PARADISE:
THE
PLACE AND STATE OF SAVED SOULS
BETWEEN
DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION.
BY
ROBERT M. PATTERSON,
PHILADELPHIA.' To-day shall thou be with me in fiaradise."
PHILADELPHIA:
PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION,
1334 CHESTNUT STREET.




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
THE TRUSTEES OF THE
PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
WESTCOTT & THOMSON,
Sereotyjers and Electrotypers, Pkhia.




CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.                    PAGE
INTRODUCTORY.-THE SUBJECT AND ITS IMPORTANCE......   5
CHAPTER II.
PARADISE.-THE WORD AND THE PLACE.......................  14
CHAPTER III.
THE INHABITANTS OF PARADISE................... 54
CHAPTER IV.
THE LOCALITY OF PARADISE...................................... 88
CHAPTER V.
TIEE STATE OF SOULS IN PARADISE............................. 115
CHAPTER VI.
THE EMPLOYMENTS OF SOULS IN PARADIS................... 140
3




4                      CONTENTS.
CHAPTER  VII.                      PAGE
THE HOLINESS AND HAPPINESS OF SOULS IN PARA DISE... 168
CHAPTER  VIII.
TIlE MANSIONS AND HOME-LIFE OF PARADISE................ I91
CHAPTER IX.
CONCLUSION..............................................................  213




PARADI SE.
CHAPTER  I.
INTRODUCTORY.-THE SUB7E'CT AND ITS IA!POR TAArCE.
K ~~  HERE is the abode, and what is the'\VA VPstate, of saved souls between the
death and the resurrection of their
bodies?
This question is one of immediate and
practical interest to Christians. It is of immediate interest because death is ever at
their door. To-morrow, to-night, it may
seize them; and then where do they go?
It is not merely of speculative but of intense practical interest, for true views of it
5




6             PARADISE.
should minister to their comfort and increase
their faithfulness in this life.
",When our friends leave us for a foreign
country to take up their residence there,"
says a thoughtful theologian, " our thoughts
and our affections naturally follow them; and
the questions often suggest themselves to
our minds, Where are they, and how are they
engaged? What are their circumstances?
What are their employments? What are
their prospects? This current of thought and
feeling acquires additional depth and fullness
and force if it be certain, or even probable,
that we shall sooner or later follow them to
the distant land to which they have migrated.
Were it not for the influences of skepticism
and infidelity and conscious guilt, such a tendency of thought and feeling toward the unseen and eternal world would be universal
and powerful among mankind-so powerful
as most materially to moderate the ardor of
earthly attachments and the eagerness of
earthly pursuits; for all have many friends




INTR OD UCTOR Y.           7
who have crossed the mysterious gulf between time and eternity, and all are on its
brink and must follow, none knows how
soon, none knows how suddenly." *
It is most reasonable as well as exceedingly Christian to meditate on the future
world, and to receive all the instruction
about it that can be communicated.
"There are three things," said an old
monkish chronicler, "which often make me
sad: first, that I know I must die; second,
that I know not when; third, that I am
ignorant where I shall then be."t  Even
many who indulge the hope of salvation
through the blood of the crucified Redeemer, and have no overruling fear of death,
permit the happiness of their hope to lose
some of its ecstasy by remaining content
with the possession of very vague and indefinite notions as to the various elements
of their eternal life; while to others who
* " The Dead in Christ," by John Brown, D.D., p. I I.
t Alge's " Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life," p. 6.




8                      PARADISE.
have con, paratively clear views of heaven
after the resurrection, the condition of the
soul between death and that event is one
of great darkness. Some melancholy verses
of a German poet, it is feared, express the
feelings of not a few believers in the Bible:
"By the shore of time, now lying
On the inky flood beneath,
Patiently, thou soul undying,
Waits for thee the ship of death.
" IIe who on that vessel starteth,
Sailing from the sons of men,
To the friends from whom he parteth
Never more returns again.
" From her mast no flag is flying
To denote from whence she came;
She is known unto the dying,
Azael is her captain's name.' Not a word was ever spoken
On that dark unfathomed sea;
Silence there is so unbroken
She herself seems not to be.
"Silent thus in darkness lonely
Does the soul put forth alone,
While the wings of angels only
Waft her to a land unknown."




INTR OD UCTOR Y.        9
Gloomy and forbidding the prospect! It
would have been enough to chill the soul
of Jesus himself.  But the land which
stretches up from the silvery thread of the
Jordan is not an unknown land. It is not a
region of silence unbroken; it is vocal with
songs of praise to God. The soul does not
in darkness lonely put forth into it alone,
for the natural sun has scarcely ceased to
enlighten the eye of the body ere the sunrise of glory beams on the released spirit.
The land to which it goes is far away from
earth, but it is entered by the dying believer
with a more than telegraphic rapidity. The
space between the Old World and the New
is now annihilated by the submarine cable;
Christ long ago brought into direct communion the land of glory and the land of sin.
Although none of our friends, who have
gone before us, return to tell about their
happy home,-as the emigrant sometimes
goes back to the scene of his boyhood in
Ireland or Germany to report to his relatives




I  PARADISE.
and acquaintances the richness of this land
beyond the flood, or as the spies returned
from Canaan to the wilderness bearing with
them the clusters of Eshcol as an earnest for the Israelites of what a rich place
the land of promise was,-our great Redeemer came directly from heaven and returned to it, and has told us much about it.
On a subject which so far transcends
human experience we need to speak with
caution. It is dangerous to speculate upon
it. We recognize here no other authority
than the word of God. It is only what he
has directly declared, or what may be fairly
inferred from his plain declarations, that we
desire decidedly to exhibit. As Dr. Owen
long ago said: "When God does not speak
on such topics, it is our wisdom to be silent.
If the light of his truth does not go before
us, we had better stand still." But God has
said more about this than many suppose,
and we seek, as far as possible, to draw
from his word what he has revealed and to




NIVTR OD UC TOR Y.      I I
exhibit it in this little book. We cannot
adopt the words of a recent rationalistic
author: "The majestic theme of our immortality allures yet baffles us. No fleshly
implements of logic or cunning tact of
brain can reach to the solution. That secret
lies in a tissueless realm whereof no nerve
can report beforehand. We must wait a
little. Soon we shall grope and guess no
more, but grasp and know."* We do not
wish to grope or guess at all; we only desire to read what God has revealed. Messages have come to us from the unseen
world. They tell us something about itvery little, doubtless, in comparison with
what we shall see hereafter.  We know
only in part. The reality will be infinitely
more glorious than we can now imagine.
But the descriptions that are given, as far
as they go, are certain; and they are fitted
to cheer us while we are here, and to make
* Alger's " Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life,"
p. 6.




12             PARADISE.
us yearn for the full realization in the hereafter.
The germ of the whole Bible truth on the
subject will be found in the Saviour's assurance to the dying penitent: "To-day shalt
thou be with me in paradise." Luke xxiii.
43. That gives the name of the abode of
the blessed souls; teaches the immediateness of their entrance to it; and involves
their condition in it.
We shall exhibitI. Paradise,-the word, its meaning and
history;
II. The inhabitants of paradise;
III. The locality in the universe of paradise;
IV. The state of saved souls in paradise;
V. The employment of souls in paradise;
VI. The holiness and happiness of souls
and their mansions in paradise.
Our object is predominantly practical and
comforting, though at times, and especially'n the beginning, we must be historical and




INTR OD UCTOR Y.        I 3
exegetical in order that we may exhibit the
broad and deep foundation on which the
practical truths are based. We also aim to
neutralize some errors that are in vogue
and somewhat fascinating for sentimental
and uninstructed minds; but we seek to do
this, not in a controversial way, by a reference to the errors and a formal refutation
of them, but by the direct and positive -exhibition of the revelations which they deny
or distort.
Keeping in mind this practical character
of the book, we shall not burden its pages
by the statements of conflicting opinions
that have been advanced on different points,
or by lengthy references to authorities that
have been consulted.
It is only necessary to add that the view
which we aim to elaborate and popularize
is the one which is presented in the thirtythird chapter of the "Westminster Confession of Faith:"
"The bodies of men, after death, return




14             PARADISE.
to dust and see corruption; but their souls
(which neither die nor sleep), having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to
God who gave them. The souls of the
righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens,
where they behold the face of God in light
and glory, waiting for the full redemption
of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked
are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the
judgment of the great day. Besides these
two places for souls separated from their
bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none."




CHAPTER II.
PARADISE.- HE WORD AND THE PLACE.
HE word paradise is probably of
Persian origin. Thence it came to
us through the Greek language,
in which it was first naturalized by Xenophon, "who designated by it the parks or
pleasure-gardens of Persia." In the Greek
translation of the Old Testament called the
Septuagint, which was made in the third
century before Christ, it was used to express any stately garden of delight. But
pre-eminently it designated the garden in
Eden which was the original residence of
our first parents: "The Lord God planted
a paradise eastward in Eden." Thus it has
come to us, so that, though it does not appear either in the Hebrew of the Old Tes15




i6             PARADISE.
ment or in our English translation of it, it
is the name which we almost universally
apply to the birth-home of our race. The
ideas associated with it are beauty and exquisite delight; and the word, being a metaphor for those ideas, appears in New Testament times in a higher application, for the
clear understanding of which it will be necessary to go back and bring together two
diverse trains of thought.
The Old Testament revelations of the
future worlds have not the clearness and
the fullness of the New Testament; it remained for Jesus Christ to bring life and
immortality to light through the gospel.
All through the sacred books, however, the
distinction between soul and body and the
union in man of the two natures are taught.
" The Lord God formed man of the dust of
the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and man became a living
soul." Gen. ii. 7. The royal preacher declared that at death "shall the dust return




THE WORD AND THE PLACE.      17
to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Eccles. xii. 7.
Moses twice addressed the Lord as "the
God of the spirits of all flesh." Num. xvi.
22 and xxvii. I6. Such passages assume
the truth which our Redeemer asserted
when he said: "Fear not them which kill
the body, but are not able to kill the soul;
but rather fear Him which is able to destroy
both soul and body in hell." Matt. x. 28.
Furthermore, the continued existence of
the soul after the death of the body, the
fact that it does not cease to live when the
body dies-in other words, its immortalitylies at the foundation of the Jewish scriptures. The great promise of the ancient
revelation, which was apprehended and
trusted in by the believers in God, embodied an inheritance after death in "a better
country, that is, an heavenly." Heb. xi. I6.
The full-orbed sun of immortality did not
appear above the horizon until Christ arose
from the grave and came back from death
2




I8              PARADISE.
to life, but the harbingers of his coming
were over the heavens,
"As rays around the source of light
Stream upward ere he glow in sight,
And watching by his future flight,
Set the clear heavens on fire."
Our Redeemer declared that Moses taught
the truth of the unbroken existence of the
soul. In a conversation with the Sadducees, who denied the doctrine of the resurrection, he said: "Now that the dead are
raised, even Moses showed at the bush
when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but
of the living: for all live unto him." Luke
xx. 37, 38. This is a very explicit divine
comment. It teaches that the patriarchs
were still living and waiting for the resurrection of their bodies; and that as they were,
so are all-immortal. The translations of
Enoch and Elijah and the history of the
reappearance of Samuel at Endor-explain




THE WORD AND THE PLACE.      19
that history as we may-kept the truth
prominently before the minds of the Jews.
In portraying the future world the Spirit
of inspiration, adapting the dress with which
he clothed his thoughts to the development
of the minds of the Jews, seized hold of
sensible things to image forth the invisible.
The bodies of the righteous and the wicked
both died and were buried in the same manner. The same Hebrew term, sheod, was,
therefore, applied in the Bible to the grave
of each. Thus a general assertion which
will include both classes is made in the
prayer of Hannah: "The Lord killeth and
maketh alive: he bringeth down to sheol
and bringeth up." I Sam. ii. 6. David, in
giving an injunction to Solomon for the
punishment of a man of blood, said: "Let
not his hoar head go down to sheol in peace."
I Kings ii. 6. On the other hand, the righteous spake of that as the resting-place of
their bodies. In his agony at the loss of
Joseph, Jacob refused to be comforted, and




20             PARADISE.
said: "I will go down into sheol unto my
son mourning." Gen. xxxvii. 35. Job said:
"Oh that thou wouldest hide me in sheol,
that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy
wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me
a set time, and remember me " (Job xiv. 13);
and again: "If I wait sheol is mine house:
I have made my bed in the darkness. I
have said to corruption, Thou art my father:
to the worm, Thou art my mother and my
sister. And where is now my hope? as for
my hope who shall see it? They shall go
down to the bars of the pit, when our rest
together is in the dust." Job xvii. I3-I6.
And God, by the mouth of Hosea, uttered
a promise which is full of encouragement
to believers: "I will ransom them from the
power of sheol; I will redeem them from
death: O death, I will be thy plagues: O
sheol, I will be thy destruction." Hos. xiii. I4.
In none of these passages is there a reference to the place of departed spirits, either
saved or lost. The declaration of Job es



THlE WORD AND THE PLACE.    21
pecially shows that the temporary restingplace of the dead body is referred to.
The grave was a gloomy and forbidding
place. Its associations were disagreeable.
Nature shrank from it. Lonely, silent, dark,
shut out from the world of life and activity, human nature desires not to go to it.
Hence, assuming the continued existence
of the soul, the same term easily came to
be applied to the place where the departed
spirits of the wicked went at death. How
very close is the association in our Lord's
description of the rich man: " He died, and
was buried and in hell (hades) he lift up
his eyes, being in torment." Luke xvi. 23.
The force of that expression can almost be
felt. The dying and dropping of the body
into the grave was the dropping of the soul
into hell. In Psalm ix.  17 it is declared that
"the wicked shall be turned into skeol."  In
the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah, in language
of fearful imagery, the wicked king of Babylon is represented as entering this place




22            PARADISE.
and being received with taunting exultation
by those who had preceded him.
Thus not only the bodies, but the souls,
of the wicked go to a gloomy region. This
is pictured to us as under ground, in the
lower parts of the earth, as far as possible
from heaven-the very opposite of heaven,
indeed. Thus: "It is as high as heaven;
what canst thou do?  Deeper than sheol;
what canst thou know?" Job xi. 8. "Though
they dig into sheol, thence shall my hand
take them; though they climb up to heaven,
thence will I bring them down." Amos ix. 2.
"A fire is kindled in mine anger, and hath
burned unto the lowest sAeol, and hath consumed the earth with her increase, and set
on fire the foundations of the mountains."
Deut. xxxii. 22. "If I ascend up into heaven,
thou art there; if I make my bed in sheol,
behold, thou art there." Ps. cxxxix. 8. The
same name is given to the place of the dead
body and to the place of the lost soul, the
former just below the earth, or in a recess




THE WORD AND THE PLACE.    23
excavated out of the earth, the latter far
beneath and far away from heaven, but both
very gloomy and repulsive places.
Nowhere, however, in the Old Testament did the Holy Spirit teach that the
spirits of the just went to any such place
on the death of their bodies.* Their bodies
* Passages in which it might seem,-at first sight, that Old Testament saints spake of their souls going to sheol as an intermediate place between earth and heaven may, we think, be explained
by the fact that the two natures, the physical and the spiritual,
are so united in the one person of a man that what is true only
of the body is habitually predicated of him. This is a common
usage in every-day conversation. We say that a friend has
died; we only mean that his body has died. The usage also
prevailed in Bible times; and very easy and naturally the righteous dead would be so spoken of as to make it appear to a superficial reader, without the recollection of this principle, that the
soul as well as the body passed into the gloomy under-ground
place. Even now, with the gospel through which life and immortality are so clearly brought to light, we speak of burying a
dead person, when all that we bury, and all that we untend to
say we bury, is his body. The same mode of interpretation
which finds in some Old Testament expressions the idea that
redeemed souls went, for a season at least, to some other place
than heaven, would draw from our expressions the dogma that
they are hidden in the grave.




