CHAPTER XV.

ETERNAL LIFE.

ETERNITY and time, or eternal things and temporal, throughout the New Testament, are placed in contrast. The reader discovers, with only a moderate degree of attention, that the former is not a continuation of the latter; that eternity is not time extended on indefinitely, but that one differs generically from the other. Two worlds are ours, in both of which we live and have our being. One is almost as changing as cloud-land, or as the scenery of a dream; the things of the other are beyond the reach of accident or fluctuation. By our material bodies we are placed in connection with the former, by our interior natures with the latter, by our inmost souls with God himself, whence come the heart-beats of eternal life.

By eternal life, the sacred writers mean a life in which the elements of time do not enter, a life whose infusions are out of an eternal state,

and which, though overlaid by temporal conditions, is subject to none of their accidents and decays. The natural body moves about upon the earth, is subject to its laws, and sometimes suffers beneath them; but "lifted up and separated," the inmost soul reclines on the Divine bosom, and smiles on the phenomena of outward change. Hence eternal life is conditioned in the present, and is a possession now and here. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true. God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." "Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, HATH eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day." In our external condition, we rise and fall, our riches fail us, our houses crumble, our purple robes fade and become tatters, our bodies become diseased, and the brow counts the years by its wrinkles; the face of the earth changes, and if the sleepers should rise up from the cemeteries, they would not know the places of their habitation. These things are temporal, and woe to him whose happiness is bound up with them. Eternal life, beneath the surfaces of time, only changes from less to greater; and when these surfaces roll off, it flowers into a world of its own, a world where the beauty without mirrors the beauty within, and where the leaf is ever green, and the bodies we wear are ever young, because they are the out

growths of that which cannot die. Hence the special significance of the promise, "I will raise him up at the last day." It is by the life received through the Great Mediator, and which is independent of all mortal mutations, that we attain to this glorious resurrection.

Death is the negation of life, and eternal death is the negation of that spiritual life which comes from the soul's communion with the Eternal Mind,-death, therefore, deep-seated and beyond the scope of earthly change. It is the death and the consequent disorder that abide in the immortal nature, and which are just the same though the worldly condition and prospects be propitious and fair. The shows of time may cover it up, the superinduction of hollow moralities may conceal its virulence, but there it is. No medicines remove it, no appliances from without can reach it; so that when these time surfaces roll off from that also, its deformity emerges, and it simply finds itself in its own place, its own surroundings and home. The same word, alúviov, eternal, is applied to the punishment of the bad and the happiness of the good, and it refers not at all to duration in months and years. It means, rather, those opposite states of mind from which the idea of time and all its contingencies has been completely eliminated; one lifted up into the eternal glories, the other de

pressed into the shadows of the eternal gloom. It is a happiness or a disorder, transfused not from this world but from another, and which, therefore, survives temporal duration and mortal dissolution, and exists in sharper contrast than ever after the fashions of this world have passed away.

CHAPTER XVI.

HOME.

HEAVEN and hell are the opposite conditions of humanity. In the former, God is supreme; in the latter, self. In this natural sphere they are mingled and interfused, and they could not be separated without destroying the framework of society. This condition of things must needs be, in a preliminary and probationary state, based on external relations and material interests and pursuits. We have seen that the necessary result of the resurrection will be to bring on the crisis, or the judgment-time, and that the necessary result of the judgment will be to resolve humanity into its elements, and separate the wheat and the tares when the reapers come to the harvest.

But what is heaven, and what is hell? It is not so difficult to answer these questions, when once possessed of the truth that their elements are bound up and waiting within us. We shall dwell now, however, more exclusively upon the