that we feel, at moments, as if the inexorable hand of time had driven us out of paradise, and barred its doors against us? Why, in a word, are we, in this respect, constituted as we are? The whole analogy of things might answer. These powerful attractions by which the human heart is drawn-this deep-seated appetite of the soul which nothing but the past could satisfy-these are assurances from that voice which called us into being, that former days and former scenes will meet us, and be restored to us again, and fill that void which our separation from them had created.

But, if we are to have the pleasures of the past again, are we to have a recurrence of its pains also? To this I answer by a repetition of what I have observed already, namely, that time and suffering are closely linked together. Our hours of misery were so, because we felt them singly and apart from the rest of life. But we know not what these shades will be, when the whole, with its reliefs and lights, is seen together. The minute insect which moves upon the face of a pictured landscape, as upon a wide and boundless plain, may feel itself at times buried in the deepest gloom of midnight; while the eye that takes in all at once, sees, in these dark lines, the contrast which gives effect and brilliancy to the

general design. In like manner, the most grateful and exhilarating draught, if analysed, will be often found to contain materials which, taken singly, are bitter and revolting to the taste. Nevertheless these are, perhaps, the ingredients which give the highest zest and flavour to the compound. Thus it may be, when our whole past experience becomes present to us at once. It is true that our saddest days and darkest dispensations will reappear; but they will not meet us, as they did upon the road of life, unmingled and unrelieved. Every danger will be accompanied by its deliverance; every perplexity by its extrication; every night of heaviness by the joy that ushered in the morning. And thus the pains of life, when life is gathered into one united whole, will, like the discords of music, only serve to render the harmony more perfect and more enchanting.

ESSAY X.

THE HAPPINESS OF THE FUTURE STATE.

SUCH is the constitution of our nature, that we can form no anticipations of the future, out of any source but that of our past experience; and, consequently, those descriptions of heaven, which transcend what the heart has already learned to love and prize, however they may dazzle or amuse, cannot deeply interest, or find a lodgment in, the mind. There must be something tangible, suitable, and level to the standard of our capacities; or offered happiness will, in spite of all assurances of its vastness and its perfection, fail to engage, or lay hold on, the affections.

If you were to visit the lowly dwelling of one who, all his days, had lived amidst the simple and sequestered scenes which gave him birth, and tell him that he must at once remove, and change his rural retreats and haunts for the magnificence and splendour of a court,-you might, indeed, awake within him a vague and restless principle of ambition, but would you bring peace and comfort to his heart? No. The transition would be too

vast-the prospect would open fields in which his desires and wishes had never been taught to range. But if you were to seek out the same retired abode, and tell its inmate that you could enlarge his little tract of land, and lighten the conditions on which he held it, and settle his children in ease and competency around him,— then you would come down to the level of his tastes; you would meet the desires which had long laboured in his breast, and make his native valley brighten into paradise.

The same principle holds, I am convinced, with respect to the great change which awaits us all. If you speak of heaven in terms too high for familiar apprehension; if you describe it as a flood of light and glory bursting upon the soul, and leaving all past experience, all shapes and forms of happiness, which the imagination hitherto had conceived, utterly behind it; if you represent it as something to be taken merely upon trust, because it is forbidden us to conjecture in what its awful realities consist: the mind will be lost in vagueness, and the heart will not know where to fix. But if, on the other hand, you speak of the place prepared by Christ for those that love him, as filled with objects long endeared to man, and furnished with delights which he has already enjoyed in part, and learned from that foretaste to

pant for their full fruition,-then you apply, as it were, the right instrument to the mind, and cheer the soul with joy and peace in believing.

That these latter are, in substance, the kind of prospects which the Scriptures open to the Christian, I assert on the following grounds:

1. Because Christ has passed into the heavens in human form, and in all the attributes of perfect man. And if the head of that system into which we shall be translated be human, it follows that the whole scene, with all its circumstances and its furniture, must be accommodated to the propensities and character of man.

2. Because we shall rise again in bodies so corresponding to our present bodies, as, in spite of the change which shall pass upon us, to preserve a strict identity.

3. Because we shall meet and rejoin the society of those friends who were united to us in Jesus here below.

4. Because the future habitation of the righteous is called in Scripture a new heaven and a new earth; the very terms implying that they will correspond with things which now appear, and exhibit, in brighter manifestation, all that is pure and lovely in that heaven and earth which shall have passed away.

These are the grounds on which I conceive