24            PARADISE.
were buried in the grave-the same kind of
a grave as that in which the bodies of the
wicked were buried. The dust of the two
mingled together. But the liberated spirits of the redeemed escaped the place of
the wicked, and were received into the
presence of God.
Thus the pious man of God declared:
"God will redeem my soul from the pbwer
of slhcol; for he shall receive me." Ps. xlix.
I 5. "For thou hast delivered my soul from
death: wilt not thou deliver my feet from
falling, that I may walk before God in the
light of the living?" Ps. lvi. i3. "Thou
hast delivered my soul from death, mine
eyes from tears, and my feet from falling."
Ps. cxvi. 8. "Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my
right hand. Thou shalt guide me with thy
counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but thee? and
there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my hcart faileth:




TIIE WORD AND THIE PLACE.      25
but God is the strength of my heart and
my portion for ever." Ps. lxxiii. 23-26. The
prophet Isaiah asserted: "The righteous
perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart:
and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away
from the evil. He shall enter into peace:
they shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness." Isa. lvii. I. Thus,
while the bodies of the righteous were lying
in the bed of the grave, their souls were living
in uprightness and in peace. The Messiah
was prophetically represented as saying:
"Thou wilt not leave my soul in sheol (or
abandon my soul to shzeol), neither wilt thou
suffer thine holy one to see corruption."
Ps. xvi. io. That is, as the body of Jesus
was not to remain long enough in the grave
to become corrupt, neither was his soul to
be permitted by God to go at all to the place
of departed wicked spirits; it was not to be
abandoned to that place.*
D* r. J. Addison Alexander translates the passage: " Thou wilt




26                    PARADISE.
This is briefly the sum of the Old Testament teaching in reference to the future
not leave my soul to hell; thou wilt not give thy holy One to see
corruption." And he adds upon it that the Psalmist " does not
say leave in, but to-i. e., abandon to, give up to the dominion
or possession of another." Then on the second clause he says:
" Give-i. e., permit, or, more emphatically, give up, abandon,
which makes the parallelism of the clauses more exact." In his
comment on Acts ii. 27, where Peter quotes the Psalmist for the
purpose of showing that his words referred to Jesus, Dr. Alexander further says: "Hell, in its old and wide sense of the unseen
world (hades), the world of spirits, the state of the soul separated
from the body without any reference to happiness or misery.
The essential meaning is, Thou wilt not leave my soul and body
separate."  Dr. Fairbairn, however, in his Hermeneutical Manual (Section, " Import and Use of Hades in Scripture"), while
through a failure to discriminate between the soul and the body
in the Old Testament passages where sheol is used, he admits
that the place was regarded as the abode after death alike of the
good and the bad, yet, speaking of hades (which, as will be seen
further on, is the Greek translation of sheol), remarks that " it
cannot but be regarded as a noticeable circumstance that in the
solitary example wherein hades is mentioned by our Lord explicitly as a receptacle of the departed, it is in connection with
the wicked and as a place of torment." p. 324. He alludes further to " the studied avoidance on the part of or r Lord of the term
hades to denote the place of his temporary sojourn and that of
his people between death and the resurrection." p. 325. Then,
rebutting the notion of' the great body of Christian writers"




THE WORD AND THE PLA CE.    27
places. The bodies and souls of the wicked
went to gloomy and repulsive abodes. The
who hold that the passage in Acts is " conclusive as to the fact of
Christ's soul having actually been in hades, since it could not have
been represented as not left there had it not actually been there,"
and mentioning that "by many of them it is deemed the only very
clear and decisive text on the point," he says: " The words in the
Greek which represent quite exactly the sense of the Hebrew
are, Thou wilt not relinquish, or abandon, my soul to hadeswilt not surrender it as a helpless prey to that hostile power or
unwelcome abode. It might, indeed, mean that the soul was to
be allowed to enter there, though not to be shut up for a continuance, but it might also, and even more naturally, intimate that
the soul should not properly fall under the dominion of hades."
pp. 325, 326. This, which is the more natural interpretation
of the words, seems to us, in the light of the general teaching of
the Bible, to be the real one. It is greatly to be regretted that
we circulate the so-called Apostles' Creed with the clause that
Christ " descended into hell," especially in view of the restricted
meaning which the word "hell" now has. Some of the early
fathers, in their citation of the creed, omit the clause. Even
such writers as Irenoeus and Tertullian, in their summaries of
the Christian faith, have nothing like it. The popular mind understands it as teaching what is a most serious error. To this
the gentle Archbishop Leighton refers almost contemptuously in
his Exposition of the Creed: " Descended into hell. The more
noise there hath been about this clause, I shall make the less.
The conceit of the descent of Christ's soul into the place of the
damned, to say no more nor harder of it, can never be made the




28                     PARADISE.
bodies of the righteous were buried in the
dark and repelling grave, but their spirits
flew away to God.
But in order to understand a very serious departure from this which prevailed
among the Jews at the coming of Christ,
and  to  appreciate  properly the teaching  of
the New  Testament in reference to the
future worlds, we must turn to a heathen
opinion on the subject.
"Heathenism is man's development of
necessary sense of these words, nor is there any other ground in
Scripture or any due end of such a descent, either agreed on, or at
all allegeable, to persuade the choosing of it as the best sense of
them. Not to contest other interpretations, I conceive with submission that it differs not much, possibly nothing, from the plain
word of his burial. Not that the author or authors of this so
b)rief a confession would express one thing by divers words, but
that it may be in the more ancient copies only the one of them
hath been in the text, and in after copies in transcriber's hands
the other hath crept into it out of the margin. But retaining it
by all means as it is, it may signify the abode and continuance
of Christ's body in the grave, in which time he seemed to have
been swallowed up of death, and that the pit had shut her mouth
on him; but it appeared quickly otherwise, for the tlird day he
arose from the dead." (See pp. 44 and 72, notes.)




TIlE WORE AND TILE PLACE.    29
God's revelation, and is related to the ancient dispensation as Romanism to the
Christian."  The early heathen families and
nations wandered off from those who had
the knowledge of the true God by direct communication, and in their wanderings carried
with them portions of the truth which they
had received in the cradle of the race; but
being left to themselves, without God in the
world, they sooner or later entirely forgot,
or greatly perverted and corrupted, the portion that they had taken with them. Japhet
and Ham, as well as Shem, received the
instructions of their father Noah. Ishmael,
as well as Isaac, the child of the covenant,
was taught by Abraham. And the descendants of Ishmael and of Japhet and Ham,
even after their departure from God, retained something of their early instructions,
as one who is stolen away from his home in
boyhood will keep in his mind through all
the vicious training that he may receive
* "Princeton Review," xxxvii. 349.




30             PARADISE.
some of the lessons which he learned from
his mother; though, being left without continued revelations and without a written
volume in which the truth was preserved
infallibly, what they had learned became
dimmer and more and more mixed with
error. This accounts for the fact that among
heathen nations vague traditions of the
great scriptural events are still found.
Thousands of years of sin and darkness
have not entirely destroyed the memory of
the creation, the fall and the flood. This is
also one of the incidental proofs that God
has made of one blood all nations of men
to dwell on all the face of the earth. They
have this common heritage.
This truth of the continued existence of
the soul after death is one which has always
prevailed among mankind. In all nations a
deep-seated conviction of it prevailed as a
part of the popular creed before it received
any scientific form from philosophers. The
Greeks, with whom we have specially to




THE WORD AND THE PLACE.    31
deal here, held that there was a place called
hades. It was under ground, lower than the
earth. The souls of all the dead were cari:ed to it. It contained two divisions; one
was Elysium, the abode of the good, the
other was Tartarus, the abode of the bad.
The predominant notion of the whole place
in both of its divisions, however, was gloomy
and forbidding. Existence there was shadowy; it was something between life and
death. The passage to it from the life of
earth was a change from light to darkness.
So undesirable was it that in Hades the
Achilles of Homer declared he would rather
till a field on earth as a day-laborer than
rule all the hosts of the shades.
The Jews in their dispersion met with
this opinion. Many of them had settled in
Egypt, which had come under Greek influence. Their Hebrew language had become
almost a dead tongue, and for their use a
translation of their Scriptures into the Greek,
which was then the fashionable cosmopol



32            PARADISE.
itan language of the world of scholars, was
made nearly three hundred years before
Christ. This is what is called the Septuagint. It was very much in use in the time
of our Saviour. The apostle Paul, being a
learned Grecian, frequently quoted from it
in his Epistles instead of from the Hebrew.
It has had an important influence on the
Christian Church.
In that version of the Old Testament the
word hades was used as the translation of the
sheol which in the Hebrew Scriptures designated the place of dead bodies and the place
of wicked disembodied spirits. In the later
period of the Jewish commonwealth the two
words were viewed as substantially of the
same import. Very naturally, as the Jews
became perverted by the philosophy of the
heathen, the heathen notion was attached by
them to the scriptural name. Hence they
came to look upon their sheol as an immense
place where good and bad spirits both existed in a separate state between the death




TE, WORD AND THEI PLA CE.      33
and the resurrection of their bodies. The
resurrection was a notion which the heathen
had not. In this the greater part of the
Jews continued to differ from them. The
heathen regarded their hades as the final
place; the Jews thought of it as an intermediate one. Josephus, the Jewish historian, who lived shortly after our Redeemer,
thus describes the belief of the Pharisees:
" They believe that souls have an immortal
vigor in them, and that under the earth
there will be rewards or punishments, according as they have lived virtuously or
viciously in this life; that the latter are to
be detained in everlasting prison, but that
the former shall have power to revive and
live again."  It is contended by some, however, that, while the Pharisees used the word
resurrection, all that they intended by it was
the existence of the soul and its transmigration into other bodies; for it would seem
that many of them had adopted the notion
* " Antiquities of the Jews," xviii. I, 3.
3




34             PARADISE.
of the passage of the spirit from one body
to another —not merely another human body,
but even that of a brute-on account of sin
committed in its previous body, and as a
means of purification. Hence the question
which was put to our Lord in reference to
the man who was blind from his birth:
"Who did sin, this man or his parents, that
he was born blind?" John ix. 2. This explanation, held in connection with the fact that
Jesus answered men according to their
meaning, will show that when he replied,
"Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents" (John ix. 3), he meant to deny not original or actual sin, but that absurd mode in
which the errorists held sin was dealt with.
It was under the influence of the same error
that the Messiah was looked upon as Elijah,
or Jeremiah, or one of the prophets, in a
new body. So, too, in the apocryphal book
of Wisdom, written under the taint of the
Grecian philosophy, the idea was expressed
in these words: "I was a witty child, and




THE WORD AND THE PLACE.    35
had a good spirit; yea, rather being good I
came into a body undefiled."
The Jews, who through contact with the
heathen philosophy had deviated from the
faith of their fathers, supposed the region
of the blessed to be in the upper part of
this hades, or the invisible and intermediate
place of disembodied souls, but still below
the earth and away from heaven; while under
it was the abyss or gehenna in which the
souls of the wicked were subjected to punishment. To the former they gave the name
of Paradzse.
It can easily be understood how the ideal
beauty of the dwelling-place of our first parents, perhaps also the fact that it had vanished from the earth, caused its name to be
transferred to that region and province in
hades, or the invisible world, where the
souls of the faithful were supposed to be
gathered waiting for the perfect consummation and bliss. "As paradise, or the
garden of Eden, was a place of great




36              PARADISE.
beauty, pleasure and tranquillity, so the
state of separate souls was a state of peace
and excellent delight."* It was supposed
to be "a far-off land, a region where there
was no scorching heat, no consuming cold,
where the soft west wind from the ocean
blew for evermore." "There was no night
there. The pavement of the place was of
precious stones. Plants of healing power
and wonderful fragrance grew on the banks
of its streams. Streams of milk and honey
were there, along which were twelve trees
laden with divers fruits, and mighty mountains reared their heads, whereon grew lilies
and roses. As the righteous dead entered
it angels stripped them- of their graveclothes, arrayed them in robes of glory, and
placed on their heads diadems of gold and
pearls." t
The word thus in use was taken by our
Redeemer and applied to the abode of the
* Trench's " Epistles to the Seven Churches," p. 128.
t Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, art. Paradise.




TILE WORD AND TIlE PLACE.     37
blessed beyond the grave, though it is worthy of note that it occurs only three times
in our Bible, the place being described in
other ways which reveal more fully its glories. And Hades, with Gehenna and Tartarus, is confined in the New Testament to
that region of the future world which is
under the power of the evil one, and where
the wicked are suffering for their sins. If
hades, as it is used in the New Testament,
meant the general receptacle of disembodied spirits, it would make that portion of
the divine volume teach that the souls of the
just are in some way under Satan until the
judgment; which is against the general and
explicit declarations of the Scriptures. In
the only sentence where Jesus himself uses
the word for the place of departed souls, it
designates the region of torment. That is
in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus:
"The rich man also died and was buried;
and in hell (hades) he lift up his eyes, being
in torments." Luke xvi. 23. The assertion




38             PARADISE.
that "he seeth Abraham  afar off" intimates that the two were not in two apartments  of the same place.  Moreover,
between the two places there is a great
impassable gulf.
But while the sacred writers use the
word paradise to designate the place of the
blessed, they purify it from its erroneous
meaning. It was too precious a name to
be abandoned to error. Its associations
for the human race were too delightful to be
permitted to cluster around any place near
the abode of the lost. It is not used in the
New Testament, therefore, to designate an
intermediate place just below the earth and
forming one apartment of an abode distinct
from heaven, the other apartment of which
the doomed inhabit. Ah, no! redeemed
souls pass through no such place to reach
the presence of their Lord. While the
word retains every good meaning that the
Jews had given it, it is purified from its
baser elements, as the Spirit of inspiration




THE WORD AND 7YIE PLACE.     39
purifies every human word that he adopts,
and is carried up to heaven itself; for the
paradise of the blessed is heaven.
The apostle Paul says in 2 Cor. xii. I-4:
"It is not expedient for me doubtless to
glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in Christ
above fourteen years ago (whether in the
body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the
body, I cannot tell: God knoweth); such an
one caught up to the third heaven. And
I knew such a man (whether in the body,
or out of the body, I cannot tell: God
knoweth); how that he was caught up into
paradise, and heard unspeakable words,
which it is not lawful for a man to utter."
It is admitted that the apostle here speaks
of himself. He is referring to a vision that
he had seen. So great was the effect which
it had produced on him, so exalted was his
ecstasy, that he could not tell whether his
soul had been for a time taken out of the
body and carried aloft, or whether body




40             PARADISE.
and soul both had been caught up to the
blessed place. It made him also allude to
the vision twice. That he refers to only
one vision is evident. The time of the two
references is the same. If they were to be
interpreted as describing two separate visions, it would follow that paradise was even
a more exalted and ravishing place than
the third heaven, because it is in the verse
which mentions paradise that the apostle
declares he heard words which it is not
lawful or possible for man to utter. But
this repetition of the vision is caused by
that impetuosity of style which marks the
writings of Paul. Perhaps, too, he intended directly to combat the perverted
Jewish notion, as if he had said: I call this
place, first, the third heaven, the highest
heaven, and I call it paradise also, to guard
against the notion that paradise is a place
separate from heaven, and therefore I
throw out my most rapturous terms when
I use that word. The third heaven and the




TiTE WOReDA AND 7YHE PLA4CEs.  41
paradise to which I was taken up are the
same.
In Rev. ii. 7 our exalted Lord promises:
"To him that overcometh will I give to eat
of the tree of life which is in the midst of
the paradise of God." Turn over to the
first two verses of the twenty-second chapter: "And he showed me a pure river of
water of life clear as crystal, proceeding
out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
In the midst of the street of it, and on
either side of the river, was there the tree
of life which bare twelve manner of fruits,
and yielded her fruit every month: and the
leaves of the tree were for the healing of
the  nations."  That is a description  of
heaven-no intermediate place below the
earth, but the place where the throne of
God and the Lamb is, the place of perfect
happiness, the vision of which is enough to
thrill the soul and almost translate it ere
the trammels of the body are laid aside.
But the tree of life, which in the beginning




42             PA RADISE.
of the book appears in paradise, is there:
so that paradise and heaven, the place of
God's throne, are the same.
The apostle Paul declares in 2 Cor. v.
6-8 that "whilst we are at home in the
body, we are absent from the Lord (for we
walk by faith, not by sight): we are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent
from the body, and to be present with the
Lord." That ought to settle beyond all
cavil the place of saved souls immediately
after death. Between death and the resurrection they are absent from the body and
present with the Lord. Wherever he is in
his glorified form they are.
If we need any further corroboration of
this, it is found in Eph. iii. I5, where it is
declared that " of our Lord Jesus Christ the
whole family in heaven and earth is named."
All the members of the redeemed family of
God are either in heaven or on earth. There
is no intermediate place that holds any of
them. The only other place is the abode




THE WORD AND THE PLA CE.    43
of the lost, and into that no believing penitent soul sinks for an instant; from it no
soul ever reaches heaven, for between the
two there is a great gulf fixed, and they that
would pass from one to the other cannot.
The idea of an intermediate placewhether it take the form of a limbus paIrum, where Old Testament believers remained without the beatific vision of God,
yet without suffering, until the death of
Christ; or of a limbus infantum, where the
souls of unbaptized infants go, and where
they enjoy not the vision of God, though
they endure no positive suffering; or of
purgatory, where partially sanctified Christians are purified through sufferings in material fire; or of a region where the disembodied souls of the good and bad both await
the resurrection of their bodies before going
to God or to Satan-is essentially of heathen origin. Our earth, in its existing form,
hell and heaven are the only three places
for the present abode of human spirits




44                    PARADISE.
which  the  Bible  reveals  to  us;  and  from
the body the soul is taken either to heaven
or hell without passing into an intermediate
place of any kind.
The soul of Jesus went immediately from
the  cross  to  paradise:*  "Father, into  thy
hands I commend my spirit." Luke xxiii.
* The contradictions into which those fall who reject this view
are striking. Thus Olshausen, adopting the doctrine that man
consists of three distinct substances, body, soul and spirit, and
feeling the force of the Redeemer's words, holds that at his
death his spirit returned to the Father. But Stier, acknowledging also the force of those words, but having accepted the erroneous idea of Paradise, says (" Words of the Lord Jesus," iii.
695), "Nevertheless, Christ's spirit did not at once go up to
heaven (the word to the malefactor would contradict this), thither
where the eternal Son was before; that did not take place until
the glorified flesh could go there too." And he thus in a note
quotes Olshausen: "While the soul of Christ went to the dead
in sheol (but I Pet. iii. I8 testifies against that) and his body
rested in the sepulchre, his spirit returned to the Father. In the
resurrection all was reunited into a harmonious unity."
Our risen Lord's words to Mary Magdalene are sometimes
cited against our view. The Rev. Edward Henry Bickersteth's
"Yesterday, To-day and For Ever" is a poem of rare beauty
and much delightful truth, notwithstanding its grave underlying
error of an intermediate place. It was reviewed and its error
in this partit ilar exposed lby the writer of this book in an article




THE WOR D AND THE P A CE.   45
46. The soul of the pardoned malefactor
dying at his side ascended at the same time
to the same place: " To-day shalt thou be
with me in paradise."   In his glorified body
Jesus returned again to the glorious region
in The Presbyterian, of Philadelphia, of January i6, I869. Mr.
Bickersteth replied to that article in a letter, which was published
with a rejoinder to it, March 20, I869. In that letter he wrote:
" When you say,' We prefer to think that the Lord is now in
the very heaven of heavens,' I heartily agree with you-I think
so too; but when you immediately proceed to say,'The soul
of Jesus went directly there-i. e., to the very heaven of heavens
-from the cross, and returned again to his body the third day,'
I must entirely dissent from your views. If this were so, how
could he have said to Mary Magdalene in the garden after his
resurrection:' Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my
Father'?" John xx. 17. But manifestly that declaration of the
Saviour meant that he had not yet ascended in the body.  Touch
mte not.  It does not imply that his soul had not gone there
from the cross. Similar to this is the declaration of Peter after
our Lord's bodily ascension, that "David is not yet ascended
into the heavens." The passage refers to the resurrection and
place of the body, and not to the soul. The bodily ascension
David was and is yet to experience. The well-understood doctrine of the Kolvvita icuwLutarwv flowing from the union of the
two distinct substances soul and body in the one person of man
(see Hodge's " Systematic Theology," ii. 379) explains all such
declarations. A person may affirm of himself an act which
belongs only to his body. (See pp. 25 and 72, notes.)




