God, be a lesson of instruction to the Universe, and throughout eternity?

If the preceding suppositions be realities, are not they collateral signs that God is Love?

Rev. xx. 7. 10.

143

CHAP. XI.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

WITH RE

SPECT TO A FUTURE EXISTENCE.

THE comfort of a Christian in the present life rests on the prospect of a happy existence after death. Beset by the troubles common to all men; bearing strongly in mind the uncertainty and the short continuance of all earthly possessions and enjoyments; perpetually feeling and lamenting his sinfulness, and the worthlessness of his best actions when tried by the holy law of his God: he turns his thoughts to futurity, and supports and delights himself in the hope that, when this house of his earthly tabernacle is dissolved, it shall be replaced to him by a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. In this hope the true disciple of Christ is warranted by the Gospel, which has brought life and immortality to light. He is warranted in it by the most solemn and express declarations of his Saviour. Our Lord affirms, that in his Father's house are

many mansions; that in the unbounded and illimitable dominions of the Almighty, in comparison with the extent of which all conceivable space is but a point, are worlds beyond worlds capable of receiving all the created servants of God, whether angels, or spirits of just men made perfect, or purified beings of whatever other nature and description unrevealed to man, into abodes of secure and appropriate happiness. Of this animating intelligence He communicates, as it were, additional confirmation to his apostles, by an assurance uniting the simple dignity of truth with the most affectionate condescensionIf it were not so, I would have told you: had the case been otherwise, I would not have deluded you by any groundless expectations. He proceeds to apply the encouragement specially to themselves. And in that application, manifestly addressing them also as the representatives of all who should afterwards believe on him through their ministry and the ministry of their successors, he carries forward the promise to all true Christians even to the end of the world :I go to prepare a place for you.1

Respecting these promised mansions in his

1 John, xiv, 2.

Father's house, in which our Redeemer since His ascension into heaven has provided an everlasting abode for His faithful followers; respecting the nature of the blessedness which shall there be their unfading portion; and respecting the changes which, if we ourselves shall be admitted through His atonement and His grace into those regions of bliss, will be wrought in our own nature, in our capacities and in our powers, in order to qualify us for the occupations of heaven, for the society of angels, for the presence of God; the mind may reasonably feel a deep and longing interest, an ardent desire for all the knowledge which it is lawful for man to possess. Yet reflection will speedily convince us that these are subjects on which our present knowledge of particulars cannot be great. Great it cannot be; for it cannot exceed the measure of our existing faculties. If the righteous are to be exalted after death to a more elevated state of existence, to a state of existence wholly different from the condition of mortal life upon earth; it is to be presumed that faculties wholly new, and adapted to new objects, will be conferred on those glorified spirits. Even

K

if the intellectual change then to be manifested in the immortal soul were but a change in degree; if the powers then to be possessed, then to be developed and exercised in the contemplation and the enjoyment of the unknown objects of eternity, were to be merely the present faculties of man exalted and expanded in measure proportioned to the difference between earth and heaven: how could that immense enlargement be comprehended by the existing scantiness of human perception? How then could new faculties, how could the objects with which they are to be conversant, be rendered intelligible to man? How could they be comprehended by a being who does not himself possess the faculties, nor understand nor know the objects? Take a man who has been blind from his birth. Can you communicate to him any distinct idea of the faculty of seeing? Can you cause him to understand the nature of light, of colours, of the visible forms and appearances of the woods, and the mountains, and the clouds? Take another who Can you has always been completely deaf. convey to him any conception of sound, of language, of conversation, of music? As rea