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."