46              PA RA D ISE.
forty days after his resurrection, and there
he has ever since abode.
How  significant of the beauty of the
place, of ever-present communion with
God, of perfect holiness and pure happiness, is this title of heaven! Recognizing
the promise made to the penitent malefactor as the heritage of all believing souls,
into the enjoyment of which they enter immediately on the death of the body, how
enrapturing the prospect for us!
It has already been intimated that the
heathen nations have not entirely forgotten
the great facts of the early sacred history,
though, as the result of their wandering off
-from  God's revelation into the wilderness
of sin, they hold them  in very perverted
forms. The remembrance of an earthly
paradise is a part of the common heritage
of the race. In Hindoo literature, next to
the sacred books perhaps the most ancient
literature of the world, "man is presented
as the creature of God, as capable of right



THE WORD AND THE PLA CE.    47
eousness, but as having sinned and forfeited the favor of God thereby." "In the
centre of Jambu-dwipa, the middle of the
seven continents of the Puranas, is the
golden mountain Meru, which stands like
the seed-cup of the lotus of the earth. On
its summit is the vast city of Brahma, renowned in heaven and encircled by the
Ganges, which, issuing from the foot of the
Vishnu, washes the lunar orb, and falling
thither from the skies, is divided into four
streams that flow to the four corners of the
earth. In this abode of divinity is the Naudana, or grove of Indra; there, too, is the
Jambu tree, from whose fruit are fed the
waters of the Jambu river, which give life
and immortality to all who drink thereof.'.'
"Arab legends tell of a garden in the
East, on the summit of a mountain of jacinth, inaccessible to man-a garden of rich
soil and equable temperature, well watered
and abounding with trees and flowers of
rare colors and fragrance."




48             PARADISE.
In the Grzeco-Roman literature, with
which we are most acquainted through the
authors that are a part of the educational
training of boys in our classical schools,
comparatively rationalistic and infidel as
that period was, we meet with a golden age
of innocence and happiness. "Truth and
right prevailed, though not enforced by law,.
nor was there any majesty to threaten and
punish. The forest had not yet been robbed
of its trees to furnish timber for vessels, nor
had men built fortifications around their
towns. There were no such things as
swords, spears or helmets.  The earth
brought forth all things necessary for man
without his labor in ploughing or sowing.
Perpetual spring reigned, flowers sprang
up without seed, the rivers flowed with
milk and wine, and yellow honey distilled
from the oaks."
"All these and similar traditions are but
mere mocking echoes of the old Hebrew
story, jarred and broken notes of the same




TILE WORD AND TILE PLACE.    49
strain; but with all their exaggerations, they
intimate how in the background of man's
visions lay a paradise of holy joy; a paradise
secured from every kind of profanation and
made inaccessible to the guilty; a paradise
full of objects that were calculated to delight the senses and to elevate the mind; a
paradise that granted to its tenant rich and
rare immunities, and that fed with its perennial streams the tree of life and immortality."
In the history of the heathen, as they
wandered off from the light, fable and speculation thus became mixed with the truths
which we believe on the authority of the
sacred word. Its facts are grandly simple.
When God had created man, he placed him
in a garden which was the beautiful abode
of holiness and happiness. After the race
had sinned it was cast forth from that garden, and paradise itself was removed from
earth. It was committed to the charge of
cherubim, and a flaming sword at its gate
4




50             PARADISE.
turned every way to keep the way of the
tree of life.  Paradise was lost; but the
words uttered by the Redeemer on the
cross of his satisfaction to God for our sins
tell us of a paradise restored. They proclaim his lordship over it and the admission
into it of every soul saved by him. What
Adam lost through the subtilty of the evil
one, our Redeemer by his sacrificial death
regained. Above earth's waste wilderness,
cursed for sin and bringing forth thorns and
thistles, the garden of Eden is raised again.
Adam took out of paradise all his descendants
because they were in him and involved in his
sin. Christ takes back to paradise all who
are in him under the gracious covenant, and
who, therefore, receive his righteousness.
And as it is the prerogative of Christ and
his gospel not only to overcome and banish
sin, but to ennoble, to elevate, to multiply
every go-d thing that they touch, the paradise tha' is far excels the paradise that
was.




THE WORD AND  THE PLA CE.            5 I
"Though that seat of earthly bliss be failed,
A fairer paradise is founded now
For Adam and his chosen sons."
The light of a gorgeous beauty rests
upon it such as the primeval garden was
never bathed  in.   Its colors appear the
richer because the grace of God has painted
them on the black clouds of sin, as the sun
shows his most beautiful tints in the rainbow  upon  the  watery  clouds.   It is the
place of creation. It has
"An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams,
Climes which the Sun who sheds the brightest day
Earth owns is all unworthy to survey."
It has the highest spiritual beauty; no sin
is in it, and therefore tears of sorrow never
fall therein; it is never broken up into the
graves of lost hopes; its atmosphere is
never ruffled with the voice of crying or
the exclamation of pain. Through it, as
it is pictured on the inspired pages, runs
a river whose waters never overflow to destroy, and whose clear crystal bosom, undis



52           IPARADISE.
turbed by storms, brightly reflects the evershining glory of God. Streets of a golden
brilliancy that never dims lead up through
it from gates that have all the purity of
pearls -highways of glory and of excellency over which no curse is scattered, and
which are not deformed by the thorns and
weeds of a sin-bearing soil. Joy and gladness are found therein, thanksgiving and
the voice of melody from the innumerable
multitude of the ransomed who sing the
song of glory to the Lamb. In the centre
is a throne with a rainbow round about it in
sight like unto an emerald, upon which, in
the land of beauty the most beautiful of all,
is the gracious and glorious One whose
promise thrills our heart with the ecstatic
hope of the place. It would not be paradise
without him; his presence makes it; and
there he is. The veil between it and us is
now so thin that, in the gorgeous visions
of the beloved disciple, we can almost see
through it and behold him. He is the same




THE WORD AND THE PL ACE.    53
that he was on earth, but how different in
appearance! He is glorified now. He wears
a body which is too bright for the gaze of
the unglorified eye, for it made the apostle
in his apocalyptic vision fall down as dead.
No longer on the cross, but on the throne!
No longer the despised of earth, with only a
dying thief to confess him, but a King reigning over the universe, the cynosure of all
eyes, the judge of all creatures! His head
and his hairs are white like wool, as white
as snow; his eyes are as a flame of fire; his
feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned
in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of
many waters. He has in his right hand
seven stars; out of his mouth goes a sharp
two-edged sword; and his countenance is
as the sun shineth in his strength; and he
declares, "I am the first and the last: I am
he that liveth and was dead; and behold I
am alive for evermore; and have the keys
of hades and of death." Rev. i. 12-I8.




CHAPTER III.
THE INHABITANTS OF PARADISE.
E are come unto Mount Zion, and
unto the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first born,
which are written in heaven, and to God
the judge of all, and to the spirits of just
men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood
of sprinkling that speaketh better things
than that of Abel." Heb. xii. 22-24.
A grander and more soul-stirring truth
than the foregoing passage contains can
scarcely be found even in the word of God.
By Mount Zion, the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem, the apostle means
54




THE INHABITANTS OF PARADISE.   55
heaven itself.  His assertion is that believers who are still living on the earth
have come —not are yet to come, but have
actually come-unto it. The gospel dispensation, which is often called the kingdom
either of God or of heaven, is viewed as
" extending through time into eternity, and
embracing saints on earth and angels and
saints in heav'en in one common family under one common head. Becoming members of Christ's Church, we are united to
that blessed family whose home and seat
are in heaven." *
The Church of God is one. Its members who have left the earth have ascended
to the metropolitan city of their kingdoma city which is daily enlarging, and which is
to extend until it shall include the innumerable multitude of Christ's redeemed.
Those who are still on the earth are citizens of the same city, living now in a far-off
part of the land indeed, but destined to go
* Sampson's Commentary on Hebrews, in loc.




56                PARADISE.
up also to the capital. They who have entered never more go out. We who are
still in the borders of the kingdom are traveling toward it, and shall finally sit down
there with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,
with the prophets, the apostles and the
martyrs, with the saved of all ages, and
with our own departed friends in Christ.
Precious truth to them and to us, because
in the one kingdom we have an interest in
the one city; our citizenship is there.
"One family we dwell in him,
One Church above, beneath,
Though now divided by the stream,
The narrow stream, of death.
"One army of the living God,
To his commands we bow;
Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now."
This designation of heaven as a city is by
no means rare. Both the place itself and
its redeemed inhabitants, because of their
everlasting and intimate connection with it,




ITS INHABITANTS.       57
are thus exhibited over and over again:
"Abraham looked for a city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is
God." Heb. xi. io.  "These all died in
faith, not having received the promises, but
having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them and embraced them, and
confessed that they were strangers and
pilgrims on the earth. For they that say
such things declare plainly that they seek a
country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came
out, they might have had opportunity to
have returned. But now they desire a
better country, that is an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their
God, for he hath prepared for them a city."
Heb. xi. I 3-I 6. "Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come."
Heb. xiii. I4. "This Agar is Mount Sinai
in Arabia, and answereth to the Jerusalem
which now is, and is in bondage with her
children. But Jertisalem which is above is




58            PARADZSE.
free, which is the mother of us all." Gal. iv.
25, 26. " Him that overcometh will I make
a pillar in the temple of my God, and he
shall go no more out: and I will write upon
him the name of my God, and the name of
the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven
from my God." Rev. iii. I2. "I John saw
the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down
from God out of heaven, prepared as a
bride adorned for her husband..... And
he carried me away in the spirit to a great
and high mountain, and showed me that
great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending
out of heaven from God, having the glory of
God." Rev. xxi. 2, 1. "Blessed are they
that do his commandments, that they may
have right to the tree of life, and may enter
in through the gates into the city." Rev.
xxii. I4.
An explanation of the way in which Jerusalem thus became a type of heaven and
gave its name to the blessed place will in a




ITS INHABITANTI.        59
very beautiful manner show the connection
of the topic of this' chapter with the history
which we have given of the word paradisea connection intimated in the last verse that
has just been quoted-and it will form an
additional and winning picture of the abode
of glorified souls.
On the expulsion of our first parents from
the garden of Eden, God placed at the east
of it cherubim and a flaming sword which
turned every way to keep the way of the
tree of life.  The cherubim  reappear in
various subsequent passages of the Bible.
By Ezekiel and by John they are called
living creatures. (It is an unhappy thing
that in Revelation, chapters iv.-vi., the word
is translated "beasts.") They are always
represented to be in the place where God
in a peculiar manner manifests his glory,-as
in the most holy place of the tabernacle,
in the oracle of the temple, bearing up the
throne of God while (in the visions of
Ezekiel) it hastens forward to execute the




6o            PAR AD ISE.
decrees of justice, and then, finally, at the
great consummation of all things, before
that throne of God's awful majesty from
which, in the apocalyptic vision, proceeded
lightnings and thunderings and voices. Ex.
xxv. I8; I Kings vi. 23; Heb. ix. 5; Ezek.
x. 5; Rev. iv., v., vi. John saw them in a
posture of reverence and adoration before
God. With the four and twenty elders
"they fell down before the Lamb, having
every one of them harps, and golden vials
full of odors which are the prayers of the
saints. And they sang a new song, saying,
Thou art worthy to take the book and to
open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain,
and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood
out of every kindred and tongue and people
and nation; and hast made us unto our God
kings and priests: and we shall reign on the
earth." Rev. v. 8-Io. The living creatures
in heaven, then, represent redeemed men;
and the placing of the figures in the garden
of Eden had this meaning: For his sin man




ITS INHI4ABIZTAN'TS.   6 
has been banished from the happy place.
He has failed to keep that which was committed to him. He is shut out from the
tree of life.  The flaming sword turns
every way, a type of the everywherelooking and everywhere-present holiness
and justice of God, which would cut down
and destroy the sinner.  But mercy is
mingled with justice.  Already has God
given intimations of redemption; for the
great enemy who had tempted man is to be
overthrown by a descendant of the tempted
pair. While the flaming sword turns, with
it there are the cherubim to show that the
way of the tree of life shall still be kept.
Notwithstanding man's suicidal failure, God
has not for ever banished him; the cherubim are in the garden a type of man
redeemed and glorified entering the heavenly paradise, and receiving from Him who
has the power over it, and who himself in
human form overcame the great enemy,
the right to the tree of life. In paradise
6




62            PARADISE.
lost, and wherever else they appeared, the
cherubim told of paradise to be restored
Thus we bring together the beginning
and the end of the Bible -the fall of man
and his complete redemption in glory-the
earthly paradise and the heavenly. The
two were continually associated in the religious services of the Jews.
When the ancient people were brought
out of the house of bondage and a covenant was made with them at Mount Sinai,
God ordered a tabernacle or movable tent
to be made, where alone the sacrificial services of the Church were to be performed.
He gave very explicit directions as to the
form of the tent and everything connected
with it. It was divided into two apartments, the holy place and the most holy,
or holy of holies, or holiest of all. Into
the latter only one man, the high priest,
was permitted to enter, and he but once
a year, on the great day of atonement:
"The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the




ITS I.VNHABITANTS.       63
way into thie holiest of all was not yet made
manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet
standing." Heb. ix. 8. That tabernacle was
a symbol of God's perpetual presence with
his people. He abode there as their covenant God. There he specially held communion with them.  His promise was:
"There I will meet with thee, and I will
commune with thee from above the mercyseat." Ex. xxv. 22. The most holy place
especially was a type of heaven, and within
it were the figures of the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat, so that the high
priest, every time he entered, had his
mind pointed back to the paradise which
had been lost, and forward to the paradise
which was to be entered by redeemed men
under the leadership of the great Sacrifice.
After the children of Israel had become
fully established in the promised land, a
permanent temple was built, and took the
place of the movable tabernacle. It was
constructed substantially after the same




64            PAR'ADISE.
model as that tent. It had the most holy
place, under the name of the oracle, the
holy place and the outer courts. It was
built in Jerusalem, on Mount M1oriah, near
Mount Zion, on which the royal residence
was erected. Jerusalem and Mount Zion
then became the centre of the Jewish
Church, the peculiar dwelling-place of God.
They were a type of heaven because God was
there, and the cherubim which pointed forward to heaven as the abode of saved men
were there. And so it continued, though
the first temple was destroyed and another
was built, until Jesus came. He fulfilled in
his person and in his work everything that
was typified in the temple and its services,
and accordingly, some years after his death,
God permitted the building to be finally
destroyed, the Jews to be scattered and
their Church to be broken up, so that never
since have their sacrifices been offered.
The Church of God needed no more a
local earthly centre, for it was not to be




7ITS INHABITAN'rS:      65
confined to one land, but to cover all the
earth. A temple was not needed to be the
visible place of God's presence, for Jesus
was the true temple in whom the Godhead
dwelt; the Son of God became flesh and
tabernacled among men. The Church of
Christ is now in a peculiar manner the
temple of the holy One. No most holy
place was any more needed on earth to be
entered only once a year; Jesus himself
ascended once, for all and for ever, to the
heavenly paradise that was shadowed forth
by the earthly. He took up with him all
that was good about the holy city of the
Jews, leaving it only the shadow of a name,
and thus the heaven to which he has gone
is called the new Jerusalem, the city of our
God. That is the capital of our Church,
the seat of the divine royalty, the abode of
our King-priest. Because the Jerusalem of
earth was so long the gracious dwellingplace of God, its associations were so sacred and so delightful that its name came




66             PARADISE.
naturally to be applied not merely to the
Church, but to its abode in glory-the heavenly paradise-which was expressively symbolized in the most holy place.
With this explanation, let the glory of the
heavenly'city, as reflected from the enumeration which the inspired apostle gives of its
inhabitants, come down upon us.
The paradise which was pointed to even
from Eden, and typified in the most holy
place of the tabernacle and the temple, we
cannot yet see, though it is declared we
have come to it. Where, then, is it? A
place it is; a particular position it has now.
Scarcely anything could teach more strikingly the certainty of that than the apostle's
enumeration. But where is it?
There are two ways of answering such a
question. In certain circumstances it gives
some information of a locality to tell who
live in it. Let a father come to this country from the Old World, leaving behind him
a babe in its mother's arms. When the child




ITS INHABITANTS.         67
begins to understand what is said to him,
he will often hear from his mother about
America, where his father is. He will prattle about it whenever a letter reaches his
home from his father with some memento
for him, and with the means to his mother
to bring him hither too. The word "America" will frequently be on his lips. Is he
asked what he knows about it and where it
is? He cannot tell exactly where, but this
he knows: it is the land where his father is,
and whither he is soon going to meet him.
So it gives us real information about heaven
as a place to know what and who are in it.
The other way of answering the question
is by giving all the force possible to the
expressions of the Bible which seem to indicate the relative locality of paradise in
the universe.
The passage that we have quoted from
the Epistle to the Hebrews gives an answer
in the first of these modes. We proceed to
elaborate that in the remainder of this chap



68             PARlADISE.
ter, leaving the second answer, which will
endeavor to point to the relative position
of the garden-city of glory, to the next
chapter.
Paradise, then, is that glorious place in
the universe where God has established the
throne of his government. " Heaven," says
our Lord, "is God's throne." Matt. v. 34.
"Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my
throne." Isa. lxvi. I. Omnipresence is the
peculiar attribute of God as the infinite
Spirit. There is no place in which it can
be declared that he is confined to the exclusion of other places.  But the boundless
circle of the universe has a centre from
which it stretches out in its limitless extent
on every side, and there the glory of God
is most brilliantly manifested to his creatures.
The vision of this glory bathes the apocalyptic chapters in a peculiar splendor. At
the beginning of them, immediately after
the reception of the epistles to the seven




ITS INXIABIZTANTS.      69
churches, John declares: "I was in the spirit:
and behold a throne was set in heaven, and
one sat on the throne. And he that sat was
to look upon like a jasper and a sardine
stone; and there was a rainbow round about
the throne, in sight like unto an emerald."
Rev. iv. 2-4. And before that throne "' every
creature which is in heaven, and on the
earth, and such as are in the sea, and all
that are in them, heard I saying, Blessincg,
and honor, and glory, and power be unto
him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto
the Lamb for ever and ever." Rev. v. 13.
Make such descriptions figurative if we
will. They represent the peculiar manifestation of the glory, the majesty, the sovereignty, the government, of God. It is not
unscriptural to suppose that when God
made our world he meant that paradise
should be the place of his throne on earth;
for when man was banished from the garden, he committed it to cherubim, and the
cherubim bear up his throne in its onward




70                PARADISE.
progress; but paradise restored, the new
Jerusalem, holds that throne  still.   The
throne of God and of the Lamb is in it.
It has the glory of God. As it appeared to
the inspired seer, it "had no need of the
sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for
the glory of God did lighten it, and the
Lamb is the light thereof." Rev. xxi. 22, 23.
Ezekiel closed his prophecy by declaring:
"The name of the city, from that day, shall
be, The Lord is there." And in it alone
is literally fulfilled the declaration of the
Psalmist: "The Lord hath chosen Zion; he
hath desired it for his habitation. This is
my rest for ever: here will I dwell; for I
have desired it." Ps. cxxxii. 13, I4. The
peculiar dwelling-place of God, the seat of
his majesty, enlightened by his glory —what
a Flace it is!
"A million torches lighted by thy hand,
Wander unwearied through the blue abyss;
They own thy power, accomplish thy command,
All gay with life, all eloquent with bliss.




