“Thirdly: How shall we fit for heaven?”
He mentioned several ways, among which,—
“We should subdue our earthly affections to God.
“We must not love the creature as the Creator. My son, give me thy heart. When he removes our friends from the scenes of time (with a glance in my direction), we should resign ourselves to his will, remembering that the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away in mercy; that He is all in all; that He will never leave us nor forsake us; that He can never change or die.”
As if that made any difference with the fact, that his best treasures change or die!
“In conclusion,—
“We infer from our text that our hearts should not be set upon earthly happiness. (Enlarged.)
“That the subject of heaven should be often in our thoughts and on our lips.” (Enlarged.)
Of course I have not done justice to the filling up of the sermon; to the illustrations, metaphors, proof-texts, learning, and eloquence,—for, though Dr. Bland cannot seem to think outside of the old grooves, a little eloquence really flashes through the tameness of his style sometimes, and when he was talking about the harpers, etc., some of his words were well chosen. “To be drowned in light,” I have somewhere read, “may be very beautiful; it is still to be drowned.” But I have given the skeleton of the discourse, and I have given the sum of the impressions that it left on me, an attentive hearer. It is fortunate that I did not hear it while I was alone; it would have made me desperate. Going hungry, hopeless, blinded, I came back empty, uncomforted, groping. I wanted something actual, something pleasant, about this place into which Roy has gone. He gave me glittering generalities, cold commonplace, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future at which I sat and shivered.
Dr. Bland is a good man. He had, I know, written that sermon with prayer. I only wish that he could be made to see how it glides over and sails splendidly away from wants like mine.