ITS INHABI7ANTS.               71
What shall we call them? Piles of crystal light,
A glorious company of golden streams,
Lamps of celestial ether, burning bright,
Suns lighting systems with their joyous beams:
But thou to these as noon to night." *
How brilliant, then, must be the place of
God's immediate presence!
Further, paradise is the place where the
glorified Jesus is, with the perfected salvation obtained by the shedding of his infinitely valuable blood. His soul went thither
from  the cross on the day he died: "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise."
Paradise is heaven, and before the sun of
the crucifixion day went down the soul of
Jesus was there. While his body was hanging lifeless on the cross, and while it was
lying in Joseph's tomb, the spirit was above
with the Father. Just at the moment of
death he cried with a loud voice, "Father,
into thy hands I commend my spirit: and
having said thus, he gave up the ghost."
* Derzhavin, in Book o' Poetry (Presbyterian Board of Publication), P- 15 




72                    PARADISE.
It is strange that any should suppose that
the soul of Jesus between his death and
resurrection was anywhere else than with
the Father, from whom he had directly
come on his mission of salvation.*
* In I Peter iii. I8-20 it is declared: " Christ also hath once
suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to
God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit:
by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison,
which sometime were disobedient, when once the long-suffering
of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing,
wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water." To
some this seems to teach that the soul of Jesus on his death went
to an intermediate place where the spirits of those who died in
disobedience in the time of Noah had gone, and that he preached
the gospel to them there, and hence that there was a possibility
of saving those who had died in their sins. The uniform teaching of the Bible in denial of an intermediate place militates
against this interpretation, as does also the declaration that the
soul of Jesus was not on his death abandoned to any such place
as that to which disobedient spirits go. It is a sound rule of interpretation that an obscure passage of Scripture, which seems
to stand alone in teaching a certain dogma, must be explained
by the analogy of faith and by other clearer passages.
The explanation usually given of this passage is that Christ,
by the Holy Spirit, had preached through Noah to the antediluvians, who, however, persisting in disobedience, were lost,
while Noah was saved. The following is suggested in Dr. Fair



ITS INHABITANTS.                     73
As the soul of Jesus returned from paradise to his body on his resurrection morning, so in the glorified body, on his ascension, he went back to the heavenly place.
He is on its throne, and thence he will come
at the last day to judgment. His soul went
bairn's chapter on "the Import and Use of Hades in Scripture":
As the spirit of Jesus went up from his body, which was left
hanging on the cross, its entrance to heaven was perceived not
only by the glorified inhabitants of that blessed place, but also
by the spirits of the lost who were shut up in their eternal prison,
and that was to them not the offer of the gospel salvation-for
that is not the meaning of the word translated "preached" in
the passage-but a fearful proclamation of their irreparable ruin,
since they were out of the blessings of the salvation secured by
that death and entrance to glory. If it be asked, Since the world
of the lost is so far from heaven as it appears to be represented
in the Bible, how could they perceive such an event from such
a distance? it may be answered that the perceptive powers of a
spirit out of the body cannot be measured by the powers which
we now possess. It seems to be the teaching of the Bible that
one element of eternal sufferings consists in the sight of the happiness of heaven from which the lost soul is excluded. While
there was a great and impassable gulf between the place of the rich
man and that of Lazarus, the rich man yet saw Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. And one of the most fearful passages in the book
of Revelation declares that'he torment of hell is in the presence
of the holy angels a! d of the Lamb. (See pp. 25 and 44, nzolev.)




74            PARADISE.
there from the cross. At the resurrection
of the body it came back to earth. For
forty days he appeared time and again to
his disciples. Then he was received up
into heaven and sat on the right hand of
God, angels and authorities and powers
being made subject unto him. Before his
death, to his deeply sorrowing disciples he
said: "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told
you; I go to prepare a place for you."
John xiv. 2, 3. There he was seen by the
enraptured eye of Stephen, who, while his
persecutors were gnashing upon him with
their teeth, "being full of the Holy Ghost,
looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw
the glory of God, and Jesus standing on
the right hand of God, and said, Behold I
see the heavens opened, and the Son of
man standing on the right hand of God."
Acts vii. 55, 56. There he appeared to
John, through whom he sends to every soul
the message: "To him that overcometh




IT.S INHABITANTS.              75
will I grant to sit with me in my throne,
even as I also overcame and am set down
with my Father in his throne." Rev. iii. 21.
And there he is now, in the midst of the
throne, a lamb as it had been slain.
"The head that once was crowned with thorns
Is crowned with glory now;
A royal diadem adorns
The mighty Victor's brow.
"The highest place that heaven affords
Is his by sovereign right,
The King of kings and Lord of lords,
And heaven's eternal light."
It is the presence of Jesus that makes
the heaven of the saved soul. Wherever
he is is heaven. If we knew nothing more
about it, that would be enough. It seems
to us that if the place were not indicated in
any other mode, or the road not marked to
it; if angels were not sent to bear the departing soul aloft, it would yet quickly, by
the force of a celestial gravitation, urge its
way through the mazes of infinite space at




76             PARADISE.
once to the foot of the Redeemer's throne.
The enrapturing brilliancy of his glorified
form would draw it on. When the Spirit
of Jesus comes to the soul, the heaven of
grace comes to it; when the soul goes to the
glorified Jesus, it enters the heaven of glory.
Again, paradise is the place where the
angels of God are. It is their home. "The
angels do there," said Christ, "always behold the face of my Father." Matt. xviii. Io.
Thence Gabriel came forth to make Daniel
understand the vision which he had seen.
Thence he came again to announce to
Zacharias the birth of John, and to Mary
the birth of Jesus. Thence the angel of the
Lord came upon the shepherds, while the
glory of the Lord shone round about them,
and announced the advent of the Saviour,
Christ the Lord. Sent forth as ministering
spirits to minister to the heirs of salvation,
continually passing between heaven and
earth on their errands of mercy, bending
with interest over every clurch where the




ITS INHABITANTS.         77
gospel is preached, and every place where
the word of God is read or a word spoken
for Jesus, and waiting for occasions of renewed joy in the repentance of sinners,
paradise is the place to which the angels
ever return. They are the elder brothers
of that blissful home. Together with the
redeemed they bend before the same
throne, and with them adore the same
crucified yet triumphant Lamb, and unite
with them in some of their songs; for the
beloved disciple declares: "I beheld, and
I heard the voice of many angels round
about the throne, and the living creatures,
and the elders, and the number of them
was ten thousand times ten thousand, and
thousands of thousands; saying with a
loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was
slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory,
and blessing." Rev. v. I I, 12.  What a
city must that be where angels minister
to saved souls-where those who have




78             PARADISE.
never fallen are companions of redeemed
sinners!
Paradise is also the place where the
Church of the first-born and the spirits
of the just made perfect are. By the first
class is probably meant Old Testament
believers, those who died before the coming of Christ; by the second, those who
had died between that and the writing of
the epistle, to whom we may now add all
the redeemed that have died since and at
their death were made perfect in holiness.
On the day of his death Jesus entered
paradise, and it is the great happiness of all
his people to go at the instant of their death
to the very place where he is. "If I go
and prepare a place for you, I will come
again and receive you unto myself; that
where I am there ye may be also." John
xiv. 3. None of them are long absent from
his glorious abode after they have believed
in him, for he comes to them at death; and
the longest life that is spent in his service




IT'S INHABITANTS.       79
on earth is less than an instant compared
with eternity. "If any man serve me let
him follow me; and where I am there shall
also my servant be." John xii. 26. "Now,
Father, come I to thee."  And "I will that
they also whom thou hast given me be with
me where I am; that they may behold my
glory which thou hast given me." John xvii.
I3, 24. The glory of heaven comes down
to the death-bed of the believer. The Holy
Spirit is there; ministering angels are there;
and ere the body has ceased to quiver in
the throes of death the soul is borne aloft
to the glory of the golden city, where are
living all the glorified redeemed from Abel
down to the unknown saint that may just
this hour have breathed his last on earth.
What a soul-thrilling place, then, that city
is! The capital of the universe, the centre
of creation, elevated above the shifting
scenes of time, far removed from the sinful
imperfections of earth, it is the region to
which, through the films of sin and of sor



80            PARADISE.
row, the purged eye of the believer ever
looks. The home of earth's redeemed sinners; the Mount Zion of the skies; the new
Jerusalem of our God to which the tribes
go up; the seat of royalty from which God
gives his laws and to which he draws his
chosen,-glorious things are spoken of the
city of our God. No mean city is it; no
small spot in the universe; no obscure region; no out-of-the-way place. It must be
the most prominent and the most favored
part of creation. It is large, and already it
is immensely populous. Its inhabitants are
literally innumerable. It received some of
them before this world was made. From
the death of Abel down to this hour its
pearly gates have never been shut. Through
them the redeemed pilgrims of earth have
ever been pressing. "And the nations of
them which are saved walk in the light of
it; and the kings of the earth do bring
their glory and honor into it." Rev. xxi. 24.
Nothing that defileth or worketh abomina



ITS TNHABITANTS.                     8 
tion or maketh a lie has ever entered there;
but those who are written in the Lamb's
book of life, embracing all the really good
and honorable in the nations, are received
into it. "Are there few that be saved?" (Luke
xiii. 23) a speculative curiosity once asked
of Jesus. His practical answer was, "Strive
to enter in at the strait gate." But elsewhere
we have the assurance that the redeemed
are "a great multitude which no man can
number of all nations, and kindreds, and
peoples, and  tongues."  Rev. vii. 9.   Our
whole world-its present population of more
than a thousand million souls-is but a little
hamlet compared with the mighty population
that is already in the city of our God; and
yet there is room for more.*
* There are some perversions and misrepresentations of our
old orthodox system of doctrine which are perpetually circulated
and repeated against all denials. One of the most threadbare
and yet persistently rewoven of these theological slanders is the
charge that our " Confession " teaches the eternal condemnation
of those who die in infancy and the salvation of a very small
proportion of the human race. But on this point Dr. Charles
6




82                     PARADISE.
The evangelical prophet Isaiah saw the
glory of the redeeming Son of God in the
heavenly place before his incarnation, and
thus he described it: "';I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and
his train filled the temple. Above it stood
the seraphims: each one had six wings:
with twain he covered his face, and with
twain he covered his feet, and with twain he
did fly. And one cried unto another, and
said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;.the whole earth is full of his glory." But
the effect upon the prophet was that he
lIodge has unequivocally (in his " Systematic Theology," i. 26)
expressed our belief: "The Scriptures nowhere exclude any
class of infants, baptized or unbaptized, born in Christian or
heathen lands, of believing or unbelieving parents, from the
benefits of the redemption of Christ. All the descendants of
Adam except Christ are under condemnation; all the descendants of Adam, except those of whom it is expressly revealed that
they cannot inherit the kingdom of God, are saved. This appears to be the clear meaning of the apostle in Rom. v. i8, I9,
and therefore he does not hesitate to say that where sin abounded
grace has much more abounded, that the benefits of redemption
far exceed the evils of the fall, that the nz.umber of the saved
far exceeds the number of the lost."




ITS IeNHABITANTS.        83
cried out: "Woe is me! for I am undone:
because I am a man of unclean lips, and I
dwell in the midst of a people of unclean
lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the
Lord of hosts." Isa. vi. i-6.
Peter, James and John also saw that
glory in the mount of transfiguration, when
the face of Jesus did shine as the sun, and
his raiment was white as the light, and the
Shekinah came down from heaven, and a
voice was heard saying, This is my beloved
Son; but they fell on their faces and were
sore afraid, and wist not what to say.
On the road to Damascus, Paul was bathed
in the glory of the ascended Lord, which,
pouring down from the great white throne
with its rainbow halo, outshone the burning
splendor of the noonday sun; but it blinded
the persecutor. When, in the apocalyptic
vision, John saw it, it made him fall at the
feet of Jesus as dead. Not until made perfectly holy can any man look for an instant
upon the direct glory of the place. But




84                PARADISE.
through the revealed word we see it dimly,
and that view should be enough to make us
yearn after a full preparation for the enjoyment of it.
What heart is so cold, so unmoved by
the brightness of the original inhabitants
of our paradise and of the long procession
of saints who for six thousand years have
been marching over the highway of our
God from earth to heaven, and entering
the charmed circle of the great white throne,
and who are now beckoning to us that are
still behind to follow,-what heart is so unruffled as not to cry out?"For thee, 0 dear, dear country,
Mine eyes their vigils keep;
For very love beholding
Thy happy name they weep.
The mention of thy glory
Is unction to the breast,
And medicine in sickness,
And love and life and rest."
Who is there that, while deriving comfort
from the scene and looking forward with




IxS INHABITANTS.         85
eager hope to a final entrance to it through
grace, will not under its influence seek after
a holier conformity to its life?
The children of Israel, after their deliverance from the house of bondage, came to
Mount Sinai, which burned and sparkled
and flashed with the terrors of the Lord.
The mountain might be touched, but they
dare not come near to it. We have come
to Mount Zion, and unto the city of the
living God, the new Jerusalem. We cannot see it. In space it seems to be far away.
Yet it is so near to the saved that the liberated soul in an instant reaches it from the
body, and its inhabitants and believers on
earth form one family, one Church, one
kingdom. We have come to it. But no
terrors surround it-no gloom or blackness,
no darkness or tempest. All about it is
gentle, attractive, winning. Its foundations
of precious stones; its gates of pearls; its
street of pure gold, as transparent glass;
its river of life as clear as crystal; the light




86            PARADISE.
of the whole like unto a jasper stone; the
everlasting prevalence of day through its
pure and healthy atmosphere; the absence
of pain and sorrow and crying from its
borders,-these descriptions excel all human
imagination and stir our hearts to their
depths.
But more than all, God our Father, and
Christ our Redeemer, and the unfallen angels, and the whole army of the redeemed
who have already been arrayed in robes
made perfectly white in the blood of the
Lamb, are in the glorious place, and we,
humble believers in the Lord, hope ere
long to mingle in their society. They belong to us and we belong to them, and
the new Jerusalem is their and our home.
What happiness is in store for us! What
a high calling we have! Let us seek to
walk worthy of it; and remembering that
they who are above and we who are still on
the earth are closely joined together, let us
strive to live the life of heaven while we are




ITS INHABITANTS.         87
here. Let us feel the throbbings of its great
heart. Let its life pulsate through our lives.
Let the atmosphere of the blessed city
settle down upon our daily walk, and pervade our homes, and inspire our souls.
Let us, through a lively faith in the crucified One, seek to die daily unto sin, and to
live unto righteousness, so that we may the
more and more anticipate the perfect holiness and the exalted communion and the
ineffable happiness of the glorious city.




CHAPTER IV.
T1HE LOCALITY OF PARADISE.
(  [ARADISE  is heaven.  Heaven is
the place where the throne of God,
l'Zx;3I the glorified Jesus, the angels and
the spirits of the just made perfect are. It
is a particular place now existing in the
universe; Enoch and Elijah long ago took
their bodies thither. But what has been
revealed to us as to its precise locality?
i. The Bible uniformly represents it as
being away from the earth. "Elijah went
up by a whirlwind into heaven." 2 Kings
ii. Ii. It would scarcely be necessary to
make this remark but for the purpose of
adding to it another.  Paradise is so far
and so completely separated fr0m  us, that
88




ITS LOCALITY.          89
the glorified spirits of the redeemed have
no communication with the earth in its
present form and dispensation. We have
no reason to think that the human inhabitants of heaven are now in any way
within the range of this world, or hover
about it at any time or in any form.
A considerable amount of Christian sentimentality exists on this point. Apart from
the destructive error which represents departed spirits as holding communications,
in a material manner, with persons who
are still on the earth, there is, perhaps,
in many Christian minds, an undefined idea
that the spirits of their friends may at
times be near them, though they can make
no revelations to them. But there is one
fact which bears with great force against
this notion.
To say nothing of the communications
made to man before the time of Moses,
many of which are preserved in the inspired book of Genesis, the period which




90            PARADISE.
extended from the writing of that book
down to the composition of the Apocalypse, which wound up the circle of miraculous communications, embraced nearly
sixteen hundred years. That was the age
of revelations from heaven to earth. Communications were frequent and many. But
through all those years human spirits were
not sent by God from heaven to make
known his will, to tell about heaven, to
foretell the future, to hold converse of
any kind with men. Angels very often
came down with communications from the
Lord. Supernatural visions were granted
to holy men, who were inspired by God
to write the sacred books. Jesus Christ
appeared on earth and instructed men,
and after his ascension from the earth
made further disclosures through the inspired writers.  But human spirits were
not in the habit of coming back from
their happy abode to communicate with
the men they had left behind.




ITS LOCALITY.         91
There are only two apparent exceptions
to this statement. At the transfiguration
of Christ, Moses and Elijah appeared with
him in glory, and spake of the decease
which he should accomplish at Jerusalem;
but if the three disciples understood, they
did not record, what was said; and even
that appearance had a design that permits
no repetition. In his judicial blindness,
Saul the king demanded of the woman
of Endor that she should bring up Samuel
to him, and the account is given of what
purported to be an apparition from the
spirit-world to the wretched man.  But
it is the opinion of many of the thoughtful, from a careful examination of the narrative, that the whole transaction was a
delusion. It is not evident that the king
saw Samuel. It is nowhere said that he
did see the prophet, though the woman
described what she pretended she saw in
such a way as to make Saul recognize
the description, and he "perceived that it




92                     PARADISE.
was Samuel." As in many other cases
in the Bible, the interview, with the pretence on the woman's part, is reported
without comment, leaving that to be drawn
from the result. But if that were a real
appearance and communication, it is not
one that would commend the matter to
us, for it was permitted as a punishment
and it foretold only evil.*
* The Scripture narrative, as is well said in Dr. W\m. Smith's
Old Testament History, p. 350, "certainly conveys the impression that there was a real apparition in the form of Samuel,
and that the words heard by Saul were uttered by the spectre.
But when we remember that the Scripture relates things as
they appear to the witnesses, without necessarily implying
their reality, the question still remains whether the apparition was real or an imposture. On this point opinions have
been divided in every age." (The most of the Fathers considered it an imposture.)  "All the analogy of experience, all
the deductions of reasoning and all the general lessons of
Scripture unite in branding every form of magic and necromancy as an imposture; and the safest conclusion is to reject
every claim to supernatural power or knowledge in any other
form than as a revelation from God himself, from the arts
of the Egyptian priests and the oracles of the Greeks down
to the pitiful absurdities which find credence in our own day."
In reference to the conversation that appeared to take place




ITS LOCAITY.                     93
The heathen thought that in dreams spirits came back to them from their abode in
the other world. "Thus Homer represents
that Achilles first became convinced that
between Samuel and Saul while the latter stooped with his
face to the ground, it is worthy of notice that the expression
in I Sam. xxviii. 7, "a woman that hath a familiar spirit,"
is literally "a woman mistress of Ob," which the Septuagint
explains as a ventriloquist.  On the other hand, The Annotateed Parafraph Bible of the London Religious Tract Society
(we believe by Dr. Angus) contains the following suggestive note
in loc..- "The clear and decided language of the passage
forbids us to suppose that all this was a mere imposture practiced by the woman, with or without demoniacal aid, and the
teachings of Scripture respecting the limited power of Satan
do not agree with the notion that Samuel was actually called
up by such agency. We must, therefore, regard this as a divine interposition, unexpected by both parties, either producing
miraculously an impression upon the senses of Saul and the
woman, which is not impossible, or causing the real presence
of Samuel, which, when a miracle is admitted, presents no
greater difficulties, agrees more naturally with the language
(for there is no intimation that the whole was a vision), and
is analogous to the resuscitation of which we read elsewhere.
(See Matt. xxvii. 52, 53.)  Thus Saul was rebuked for his
new crime, whilst, like Pharaoh, he received a last solemn
warning on the eve of his destruction. It should be observed
that the answer of Samuel was fulfilled to the letter, and was
anything but such as the woman would have been likely to give."




94             PARADISE.
souls and shadowy forms have a real existence in the kingdom of the shades by the
appearance to him of the departed Patroclus in a dream." An apostate Church has
worked upon the fears and the excited imaginations of its deluded votaries by the
pretended reappearance of saints clothed
even in bodily forms before their resurrection. But the Bible not merely places the
glorified souls far away from the earth, with
its sins and sorrows, but gives no countenance to the idea that they ever come across
the deep profound that separates their present abode from their late dwelling-place.
In heaven they remain, and shall remain
until they come again with Christ at the
last day to receive their bodies redeemed
and glorified.
2. Paradise is, in the language of the
Bible, above the earth: "John bare record,
saying, I saw the Spirit descending from
heaven like a dove." John i. 32. "No man
hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came




ITS LOCALITY.          95
down from heaven." John iii. I3. "After
this I looked, and behold a door was opened
in heaven: and the first voice which I heard
was as it were of a trumpet talking with me,
which said, Come up hither." Rev. iv. I.
" And they heard a great voice from heaven,
saying unto them, Come up hither. And
they ascended up to heaven in a cloud."
Rev. xi. 12.
The earth is a sphere or globe. When we
speak of heaven and point upward, and
when an inhabitant directly opposite to us
on the earth speaks of it and points upward, we point in diametrically opposite
directions. We seem to look to heaven as
one place, and yet as situated in different
quarters of the universe. This is adduced
by some as an exhibition of a want of scientific accuracy in the Bible, while others
say that the expression simply indicates that
heaven is a most exalted place. The latter
explanation is a true one. We speak of
looking up to a man who occupies a higher




96             PARADISE.
position in the world than we do. He is
said to be above us. In this way also the
abode of the glorified redeemed is a far
more exalted place than this earth.
But, after all, this scriptural expression is,
in a physical point of view, more accurate
than some of its impugners would imagine.
We have never met, outside of the holy
book, with a passage which gives a more
striking view of the immensity of the universe, and of course of the infinity and
power of God who made it, while it also
brings out the idea that we intend to convey on this point, than an extract from a
German writer. He embodies his instructions in the form of a dream, which of course
is imaginary, but the truth remains grand
and sublime:
"God called up from dreams a -man into
the vestibule of heaven, saying, Come thou
hither and see the glory of my house. And
to the servants that stood around his throne
he said, Take him and undress him from




IT7S LOCALI TY        97
his robes of flesh; cleanse his vision and
put new breath into his nostrils; only touch
not with any change his human heart, the
heart that weeps and trembles. It was
done; and with a mighty angel for his
guide, the man stood ready for his infinite
voyage; and from the terrace of heaven,
without sound or farewell, at once they
wheeled away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel wing
they fled through Saharas of darkness,
through wildernesses of death that divided
the worlds of life; sometimes they swept
over frontiers that were quickening under
prophetic motions from God. Then, from
a distance that is counted only in heaven,
light dawned for a time through a sleepy
film; by unutterable pace the light swept
to them, they by unutterable pace to the
light. In a moment the rushing of planets
was upon them; in a moment the blazing
of suns was around them. Then came
eternities of twilight that revealed, but were




98              PARADISE.
not revealed. On the right hand and on
the left towered mighty constellations that
by self-repetitions and answers from afar,
that by counter-positions built up by triumphal gates whose architraves, whose
archways, horizontal, upright, rested, rose,
at altitude by spans that seemed ghostly
from infinitude. Without measure were
the architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates. Within
were stairs that scaled eternities below;
above was below, below was above, to the man
siripped of gravitating  body; depth was
swallowed up in height insurmountable;
height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly, as thus they rode from
infinite to infinite, as thus they tilted over
abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose that
systems more mysterious, that worlds more
billowy, other heights and other depths,
were coming, were near, were at hand." *
*Richter; quoted by 0. M. Mitchell in his " Planetary and
Stellar Worlds," p. 287.




ITS LOCALITY.           99
In the immense circle of the universe,
which is ever returning on itself, below is
above and above is below to the man
stripped of a gravitating body. So small
is this world and such its position in the infinite that souls in bounding from its surface, no matter from what side, as they
quickly pass from its immediate region, go
up the one line to reach the heaven they
are bound for.
3. The apostle Paul calls paradise the
"third heaven." 2 Cor. xii. 2. That means
the highest heaven. The first heaven, according to the Jewish idea, was the a-rial
heaven, the region of the atmosphere where
the birds fly, the winds blow and the' clouds
are formed. The second was the firmament, or starry heavens, wherein the heavenly bodies are disposed. The third was
the highest heaven, the place of God's residence, and the dwelling of the angels and
the blessed saints. Thus paradise is declared to be above the clouds and beyond the




I 00               PARADISE.
visible expanzse  or t1he firmaatent  of slavs.
At his ascension a cloud received Jesus
out of the sight of his disciples. Acts i. 9.
"Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne
above the stars of God; I will sit upon the
mount of the congregation, in the sides of
the north; I will ascend above the clouds;
I will be like the Most High." Isa. xiv. 13.
The clouds are declared to be the dust of
God's  feet.* Nah. i. 3.  When Jesus was
baptized, the heavens were opened unto
him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him, and,
lo! a voice from heaven saying, This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
In the presence of the Jewish Sanhedrim
Stephen declared, Behold I see the heav* We think we never fully realized the force and beauty of
this expression until a recent ascent of the White Mountains.
As we slowly wound our way up to the summit we passed
through the clouds, and then, when we reached the top, we beheld them floating below us, in many places looking really like
a fine dust filling the air




ITS LOCALITY.         IOI
ens opened and the Son of man standing
on. the right hand of God.
In these cases there was "an apparent
separation or division of the visible expanse
of heaven," * as if in the one to afford a
passage to the form and voice which are
mentioned as coming down from heaven,
and in the other to enable the first martyr
to see the place where our Redeemer was
and whither he was himself going.
The prophets make use of the expression "the opening of the heavens" to signalize special revelations coming from God
who dwells above. Thus Ezekiel opens
his book with the declaration that the heavens were opened and he saw visions of
God. And Isaiah cries out: "Oh that
thou wouldst' rend the heavens, that thou
wouldst come down, that the mountains
might flow down at thy presence as when
the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth
the waters to boil, to make thy name
* Dr. J. Addison Alexander on Mark i. Io.




I 02           PARADISE.
known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence." Isa.
lxiv. I.
Certainly, then, above all that the naked
eye of the writers of the Bible could discover, is the paradise to which saved souls
go at death.
4. Moreover, it isfar above all these things.
The apostle Paul declares that when Jesus
went up " he ascended far above all heavens
that he might fill all things." Eph. iv. Io.
Away beyond the limits of the visible creation, as the naked eye of man can take it
in, God seems to have established the paradise where our glorified Jesus now is with
the departed souls of the saved.
More definitely than this the Scriptures do not reveal the locality. Therefore
we must be reverent and humble in our
thoughts about it. What we think or what
we say must not be advanced as a dogmatic
utterance. To muse upon it is natural. If
it were God's will, we would all doubt



ITS LOCALITY.         103
less like to know exactly where the place
is. But he has not made it known, and
anything that may be advanced about it
must be received as a surmise until death
come and take us to the place. In ancient
times it was conceived of as the whole expanse of heaven, high above the atmosphere
or starry region. Some modern writers
think of it as a particular planet or world.
It is safe to assume that it must be a place
of peculiar brightness. In the account which
Paul gave to King Agrippa of his conversion he declared: "At midday, O king! I
saw in the way a light from heaven, above
the brightness of the sun, shining round
about me and them which journeyed with
me." Acts xxvi. 13. Did not the heavens,
then, open, and did not the light of paradise
shine down upon the traveler? True, it was
the Shekinah, the glory of God, that surrounded him, but that is the light of heaven.
As we muse upon this most interesting
subject our minds go up and our thoughts




I04            PARADISE.
expand until we are lost in admiration at
the immensity of heaven and the greatness
of our God and Redeemer, who has peopled
it with its world inhabitants. If we fail in
exactly localizing paradise, we are yet
sure that it is the most beautiful, the most
delightful, the most alluring place in all the
universe.
But in our musings the question addressed
by God to Job arrests us: " Canst thou bind
the sweet influences of Pleiades?" This is
the name of a constellation in the northern
part of the heavens.  The Hebrew word
thus rendered means literally a hiJzge, pivo1,
axle, which turns around and moves other
bodies along with it. As we ponder the
question we are reminded that astronomy
has discovered that Alcyone, the brightest
star of the Pleiades, is the centre of gravitation of our vast solar system, the luminous hinge in the heavens around which our
sun and his attendant planets are moving
through space.




ITS LOCALITY.         I05
That sun of ours is not stationary. Our
world, revolving daily on its own axis, revolves also yearly round him; and he and
all the system of worlds dependent upon
him move slowly round that constellation
Pleiades; and to that revolution " is due indirectly and in a higher sense than that of
the old astrological belief the beautiful and
grateful vicissitudes of the seasons on our
earth.
In the vast and complex arrangements
by which worlds on worlds thus revolve
round and through each other, "not one
wheel jars or creaks, not a single discordant sound disturbs the deep, solemn quietude of the midnight sky. Smoothly and
silently each star performs its sublime revolutions.... Moons revolve round planets, comets and planets round the sun, the
sun around Alcyone, and Alcyone round
some other unknown sun hidden far away
in some unexplored depths of our galaxy;
and, grand beyond conception, this cluster




io6            PARADISE.
of systems round the great centre of ten
thousand centres, the white throne of the
Eternal and the Infinite, and all with rhythm
so perfect that we might almost believe in
the old poetic fable of'the music of the
spheres.' "
The heavenly movements are majestic;
but we look for Him who presides over
them. And " in this vision of orbs and
revolutions, more awful and stupendous
than  Ezekiel's vision  of wheels within
wheels, we see on the throne above the
firmament, not a blind chance or a passionless fate, but one like unto the Son of man,
he whom John saw in Patmos, holding the
mystery of the seven stars in his right hand,
possessed of infinite love as well as infinite
power, binding and loosing the sweet influences of Pleiades solely for the good of his
creation." *
In a particular place, on the throne of
the universe, at present hidden away in the
* Sunday Magazine, vol. i., pp. 442, 443.




ITS LOCALITY.         107
depths of the infinite and among those
mighty constellations, is our Redeemer, ruling over all worlds, but bending upon our
earth a peculiarly sympathetic eye. That
place is the paradise where all the departed
spirits of the saved now are; and thither,
if we may be permitted through a penitent
faith in Jesus to indulge the hope, we shall
go at the moment of death.
At the very moment of death all souls
pass immediately from earth either to
heaven or hell, between which places there
is no communication. The redeemed go
at once from the body to Jesus in heaven
without delaying in any intermediate spot.
What could be more direct on this than the
assertion of Christ to the dying penitent?
On the day of his death he was with the
Redeemer in paradise. As soon as Lazarus died his soul was carried by angels to
Abraham in heaven. Paul declares, "We
know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have" (not we




I08            PARADISE.
shall have, but at the moment of dissolution we have) "a house not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens." " Therefore," he adds, "we are always confident,
knowing that whilst we are at home in the
body, we are absent from the Lord," and we
are "willing rather to be absent from the
body and present with the Lord." 2 Cor.
v. I, 6-8. The soul out of the body is in
heaven with its Lord. Therefore the great
working apostle could say again, "To me
to live is Christ and to die is gain;" and "I
am in a strait betwixt two, having. a desire
to depart and be with Christ, which is far
better." Phil. i. 2I, 23.
As we stand at the bedside of a dying
Christian and see in the tremor of the body
its sense of the soul fluttering away from it,
we love to think that even before the corpse
has become entirely cold, while it is still
quivering under the forcible departure of
the spirit from it, the soul itself is already
with the glorified Jesus. It ascends to its




ITS LOCALITY.         Iog09
abode of holiness and happiness more
quickly than the body goes to its bed of
earth.
Does this startle any when they think of
the immense distance at which paradise
seems to be placed from the earth? Let
us cease to judge of the power of the disembodied spirit by its motions whilst it is
clogged in the natural body of earth. God
himself, the great Spirit, is everywhere at
all times. With him distance is not. The
angels are continually passing from heaven
to earth and back again on God's work;
and their speed may be so great in their
transitions from one to the other that "far
as the regions may be asunder they may
make the passage quick as a gleam of lightning and rapid as the twinkling of an
eye." Liberated souls may be borne aloft
as quickly. And once in heaven they remain there, far away from this earth until it
shall be regenerated and purified by the
great conflagration of the last day. Then




'I 10          PARADISE.
they will return; "for if we believe that
Jesus died and rose again, even so them
also which sleep in Jesus will God bring
with him." I Thess. iv. I4. They will come
to reclaim their bodies from the grave and
to reassume them in a glorified form like
the glorified body of Christ; and after that
the seat of their kingdom may be changed.
We are strenuous in guarding against
the idea of any intermediate place between
heaven and earth where the righteous do
not enjoy perfect bliss. "The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in
holiness and do immediately pass into glory
eternal and a high degree of happiness."
As to a change of locality at the judgment
day, "whether the righteous and wicked
after the judgment go literally to the same
place in which they were before situated, it
is not material to inquire; but both before
and after the judgment the righteous will
be in the same place with their glorified
Saviour and his holy angels, and this will




ITS LOCALITY.         I II
be heaven; and before and after the judgment the wicked will be in the same place
with the devil and his angels, and this will
be hell."
But if we read the Bible aright on this
point, after the purification of our globe by
fire and after the judgment day, the heaven
of Christ's redeemed people will be transferred to this earth in its renovated and glorified form.  This seems to be the truth
which John teaches in the twenty-first chapter of his Revelation. He saw a new heaven
and a new earth, for the first heaven and
the first earth were passed away, and there
was no more sea. That new heaven and
new earth the apostle Peter declares will be
the result of the great conflagration. 2 Pet.
iii. And then John adds: "I saw the holy
city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God
out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned
for her husband;" and again: "And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and
high mountain, and showed me that great




I 112          PARADISE.
city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of
heaven from God, having the glory of God."
The view which has been exhibited of
the paradise of the redeemed brings it very
near to us. It is just on the other side
of death. And death is not far off; it is
passing by us every day; it is seizing one
soul after another; and it will lay its hand
upon us very soon, very suddenly, perhaps
ere we are aware.  But let heaven be
brought nearer still to us. It is not merely
a future place, but a present state. "The
kingdom of heaven is within you." Luke
xvii. 2I.  It consists "in righteousness,
peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." Rom.
xiv. I 7. The heaven of grace must enter our souls here, or we cannot enter
the heaven of glory hereafter. Paradise
is a place of exceeding beauty, but its
highest beauty is its holiness.  That is
the atmosphere of the place; and holy
wve must become through the sanctifying
influence of the Spirit of God, or we




ITS LOCALITY.         I I 3
can never enjoy it. While, then, the imagination is captivated by the beautiful
descriptions of the Bible, let us seek to
be brought under the influence of the
holy One. As we gaze upon the glory
of heaven, as we peer away through the
distance that stretches between us and
the place, let us ponder the Saviour's declaration that except we be born again we
cannot see it. Let us not forget that we
must be justified by Christ and sanctified
by the Spirit in order to enter there; and
let us remember that the hour is at hand
when from the throne will sound in the
dying ear the sentence: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which
is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that
is righteous, let him be righteous still:
and he that is holy, let him be holy still."
Rev. xxii. I I.
Those whom death finds unholy cannot
enter heaven. Therefore, bow before the
Redeemer with the petition of a penitent
8




114            PARADISE.
faith: "Renew a right spirit within me.'
Ps. i. I o.  Seek daily to grow in grace.
Then, let death come when and how it
will, life may be closed with the quiet,
confident, triumphant prayer, "Lord Jesus,
receive my spirit" (Acts vii. 59); and immediately the soul shall bound aloft quicker
than the sunbeam, to the great white throne
and to the personal and bodily presence of
Him who gives fullness of joy, and to his
right hand, where pleasures throb and surge
and enrapture for evermore.




CHAPTER V.
TIHE STATE OF SOULS IN PARADISE.
HE Sadducees, who denied the doctrine of the resurrection, once undertook to puzzle our Lord and
to insinuate a "grave scoff" at the truth
which they rejected. Luke xx. 27-38. They
quoted a regulation of the Mosaic law
which is recorded in Deut. xxv. 5-IO, and
which was of a temporary character for the
purpose of preserving the tribes of Israel
in their distinct existence. The quibblers
started a fictitious and, we may say, an improbable case under that law.  It is not
likely that it ever had been a fact; and they
asked in a sneering tone, If this woman and
her seven husbands rise again in the body
115




I 6            PARADISE.
of which of the seven shall she be the wife?
In reply the divine Teacher corrected the
low and carnal construction which the question put on the resurrection by declaring
that after that event, as the inhabitants of
the sinless land cannot possibly die, so
there will be no such thing as marriage
and propagation to make up for death.
This is one respect in which the spiritual
body, while the same as the natural body,
will differ from it. Then the blessed Master, speaking with the authority which
belonged to him, asserted that the bodily
resurrection is really involved in true views
of the existence of the soul; and because
of the union between the spiritual and the
physical in man, as the one lives on for
ever, the other miust rise from the grave
to make the person complete. The proof
of it is this: Moses wrote that, hundreds
of years after the death of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, God declared: "I am  their
God," showing that they were still living




TILE S TA TE OF SO ULS.    II7
after their physical death. "To you," inti
mates the Saviour-" to you, skeptical Sadducees, that may seem  to  be a mere
reminiscence of the past; but I can tell
you that the patriarchs are there referred
to not as persons who exist no longer,
nor even as disembodied spirits, but as
living men possessed of souls and bodies,
whose God Jehovah is to be for ever-a
relation partially suspended for the present by the separation of those parts, but
hereafter to be fully reinstated by the resurrection and redemption of the body." 
And this, which was true of the patriarchs,
is true of all, "for all live unto God." They
are all immortal. They do not, like brutes,
die when their bodies are decomposed in
the  grave.  They  are  not annihilated.
They continue to live under the control
of God.
This grand declaration of the infallible
One introduces us to the life of saved
* Dr. J A. Alexander in loco.




I I8           PARADISE.
souls, while out of their bodies, in the
paradise whither they are translated immediately from their earthly abode.
I. That life continues to be a distinct individual life. The souls of the saved, as
they go from their bodies to heaven, retain
their separate existence, their personality.
Here their residence in visible bodies marks
off the distinction of souls from each other,
and it might, therefore, occur to some that
when they pass from their earthly tenements into the widely-peopled spirit-world
they may in some way lose that distinction
and be confused with others. But "when
the dust returns to the earth as it was, the
spirit returns to God who gave it —not,
as some have dreamed, to be reabsorbed
by the divine essence from which it originally emanated, but, continuing to preserve
its separate being, to enter on a new form
of existence." Its individuality does not
disappear in the divine essence, nor is it
lost in the maze of universal existence.




TILE SATE 7  OF SOULS.    I 19
In the account of the restoration to life
of the son of the widow of Zarephath it is
said that Elijah the prophet "stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried
unto the Lord and said, O Lord my God,
I pray thee let this child's soul come into
him again," or, as it is in the margin of the
Bible, "into his inward parts." "And the
Lord heard the voice of Elijah; and the
soul of the child came into him again, and
he revived." I Kings xvii. 2I, 22. When
Jesus took the dead daughter of Jairus by
the hand and  said, "Maid, arise," "her
spirit came again, and she arose straightway." Luke viii. 55. Akin to this is the
declaration of Paul: " For we know that if
our earthly house of this tabernacle were
dissolved, we have a building of God, a
house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens." 2 Cor. v. I.
There is a philosophic heresy which
teaches that the soul is not a being entirely distinct in substance from matter, but




I20            PARADISE.
only the result of our peculiar bodily organization, and that when the body decays and
is disorganized what is called the soul ceases
to exist, until the body is reorganized again
in a similar way to result in thinking.
This low materialistic notion floats about
a good deal in the current and popular
literature of the day. The passages just
quoted from the Bible show that it recognizes no such dogma. They draw a
sharp distinction between the human spirit
and the body, intimately united though
they are, for the spirit is spoken of under the figure of an inmate inhabiting
the body as a temporary earthly tenement.
They also point to the continued separate
existence of the soul in a personal condition after death; for if the spirit goes
away from the body and can come Lack to
it as it did in those cases, the inference is
unquestionable that in the mean time it continues to exist somewhere else in as perfectly distinct and individual a mode as it




THYE STA1TE OF SOULS.      121
did while in the body-an inference which
is placed beyond all doubt by the parable
of Dives and Lazarus and by the temporary
reappearance in glory of Moses and Elijah
at the transfiguration of Christ.
In the present stage of our existence the
clearly-defined bodily form marks off each
individual from all others. In the heavenly
world each soul, while out of the body, is
to other spiritual intelligences as distinctly
divided from its fellows. Immediately at
death it leaves the earth and takes its station near the throne in the glorious light
of God's countenance, and amid the spiritual blaze of heaven. In the highest sense
it then becomes perfectly a partaker of the
divine nature. But "as the air when thoroughly illumined by sunshine still keeps its
aerial nature and does not become sunshine, or as iron all red in the flame still
keeps its metallic substance and does not
turn to fire itself, so a soul fully possessed
and moved by God does not in conse



122                PAtRADISE.
quence lose its own sentient and intelligent
being." It is still a being of distinct existence, with its own thoughts and feelings and
volitions separate from all others. Thus
disembodied spirits can recognize each
other. A living English poet has most
beautifully sung this Christian truth:
"That each who seems a separate whole
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again should fall
Remerging in the general soul,
" Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside,
And I shall know him when we meet."
How exceedingly splendid must the appearance of the soul be!  If the glory of
heaven transfigured the body of our Lord
even while he was on the earth, so that the
fashion of his countenance was altered and
his raiment was white and glistering,-if after
he ascended to the brilliant land his countenance war as the sun shineth in his strength,



THE STATE OF SOULS.       123
and if his people after the resurrection day
shall wear bodies like unto his glorious body,
-may we not rest assured that as the soul,
which is to have such a resplendent eternal
abode, passes from the earthly tabernacle
in which it is now confined, it appears a
shining and brilliant being? We know not
no.w what a human spirit is like, for it is
"cabined, cribbed, confined" in an imperfect sinful body; nor can we imagine,
and perhaps just as little could any of us
yet gaze upon, the glorious appearance
which the translated souls wear in the better land.
2. The life of the blessed souls in paradise is an unceasingly active life. As they
pass into their intermediate state they not
only retain their separate personality, but
they continue unceasingly active in it. We
look upon a body just after it has died, and
we behold it entirely motionless. It can
be moved, but it cannot move itself. Naturally the question arises, Is the soul which




124            PARADISE.
has passed out of this tenement also in a passive condition? Wherever it may be, is it
as quiet and motionless as the physical
frame is? And perhaps the first prompting is to think, as even some Christian
writers do think, that the rest into which
the immortal spirit has entered may be
somewhat similar to the passive rest of its
earthly tabernacle.
Such an idea, however, should not be entertained. The human spirit not only continues to exist after,the death of the body,
but the consciousness of its life is unbroken
and unsuspended for a single instant. The
soul never becomes insensible. It never
sleeps. It never ceases to be active. Neither at death nor at any subsequent period
is there a suspension of rational life, or a
weakening of its powers, or a failure to
connect the past with the present existence.  The spirit continues to think and
feel and act without intermission. Above
all, the new and higher life which is com



THE STATE OF SOULS.         I25
municated in regeneration exists on through
death without any break; and this carries
along with it the continued exercise and enjoyment of that life. The spiritual part
of the believer neither dies, sleeps, nor becomes inactive for one instant.
This is involved in what Paul declares:
"'If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit " —that is, in this
passage, the human spirit-" is life because
of righteousness." Rom. viii. io. The body
shall die, but the soul shall continue to live;
it is itself life. Life in such a manner belongs to it that unless we think of it as entirely blotted out of being into nothingness,
which is impossible, we must conceive of it
as retaining all its energies without any
cessation. Bodily death is a part of the
world's curse from which not even the justified believer is freed, though at the resurrection it shall be overcome: from the spiritual and eternal death of the soul he is delivered when the Holy Spirit takes up his




126            PARADISE.
abode in him; and then on, on, for.ever and
ever, through this life, through physical
death and through eternity, his life glows
and burns, never going out, never growing
dim.
This truth is also asserted in the declaration of the Redeemer: "Verily, verily, I say
unto you, He that heareth my word and
believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto
life." John v. 24. And how cheeringly does
it ring through what is perhaps the most
heart-stirring of all Christ's declarations!
"I am the resurrection and the life: he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet
shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." John xi. 25,
26. Not only shall the dead body live
again when the archangel's trump shall be
heard sounding through the graves of
earth, but the soul which is born anew in
this life, and lives and believes, shall never




THE STATE OF SOULS.        127
die; and as the essential idea of life is activity, there shall be no suspension in its powers of action.
Here also comes in Paul's strong expression of his faith: "For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation
by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us,
that whether we wake or sleep," whether
in the body we live or die, "we should live
together with him." I Thess. v. 9, Io.
Take away this truth from the fifth chapter of Second Corinthians, and the peculiar
force of that comforting chapter is destroyed.
Without this what would become of Paul's
declaration to the Philippians: "To me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I
live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labor:
yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I
am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire
to depart, and to be with Christ; which is
far better"? Phil. i. 21-23.  Eighteen centuries have rolled around since the apostle
uttered that declaration. How many more




I 28           PARADISE.
years shall pass before the resurrection God
only knows. Can any man suppose that the
intensely energetic mind of Paul, used to
action, and loving action, in the cause of his
Redeemer, and ever on the wing from land to
land in the advancement of the divine glory,
would have esteemed it far better to sink
into such a long period of unconsciousness
and inactivity? Better to be in a condition
in which for hundreds and hundreds of years
he should know nothing, think nothing, feel
nothing, than to enjoy those rapturous views
of God and heaven which he had when
caught up into Paradise?  Better to be an
inert, passive thing, doing nothing for Christ,
enjoying nothing of Christ, than to be laboring continuously for the glory of God in
the salvation of souls, and in that labor tasting the joy of the Lord as his strength?
No, no!  With all the spirits of the just
made perfect he is now, and has been since
he died, as active as he ever was in the
body. His life had been one of intense suf



THE STATE OF SOULS.       129
ferings-did ever any man have more of
them?- but it was not merely relief from
them that made death desirable. It was the
assurance of being immediately with Jesus,
and in the active enjoyment of his presence,
that impelled the apostle to ecstasy.
It may be added that the parable of the
rich man and Lazarus affords additional
proof of this position.  Activity is there,
both in Abraham and Dives; and the time
covered by the parable is the period between death and the resurrection, for the
five brethren of the rich man were still living
on the earth.
There is one passage in the Old Testament which forcibly expresses the fact that
while the bodies are lying in the graves
their souls continue active: "The righteous
perisheth and no man layeth it to heart:
and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away
from the evil. He shall enter into peace:
they shall rest in their beds, each one walk9




130            PARADISE.
ing in his uprightness." Isa. lvii. I, 2. The
word "walk " is in Scripture frequently used
to express the whole active life.  Thus,
"walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye
are called" (Eph. i;. I)-that is, live daily
in such a manner as becomes your high
position. So Isaiah declares that, while the
bodies of the righteous rest in their graves
as in their beds, the souls are living, acting,
in their uprightness.
But what does the Bible mean when it
speaks of death as a sleep? This is one
of the most delightful images under which
death is represented in the inspired volume.
Thus, instead of saying that Stephen died,
it is declared " he fell asleep." Acts vii. 60.
Notwithstanding the various passages of
Scripture which have been quoted, some
understand by this a cessation of all action,
a passive, inactive state not only in the
body, but in the soul as well. They suppose
it is possible for the soul to be without
the exercise of thought.  This erroneous




THE STATE OF SOULS.       T31
philosophy applied to revelation puts a
false interpretation upon it; and it is one
instance of the fact that the different interpretations, which prevail in the Church,
of those passages of the word of God
that draw their expressions from, or border
on, human science are not the fault of the
Bible itself, but of the erroneous impressions, and the erroneous systems of philosophy, which men bring with them to the
book and place between their minds and
the inspired words.  But the only idea
which we have of the soul is that it is a
substance which thinks and feels and wills.
If we conceive of it as losing its power
to act, we divest it of all that we really
know about it. We believe, however, that
the soul never sleeps, never becomes unconscious and inactive for a single moment,
even in this life. What we call sleep, what
we need to enjoy every day, is the suspension of communication between the soul
and the external world caused by the




132            PARADISE.
weary, worn-out condition of the body, or
rather of the nervous system, which is the
means of communication. Self-consciousness is lost-the ego as related to time and
place and external circumstances. All the
while the soul is thinking, but the means
of communication with the outside world
are suspended; the wires are down, the
electric fluid does not pass over them, no
message can be received from or sent to
the world. That this is so appears from
this consideration: Dreams belong to an
imperfect sleep, or to a transition state
between sound sleep and perfect waking.
In that state the body, or the nervous part
of it, is not entirely asleep. The thoughts
of the mind pass over it, and we are conscious of them, in their connection with
the external world, though in a disjointed
or exaggerated form.  The inference is
strong that the mental activity is always
going on; but in a very sound sleep, when
the bodily senses are altogether locked up,




THE STATE OF SOULS.       I33
or the nervous communication prostrated,
we are not conscious of them, or do not remember them.
We are inclined to think, then, that this
expression is, in the Bible, applied only to
the body. A body that has just died and
one that is asleep look very much alike.
Therefore the same term is used for both
conditions, though the cause of the appearance in each is different. This is all the
word "sleep" itself suggests. It refers to
the supine appearance of the body-its
falling back and sinking down through the
relaxation of the muscles.  This is the
first fact obvious to the eye as regards
the sleeping body; and the same thing
appears in a corpse.
This application is sustained by the declaration in the book of Daniel, where
the expression is applied not only to the
righteous, but also to the wicked: "Many
of them that sleep in the dust of the
earth shall awake, some to everlasting




I34                 PARADISE.
life, and some to shame and everlasting
contempt." Dan. xii. 2, 3. That declaration, too, is directly limited to the body,
for the soul does not sleep in the dust.
In this view the expression means that
"dead bodies are destitute of sense and incapable of labor. They sleep in the dust
free from pain and fatigue themselves, and
incapable of being the means of affecting
with weariness or suffering the spirit with
which they were once so closely conjoined." *:
How delightful this is! And as we gaze
upon the dead body of a Christian friend,
how sweetly come the words:
"The languishing head is at rest,
Its thinking and aching are o'er;
The quiet, immovable breast
Is heaved by affliction no more.
"The heart is no longer the seat
Of trouble and torturing pain;
It ceases to flutter and beat,
It never will flutter again.
* "The Dead in Christ," by John Brown, D. D., p. 37.




THE STA4TE OF SOULS.          135
"The lids which so seldom could close,
By sorrow forbidden to sleep,
Now, sealed in their mortal repose,
Have for ever forgotten to weep."
If, however, the souls of believers are to
be brought within the application of the
word, it means that "to them the state of
death is a state free from peril..... There
is no more hazard in death to a Christian
than  in  sound  sleep  to a healthy man.
Rather, it is like the salutary sleep which
often terminates disease and restores to
health. It is the peaceful interval between
the distempered state of the present evil
world and the absolutely perfect rest which
is to  follow  the resurrection.... Freed
from the evils of life, from the temptations
of Satan, from the remains of sin, the departed saint is an entire stranger to fatigue
and pain.  He has desires, but no disquieting ones. His desires arise not from a
painful sense of destitution, but entirely
from the assurance of a still higher degree




136                   PARADISE.
of holy happiness to meet enlarged capacities for it. He has hope, but it is unmingled  with  fear.   It is the  full, assured  expectation of the adoption, the redemption
of the  body and  of the glories and joys of
the  final  state,  the   grace  that  is  to  be
brought to  him  at the  revelation  of Jesus
Christ." *
With this explanation we may adopt the
beautifully musical verses which Tennyson
wrote on the death of a very dear friend,
and in which he unites soul and body as
enjoying the sleep, though the verses are
not exactly correct in point of theology or
philosophy:
"Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;
Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.
"Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet,
Nothing comes to thee new or strange;
Sleep full of rest from head to feet;
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change."
* " The Dead in Christ," by John Brown, D. D., pp. 35-39



THE STATE OF SOULS.       I37
Consider death, therefore, as the wonderful translation of the soul, with all its activities, from the land of conflict to the land of
triumph. Look not at it with the glamour
of a dead body on the eye. The physical
frame, after a struggle with sickness and
pain, falls over and is quiet; no action, no
life, is in it. But the soul, almost ere the
pulse has ceased to beat, at one bound,
quicker than the lightning flash, we cannot
doubt, mounts aloft to paradise.  Unperceived by human eyes it passes away from
the room in which the earthly tabernacle lies cold and stiff; but not so does it
enter the building of God, the house not
made with hands. It makes a glorious entrance into the new Jerusalem. Before we
are certain that the breath has left the body
the soul is crowned with an eternal crown
from the hand of the Redeemer, and enthroned upon an everlasting throne; for the
promises are: " Be thou faithful unto death,
and I will give thee a crown of life;" and




138            PARADISE.
"To him that overcometh will I grant to sit
with me in my throne, even as I also overcame and am set down with my Father in
his throne." Rev. ii. I o; iii. 21.  Angels
receive it. Spirits of the just made perfect
who have gone before look on it with rapture, and welcome it to their number. And
at once it takes its place among the innumerable multitude who worship the glorified
Lamb, saying: "Thou wast slain, and hast
redeemed us to God by thy blood out of
every kindred, and tongue, and people, and
nation: and hast made us unto our God
kings and priests: and we shall reign on
the earth." Rev. v. 9. It has life in its high
spiritual form, without cessation, without alloy, pure and perfect in all its manifestations. This is the rich assurance which we
have in reference to the present condition
of our glorified redeemed. This is the precious hope with which, through a penitent
faith in the crucified One, we approach our
own death.




THE STATE OF SOULS.                    I39
For his saved people Jesus has abolished
death. Their bodies fall asleep in him, and
rest in the bed which he has sanctified.
Their souls are at once translated to paradise. In strict truth, therefore,
"It is not death to die,
To leave this weary road,
And'midst the brotherhood on high
To be at home with God.
" It is not death to close
The eye long dimmed by tears,
And wake in glorious repose
To spend eternal years.
"It is not death to bear
The wrench that sets us free
From dungeon chain to breathe the air
Of.boundless liberty.' It is not death to fling
Aside this sinful dust,
And rise on strong exulting wing
To live among the just.
"Jesus, thou Prince of life,
Thy chosen cannot die;
Like thee, they conquer in the strife,
To reign with thee on high."




CHAPTER VI.
THE EMPL 0 YMETT'S OF SOULS IN PARADISE.
AVING  seen that souls continue
active after they leave the body,
d4 s.it will be interesting to consider
how they act.
On the general subject of their employment in Paradise the following remarks
should be kept in mind:
I. From the activity of the soul, during
the period between death and the resurrection, we ought to dissociate everything that
is physical. We must not think of it as
acting in any way through material organs,
or in the modes in which it does here
through the senses.  Bodily movements,
occupations and enjoyments must be rejected. Here lies one radical defect of
140




THE EMPLOYMENTS OF SOULS.  I4I
modern "spiritualism," so called, though
it is really the baldest kind of materialism.
It represents disembodied spirits as engaged in bodily works similar to those
which occupied their attention on earth; a
good old grandmother, for instance, as having knitting-needles in heaven and busily
plying her vocation in a land where there
are no cold feet to need stockings!
2. The native and the acquired sinless
powers and capacities of the soul, so far at
least as they are not dependent upon, the
bodily senses, are retained in active exercise. Two radical changes pass upon the
saved human spirit at death-its perfect
release from sin and its deliverance from
the trammels of the body, with perhaps the
development of powers which were not
manifested while caged up in a cramping
and sinful tabernacle. With the exception
of these two sudden changes, "the life after
death is an immediate continuation of the
present life  The soul is not altered in




142             P_ RADIS.E.
death, but takes along with it its dispositions, its habits and whole tendency into
the future world. The life to come taken
in connection with the present make together one whole, even as manhood is
only the continuation of youth."* "The
laws of all the visible elements may vanish;
the discoveries of science, as far as they
are experimental discoveries, may yet be
superseded by laws and relations of a different character, if a reason should exist to
command the alteration; but, from the nature of the system to which he belongs, the
principal laws of conscious being may be
presumed to be interwoven in its permanent identity, and thence to be its laws for
ever." t'It is but the application of this principle
to say that sinless peculiarities of mind,
which, in the kingdom of grace, mark different men, may be retained and continue
* Knapp's " Christian Theology," sec. cxlviii. 2.
William Archer Butler.




THE EMPLOYAIEATTS OF SOULS.  I43
active in heaven, so that there will be a
diversified active life there. If a man, under the influence of his home and collegiate
education, has developed a philosophical, or
a scientific, or a poetic, or a mathematical
character, he does not, when he becomes
converted to God, lose that character. Regeneration does not destroy it. Sanctification does not wear it away. The influence
of the Spirit brings it, and its acquired
treasures, and its active powers, into the
service of Jesus.  There is nothing irrational or unscriptural in the supposition
that these differences, which men take into
the kingdom of grace on earth, may accompany them into the kingdom of glory
in heaven. Mental and moral habits which
have been acquired by repeated practice,
and carefully cultivated and employed for
God, will not be cast behind as the soul
enters the beautiful land. So far from this
being the case, we may suppose, on the contrary, that they will find a larger scope for




144            PARA DISE.
their exercise than they had here, and be
used for ever to glorify God.
This is an important principle. We shall
enter heaven with the sinless character
which, under the influence of God's grace,
we have formed here. So that every improvement that we make tells on eternity.
3. The activity of these powers of the
soul is intensified in paradise. The life of
heaven is a higher spiritual life than this.
It is free from the limitations and imperfections of the body of sin. The soul on entering it must be quickened into wonderfully increased energy. It seems to be the
teaching of Peter that the spirit of Jesus
was thus quickened as it ascended from the
cross; and if that could be the case with his
pure spirit when liberated from his sinless
body, much more must it be so in the case
of the souls of the just which are released
from imperfect and diseased bodies.
This is a delightful thought. There are
many around us, some dear to us, who,




TILE EMPLOYA MENTS OF SOULS.  I45
through a defective bodily organization,
show weak, inactive, sluggish minds. The
soul looks very dimly out through the windows of sense upon the world. All of us
have pains and defects which interfere with
and cripple the mind in its action. Disease
and trouble sadly mar our mental efforts.
From all these we shall ere long be released; and the soul shall mount up to
God rejoicing in its inherent energy, burning in reflected brightness before the throne,
waiting for a glorified body like unto the
glorified form of Jesus, which shall have no
defect and be a meet temple for the soul
through the remaining eternity.
4. The activity of the disembodied souls
is uninterrupted. They need no repose or
relaxation, for they "rest not day and night"
(Rev. iv. 8) praising God. "They serve
him day and night in his temple." Rev. vii.
I 5. While the alternations of day and night
here bring along with them the necessity
for rest, it is not so with the spirits of the
10




I46           PARADISE.
just in heaven. They never weary nor
experience fatigue.
Their activity is, in a high sense, in the
service of God. They ever worship him.
Everything that is in them, every new discovery they make, gives them new food for
praise. It is not true that the employment
of heaven is "little more than a grand eternal act of worship by singing psalms of
praise." This, it is to be feared, is the view
that many have, They look upon heaven as
an unspeakably happy place, in which they
seem to imagine the redeemed will be doing
nothing all the while but looking at Jesus and
singing to him-that they will be so wrapped
up in that as to be thinking of and doing
nothing else, and so enraptured with the
sight of Jesus as to desire to know no one
else. This is a very incomplete view of the
life of heaven. There is, however, a foundation for it in a superficial reading of the
revelations of Scripture which make so
much of worship.  No doubt that is a




TIlE EMPL 0 YAMENTS OF SOULS.    47
chief employment of the beautiful land,
"for praise is but the necessary expression
of love, admiration, joy. In what way this
praise is to be expressed I know notwhether in the spontaneous exercise of
individual souls,'singing as they shine,'
with hymned voices and fashioned instruments of golden harp or angelic trumpet,
or only by the rapid gaze of a spirit absorbed in still communion; and whether in
heaven as on earth there may be great days
of the Lord on which the sons of God,
gathered from far, will come specially before
the exalted Redeemer, when their joy, uttered by outbursts of harmony, shall awake
the amphitheatre of the skies with impassioned hallelujahs, who can as yet tell?" 
But praise in some form there is, and every
new acquisition that the soul makes in knowledge and in activity gives a new sentiment
to its song; every advance that it makes
onward and upward in the perfect yet ever
* Norman McLeod's "Parish Papers," pp. 136, 137.




148           PARADISE.
progressive life of heaven makes it thrill
with another note; every new soul that
joins the heavenly choir increases its sympathy and volume. With all the powers
and all the knowledge that redeemed souls
have when they enter heaven they commence the strain; and every communication
that is made to them, every increase in
knowledge, gives them fresh materials with
which to magnify their God.
Under this thought we may group some
of those mental powers which are specially
represented in the Bible as engaged in the
service. Let it be observed that the word
of God does not profess to give full descriptions of heaven. Its great object is to
teach us how to get there. The hints which
it throws out, about the activity of its inhabitants and their mode of life, are only
incidental and in connection with other
things. We do not look upon them as
complete. They leave much for us to find
out when we reach the blessed land. What




TIE EMIPLO YiMENTS OF SOULS.  I49
we exhibit now we cull as clusters of Engedi. From what is certainly given we can
infer much more.
The memory of souls, while out of their
bodies, is active. "Son, remember" (Luke
xvi. 25), said Abraham to the rich man of
the parable. This is involved also in the
new song which is sung in heaven between
death and the resurrection: " Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals
thereof; for thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of
every kindred, and tongue, and people, and
nation." Rev. v. 9. The glorified spirits of
the just made perfect continue to have a
vivid recollection of redemption's story, of
their own winning to Christ, and of their
conflicts in the spiritual life.
But they also receive further knowledge.
Much of their own past history was an
enigma while on earth. There is much
that the Bible does not explain about the
creation of this world, with which the geol



150            PARADISE.
ogist often tries to puzzle the humble child
of God; much that is unknown in the past
history of the world. There are many difficulties in the inspired book with which the
acute skeptic may annoy us. All these, we
doubt not, glorified souls have cleared up
when they enter heaven, so that the least
of them knows more than the mightiest
scholar here.
It has been well remarked that a child
who has read the first ten chapters of the
book of Genesis is better instructed in ancient history than the greatest man of literature and speculation who has not the
Bible in his hands. We feel assured that
every soul that has passed into the new
Jerusalem knows more about the secrets
of the earth, its creation and its history,
than all the schools of the world's geologists; more of the history of man and of
the nations of the earth than all its historians; and more of science than all its natural
philosophers.




THE E.IPi 0o Y'IEi7'TS 0F SO LS.   151
Let this comfort the poor hard-working
Christian who cannot get time to study the
world's literature, but who is in his lowly
place serving the Lord with the knowledge he has. As the Bible has infinitely
more positive truth about man, his early
existence and his destiny than all the speculations of philosophers, so the first ray
that falls from the great white throne upon
the soul as it enters heaven banishes much
of the mystery that the Bible intentionally
leaves over us here, and makes clear and
precise what is now obscure and vague.
To guard, however, against an erroneous
inference which some might draw from this
-that, no matter how they live, if they are
just saved at the last, they shall be equal
in heaven to the greatest and most useful
saints-it should be observed that in the
glorified society "there can be no sameness either in the past history or in the intellectual capacity of its members. How
vast must be the difference between the




152             PARADISE.
history of Gabriel, the thief on the cross,
the apostle Paul and the child who died on
its first birthday!"   Those who think that a
death-bed repentance, if they can only make
sure of that, or a sluggish Christian life,
which selfishly presumes to rejoice in their
own salvation while little or nothing is done
for the advancement of Christ's glory in
the salvation of others, will introduce them
to heaven on a level with the zealous and
active followers of Jesus, misapprehend the
great doctrine of reward (of grace and for
Christ's sake indeed, but) according to our
works.
Further, new glories of creation burst
upon glorified souls and are apprehended
by their perceptive powers.  It is of redeemed spirits before the resurrection of
their bodies that John declares, in his
apocalyptic vision, that they " fell down
before him that sat on the throne, and
worshiped him that liveth for ever and
* "Parish Papers," by Norman McLeod, D. D., p. I25.




THE E MPL  YAIENTS OF SOULS.  15 3
ever, and cast their crowns before the
throne saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord,
to receive glory, and honor, and power:
for thou hast created all things, and for
thy pleasure they are and were created."
Rev. iv. Io, II. Do they simply have new
views of past creations? or does their
power of perception extend into new regions of infinitude where God's creative
power is still being exercised?  Do new
worlds burst upon their view? and are
they glorifying God for them?  Is God
ever creating? and are they ever beholding new works of his hand?
Moreover, the progress of Christ's kingdom on earth is made known to them as it
advances. If there be joy in the presence
of God among the angels and among the
glorified redeemed over the repentance of
souls, the knowledge of that repentance
must, whenever it occurs, reach the blessed
place. Every new destruction of Satan's
power is also revealed to them; for we




154              PARADISE.
read again of the period before the resurrection: "I heard a loud voice saying in
heaven, Now is come salvation and strength
and the kingdom of our God and the
power of his Christ; for the accuser of
the brethren is cast down, which accused
them before God day and night. And they
overcame him by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony, and
they loved not their lives unto the death.
Therefore, rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that
dwell in them." Rev. xii. I O-I2.
How the disembodied souls obtain all this
information we shall not seek to determine.
We believe, though, they perpetually receive new and bright revelations from
God, beginning in a peculiar manner at
death:
"Putting off their mortal vesture, in their source their souls
they steep;
Truth by actual vision learning, on its form their gaze they
keep,
Drinking from the living fountains draughts of living waters deep."




THE EMPLOYMENTS OF SOULS.  I55
They learn from Jesus, from the angels
whose companions they are, from the redeemed who have gone before and with
whom they associate; for they are with
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the
glorified. For aught we can tell, also, the
soul's powers of perception may be such
that, even from the far-off place where
heaven is, it can see this earth and pierce
through creation's bonds. "Abraham sees
the rich man in hell. The holy inhabitants
of heaven see the smoke of the torment
of the lost ascending up for ever and ever."
May they not more easily perceive this
earth and its passing transactions? Would
not this give great point to the appeal of
Paul: "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and
the sin that doth so easily beset us"? Rev.
Xii. I.
"The soul of man," says Dr. Archibald
Alexander in his "Religious Experience,"




156            PA.RADISE.
"though probably greatly enlarged in its
powers, may have new faculties developed
for which there was no use here and of
which it had no consciousness; yet the
field of knowledge being boundless, and
our minds being capable of attaining only
to one thing at a time, our knowledge of
celestial things will be gradually acquired
and not perfected at once," in the sense
of possessing all that can be known, though
what is known will be perfect in the sense
of being accurate and free from  error.
The soul continues to learn when it enters
heaven, and will go on learning for ever.
"Indeed, there can be no limit set to the
progress in knowledge, and it will be endless. No doubt the unalloyed pleasures
of the future state will be intimately connected with this continual increase of divine
knowledge.  And as here knowledge is
acquired by the aid of instructors, why
may not the same be the fact in heaven?
What a delightful employment to the saints,




TIlE EMRIPL 0 YAITS, OA F SOU TLS.   157
who have been drinking in the knowledge
of God and his works for thousands of
years, to communicate instruction to the
saints just arrived!   How  delightful to
conduct the pilgrim, who has just finished
his race, through the ever-blooming bowers
of paradise, and to introduce him to this
and the other ancient believer, and to assist
him to find out and recognize, among so
great a multitude, old friends and earthly
relatives!" * The recognition of friends in
heaven is one source of the happiness of
the blessed place, and the recognition is not
confined to the bodily form. There is a
recognition of souls.
Does it strike any humble-minded Christian with surprise to hear that as his soul at
death enters heaven he may at once, after
having gazed upon the glorified Jesus, meet
some Old Testament saint whom he never
saw in the flesh, or some dear Christian
friends who had died before him, and that
- " Religious Experience," ch. xxii., p. 507; new edition.




5 8           PARADISE.
they may tell him much about the glories
of heaven, and take him to other saints and
parted friends, and that with them he may
hold communion about what has been passing on earth just before he left it?  Shall
he be surprised at the idea of the redeemed
who had gone before telling him of what
has taken place in heaven, and of his telling
them what had just happened on earth? If
so, is it not because heaven is not enough
thought about as a social place with human
souls in it?
At the transfiguration of Jesus, Moses and
Elijah appeared communing with him of his
decease. That transfiguration has ever been
considered as a temporary appearance of
the glory of heaven and of its life upon
the earth. Thus Bishop Hall says in his
"Meditations": "What comfort, what assurance of future blessedness, was thus
afforded to those living witnesses who were
present at this stupendous scene! With
what joy did they behold these examples




THE EMP O YAENTS OF SOULS.   I59
of the glory that shall be revealed! They
saw in Moses and Elias what themselves
should be after they had passed through
the grave and gate of death." A desire to
know about the future, then, and inquiries
in regard to it, occupy glorified souls while
out of the body.
Doubtless fields of active labor for Christ
are found in paradise.  Each soul does
there the work for which it has been exquisitely adapted and carefully trained by
the life of Christian discipline on earth.
Heaven cannot be a world of listless inactivity, of holy idleness and mere rest, even
with singing as an accompaniment. It must
be "a world of action and unwearied diligence in doing God's will and in executing
his commands." Otherwise it would be out
of all analogy with the kingdom of grace, in
which the first question put by the new-born
soul is, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to
do?" Acts ix. 6. It is a place of rest from
the fatigue and weariness of labor, for




I60            PAR ADiSE.
"Blessed are the dead which die in the
Lord, yea, saith the Spirit, that they may
rest from their labors, and their works do
follow them" (Rev. xiv. I3); but it cannot
be a place of cessation from holy labors
which in a sinless state will bring no
fatigue.
The various emotions and affections which
flow from such knowledge and employments
as have thus been referred to are involved
in the activity of the soul-joy, gratitude,
love to God and to the other redeemed,
especially to those who were friends on
earth, desire of knowledge, desire of society. The worship which the disembodied
souls pay to God is one of rapturous gratitude in union and communion with each
other, and this implies the ever-active exercise of all the powers of the soul. In the
sixth chapter of the Revelation, John exhibits the souls of the martyrs as expressing a
desire for justice upon the persecutors of
the Church: " How long, O Lord, holy and




THE EMPL O YIE N TS O F S 0ULS.      I
true, dost thou not avenge our blood on
them that dwell on the earth?" Rev. vi. Io.
If it be true that redeemed souls pass
into the heavenly world with no sinless
power or capacity destroyed, then, while we
talk about them, they perceive, they remember, they converse with each other and with
Christ, they reflect, they reason. They have
no sorrow, no repentance, no remorse, no
sinful feeling; but they have joy, and they
sympathize in each other's joy; they enjoy
the new and the wonderful, the beautiful
and the sublime in nature which we now
perceive, and much more which they perceive; they love each other; they enjoy
each other's society; they desire to increase in knowledge; they worship God;
they are instructed by the Redeemer directly and through other saints; and doubtless, since they are free from bodily trammels, mental powers are developed in them
which in contrast leave us but as babblers
in the divine life and in all knowledge.
11




I62            PARADISE.
Whether the glorified human spirits ever
leave paradise to soar through other parts
of the universe, or to make temporary visits
to earth, the Bible does not say. We cannot deny the possibility of their returning
here, and even of making revelations to
living men, if such were the will of God.
But there is nothing in the Bible to lead us
to believe in such a return as an actual fact;
and most certainly new revelations are not
made to men on earth through their instrumentality. They are ever learning much
that is new; but the Bible contains all the
revelation that God has designed to make
to us while we are here. This is our allsufficient guide for this life. The canon is
closed: "If any man shall add unto these
things, God shall add unto him the plagues
that are written in this book." Rev. xxii. i 8.
As to the activity of glorified saints and
angels, such a cautious and scriptural writer
as Dr. Archibald Alexander wrote in his
"Religious Experience": "It need not be




THlE EMPLO YMENTI S OF SOULS.  I63
supposed that saints in heaven will be continually employed in nothing but praise.
This, indeed, will be their noblest employment, and the anthems of praise to God
and the Lamb will never cease; but may
we not reasonably suppose that the exercises and pursuits of the saints will be various?  The wonderful works of God will
open to their contemplation. They may be
employed as angels are now, as messengers
to distant worlds, either as instruments of
justice or mercy, for we find that the angels
are employed in both these ways. While,
then, one choir surrounds the throne and
elevates the celestial song of praise for redemption, others may be employed in executing the commands of their Lord; and then,
in their turn, these last may keep up the
unceasing praise, while the first go forth on
errands of mercy or wrath."*
Hence all Christian training here will be
of use there. "Can it be," says Dr. Nor* " Religious Experience," pp. 5I3, 514, new edition.




164           PARADI)SE.
man McLeod, "that our moral habits and
Christian graces shall never be called into
exercise in works and labors of love among
orders of beings of whom as yet we know
nothing? Countless worlds may be teeming with immense populations; and who
knows but such worlds may be continually
added to the great family of God? And if
throughout the endless ages of eternity, or
in any province of God's boundless empire,
there should ever be found some responsible beings who are tempted to depart from
God by the machinations of wicked men or
evil spirits-permitted then, it may be, as
well as now, to use all their powers in the
service of sin and against the kingdom of
God-and who, being thus tempted, shall
require warning or support to retain them
in their allegiance; or if there be found
others who are struggling in an existence
which, however glorious, demands patience,
fortitude and faith in Jehovah; if there are
now in other worlds, or ever shall appear,




THE EMIPLOYMENTS OF SOULS.  T65
any persons who need such ministrations as
can be afforded only by those educated in
the wonderful school of Christ's Church,then can I imagine how God's saints from
earth may have glorious labors given them
throughout eternity which they alone, of all
the creatures of God, will be able to accomplish, when every holy habit acquired here
can be put to noble uses there. I can conceive patience needed to overcome difficulties, and faith to trust the living God amidst
evolutions of his providence that baffle the
understanding; and indomitable courage,
untiring zeal, gentle love, heavenly serenity
and intense sympathy, yea, even the peculiar gifts and characteristics of each individual, all having their appropriate and fitting
work given them.'Now abidelh faith, hope,
charity; but the greatest of these is charity.'
And what immense joy will be experienced
in each saint thus finding an outlet for his
love, and exercise for his knowledge, and
full play for his every faculty, in that house




I66            PARADISE.
of many mansions, with all God's universe
around and eternity before him!
"Let this comfort us when we see' such
a one as Paul the aged' fall asleep after his
day of toil, and strengthen us to bow our
heads in meekness when we hear of the
young man full of zeal and ardor, apparently fully equipped for God's service,
suddenly cut down, or the self-sacrificing
missionary who seems to have spent his
strength in vain perish with no one in the
wilderness to give him a burial..Oh, think
not that the work of the old saint, who loved
it so well till the last hour of his existence,
is ended for ever, or that the labors of
younger brethren, so unfinished here, shall
never be resumed hereafter, and that all
this preparation of years has been a mere
abortion, a mockery and delusion. Believe
it not. No day of conscientious study for
Christ's sake has been spent in vain, no
habit of industry or self-denial acquired for
Christ's sake has been acquired in vain,




THE EMPL 0 YMENTS OF St ULS.   i67
nor will the burning zeal to do something
for Him who died for them be ever lost in
darkness or put to shame. Soul, spirit and
body will yet do their work for which they
have been so exquisitely adapted and so
carefully trained." *
* " Parish Papers," pp. I34-136.
*,ii~~




CHAPTER VII.
THIE HOLINESS AND HAPPINESS OF SOULZS INV
PARADISE.
perfectly holy.  The Holy Spirit
completes his sanctifying work at
death.  Old things then utterly and for
ever pass away from the regenerate spirit,
and all things become entirely new. All
the remains of corruption and of inclinations to sin are rooted out of it; and in that
holiness the departed souls are confirmed.
They can never more sin; they are not exposed to temptation; they are " the spirits
of the just made perfect" (Heb. xii. 23);
they are "without fault before the throne
of God." Rev. xiv. 5. There shall in no
wise enter into heaven anything that defi168




THE HOLINESS OF SOULS.      I69
leth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a lie. Glorious state! No
sin!  No temptation!  No corrupt will!
No unholy inclinations! No evil dispositions! No serpent among the trees of the
heavenly paradise! All lilke Christ! Delightful termination of a long conflict which
is waged here, not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities and powers!
It is not death that effects this change,
though it pleases God to accomplish it then.
There is something wonderful about it. If
Nicodemus was startled when Jesus declared
the mystery of the new birth, this is quite
as astonishing. The human mind can scarcely grasp the wonderful extent of the transformation which is wrought in that moment
of time. For reach whatever standard of
holiness the believer may in this world,
while there is the slightest taint of sin in
him, he is at an infinite remove from the
likeness of the all holy One. "To many
it is the subject of distressing perplexity




170            PARADISE.
that persons of unquestioned piety sometimes continue to manifest great iml)erfections to the very end of their life. Even
at the near approach of their transition
from the earthly state to the heavenly their
sanctification seems to be immature. The
mind of Dr. Guthrie appears to have been
strongly impressed by this enigma in Christian experience, of which he could offer no
other solution than that a change must take
place at the moment of death second only
to that at the moment of conversion.'There is much sin to be cast off,' he
says,'like a slough, with this mortal flesh.
Saw we the spirit at its departure, as Elisha
saw his ascending master, we might see a
mantle of imperfection and infirmity dropped
from the chariot that bears it in triumph to
the, skies. I have thought that there must
be a mysterious work done by the Spirit
of God in the very hour of death to form
the glorious crown and cope-stone of all
his other labors, and that, like the wondrous




THE HOLIZNESS OF SOULS.     171
but lovely plant which blows at midnight,
grace comes out in its perfect beauty amid
the darkness of the dying hour. How that
is done I do not know. It takes one whole
summer to ripen the fields of corn and five
hundred years to bring the oak to its full
maturity; but He at whose almighty word
this earth sprang at once into perfect being,
loaded with orchards and golden harvests
and clustering vines and stately palms and
giant cedars, man in ripened manhood and
woman in her fuill-blown charms, is able in
the twinkling of an eye, ere our fingers
have closed the filmy orbs or we have
stooped to print our last fond kiss on the
marble brow, to crown the work his grace
begun. With him one day is as a thousand
years. He shall perfect that which concerneth you. He shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shouting, crying, Grace,
grace unto it.' "*
* " Man, Moral and Physical," by the Rev. Joseph H. Jones,
D. D., p. 277.




172            PARADISE.
The perfect holiness of the disembodied
spirits of the redeemed is inseparably connected with their perfect happiness, to which,
therefore, we proceed. On this it should
be remarked'
i. That their happiness is perfect, but
not complete, between the death and resurrection of their bodies. Every capacity that
they have in themselves for pleasure is perfectly satisfied, but still they look forward to
something higher. They have joys of anticipation as well as of memory and action.
"The separation of the body from the soul is
not in itself desirable. It is the consequence
of a derangement of the original state of
things, which, when God contemplated it
after he had established it, appeared to his
all-perfect, infinitely holy, wise and benignant
mind very good. God made man immortal,
and formed him an image of his own eternity.
Death entered by sin. It is a penal evil,
an expression of the displeasure of God at
the violation of the primitive constitution




TILE HAPPINESS OF SOULS.      I7.3
under which man was placed."*  "The fact
of the resurrection proves that with man at
least the state of a disembodied spirit is a
state of unnatural violence, and that the
resurrection of the body is an essential step
to the highest perfection of which he is susceptible."
The happiness of the soul in paradise
is higher, far higher, than the happiness of
our present life. Elements of joy it has
which we have not now. But it is not as
high as will be the happiness of the resurrection state. Therefore our Larger Catechism says that while the souls of the redeemed are at death "made perfect in holiness and received into the highest heavens,
where they behold the face of God in light
and glory," they are "waiting for the fill
redemption of their bodies, which even in
death continue united to Christ and rest
in their graves as in their beds, until at
the last day they be again united to their
" The Dead in Christ," by John Brown, D. D., p. 41.




I74            PARADISE.
souls." Ques. 86. They lose not the recollection of their earthly tenements. They
wait for the sinless reconstruction of them.
Those bodies in their graves are mingled
with the bodies of the wicked, for the complete separation from which the souls wait
and look forward with ardent desire. The
calling up of the body from the grave and
its reconstruction like unto the glorious
body of Jesus, and the dwelling in and activity of the soul through that bright and
shining form; the transactions of the public
judgment day; the approval of the believer
before the universe in connection with the
vindication of all God's ways; the public
utterance of the invitation, "Come unto
me;" and the re-entrance of soul and body
united into the everlasting joy of the Lord,shall consummate and make complete the
perfect happiness which begins to be experienced at death.
2. The happiness of all glorified souls is
perfect, but:lot equal. Neither the inter



THE HAPPINESS OF SOULS.    175
mediate nor the final state is one in which
all the saved have an equal measure of
bliss. They enter heaven with great differences between them. "Blessed are the
dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may
rest from their labors, and their works do
follow them." Rev. xiv. I3. Their works
do follow them when they die. We conceive of two ways in which our works will
follow us into heaven. *We shall take along
with us the remembrance of them, and we
shall meet with their happy results. If, under the grace of Christ, we have brought
other souls to salvation or helped them on
in their course, we shall meet with the fruits
of our works in knowing that those souls
have been saved, recognizing them in
heaven, and while recognizing them remembering the good which we did to them for
the sake of our one Redeemer.
Compare, then, in their death, the penitent malefactor who was saved from the




176           PARADISE.
cross and the apostle Paul. The sinner
saved from the jaws of death went up from
the cross to heaven with the prayer quivering from the lips, "Lord, remember me
when thou comest into thy kingdom." How
great was his joy as he passed through the
pearly gate to know that he was saved
for ever!  But all that he could remember
with any pleasure was that simple act of
faith. No good works done through grace
could follow him on which he could look
with pleasure. He was happy, perfectly
happy, according to his capacity. His gush
of bliss in ascending from the cross of a
thief to the crown of a king, saved by grace,
was unutterable, and he could magnify the
mercy of God in a strain which would attract the admiring attention of all heaven.
But the apostle Paul entered the glorious
land with these triumphant words: "I have
fought a good fight; I have finished my
course; henceforth there is laid up for me
a crown of righteousness." 2 Tim. iv. 7. His




TIHE HAPPINrESS OF SOULS.    177
memory was charged with years of activity
and holy zeal spent in the service of his dear
Redeemer. They were so inwrought with
the texture of his soul that they could not be
torn from it without its destruction. Souls
were waiting for him whom he had been the
instrument, through his preaching and his
self-denying work, of leading to the cross.
To this day soul after soul is entering
heaven saved through his writings. In his
own mind and in the society of heaven he
has had, and ever shall have, springs of joy
which the eleventh-hour convert cannot
have.
"The more difficulties the saints have
passed through in their way to heaven, the
place will be the sweeter to them when they
come at it. Every happy stroke struck in
the spiritual warfare will be a jewel in their
crown of glory.  Each victory obtained
against sin, Satan and the world will raise
their triumphant joy the higher. The remembrance of the cross will sweeten the
12




I78               PARADISE.
crown, and the memory of th.ir travel
through the wilderness will put additional
verdure on the fields of glory while they
walk through them minding the day when
they went mourning without the sun."*
3. The happiness of each redeemed soul
is perfect when it enters paradise, but it is
not stationary.   It is an  ever-increasing
bliss.  Increasing knowledge and increasing activity bring along with them  increasing capacities and sources of enjoyment.
The more the redeemed learn of the works
and ways of God-and this they will ever be
doing-the more and the deeper will be the
fountains of their enjoyment, In the singularly expressive words of one of the
Middle Age hymn-writers,
"Ever filled and ever seeking, what they have they. still desire;
Hunger there shall fret them never, nor satiety shall tire;
Still enjoying whilst aspiring, in their joy they still aspire."
In forming our views of the various elements which constitute the happiness of
* B3oston's " Fourfold State," p. 309.




TIlE HAPPINESS OF SOULS.    I 79
paradise, it should be remembered that
whatever true spiritual enjoyment any soul
has here is continued in it, and that additional pleasures flow from the continued
exercise of all those mental powers which
continue active. Here the word. paradise,
expressing a place of peculiar joy, applied
to the heavenly home, is very suggestive.
It carries us back to man's happiness before the fall. The great idea conveyed by
it is that of a restoration to a condition
the same in kind with that in which man
was created, though higher in degree, and
doubtless with added elements of joy, because of the union of God with human
nature and the blessings purchased by
redemption through which men are advanced above the angels.
"Sin is a perversion of human nature,
not its annihilation-a disorder of its powers, not their destruction. Nor is restoration by Jesus Christ the gift of a different
constitution, as if he made us something




I80            PARADISE.
else than human beings, but the renovation
of the old constitution after its original type.... That which would constitute the happiness of man, were he perfect on earth,
will be his happiness, though in a higher
degree, when he is made perfect in heaven.
This supposition only assumes the fact that
we shall be the same persons for ever, that
human nature will never cease to be human
nature, or be changed into a different species of existence, no more than Jesus Christ,
the head of his Church, will ever cease to
be what he is, the man Christ Jesus with a
human body and a human soul, the same
yesterday, to-day and for ever."*
But we shall particularly mention the
elements in the happiness of the soul's
intermediate state which none of us have
here. These are in addition to the spiritual joys of this life.
I. The glorified souls are freed from all
positive evil. Hlow much is embraced in
*" Parish Papers," by Norman McLeod, D. D., p. 98, 99.




TI/E IPA 1'PPINESS OF SOULS.    I8I
this statement-perfect freedom from all sin
and from all suffering! This bliss alone
would be ecstatic.  Notice some of the
things that are included in it:
(I.) Perfect deliverance from sin. Can
any one imagine the thrill of joy which
must pass over a soul at the instant of
death as it flies from the body heavenward,
with the delightfiul assurance that all sin is
for ever left behind? It has something of
the unalloyed happiness of the holy God.
The hour when first it believed in Jesus is
a precious one in memory, but can it be
compared with that? Paul once cried out,
even after he had made great progress in
holiness, 1"O wretched man that I am, who
shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" Rom. vii. 24. When his glorified
Lord summoned him from earth his soul
was quickly borne aloft by angels, while in
ecstasy he was able to exclaim, Blessed
Redeemer, thou hast now delivered me!
And so the joy of perfect holiness belongs




182            P RAADISE.
to every saved soul immediately on its
translation from the body.
(2.) Freedom from all suffering caused
by bodily disease and deprivations. So intimate is the union between soul and body
that the imperfections and the pains of the
latter must sadly affect the former. The
religious exercises of the soul are often interfered with, its communion with God is
marred, by bodily weaknesses and pains.
But the disembodied spirits are free from all
this. They "rest from their labors." Rev.
xiv. 13. Spiritual exercises are no longer
a weariness. The glorified never faint,
never become tired in them.
(3.) Freedom from the dread of dying.
Notwithstanding our victory through Christ,
there continues to be a sting in death.
Even the believer shrinks from the pain,
and the su.fferings, and the breakings up
connected with it. But in paradise mortality is swallowed up of life. The soul, ever
fresh, ever young,. rejoices in the blissful




TIE HAPPIAEXSS OF SOV ULgs.   183
assurance that the hour of bodily death has
passed, and that, instead of having to look
forward to such an event, it awaits the hour
of bodily reconstruction. In the song of
redeemed souls before the resurrection
Paul's triumphant exclamation must occupy
a prominent place: "O death, where is
thy sting?  0 grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin, and the strength
of sin is the law. But thanks be to God,
which giveth us the victory through our
Lord Jesus Chirist." I Cor. xv. 55-57.
(4.) Freedom from the dread of falling
any more into sin. No evil principle within, no temptation without, the blessed souls
are not in constant need of watchfulness
and prayer lest they fall. The crowns of
triumph are on them. The rewards of victors have been bestowed upon them. No
longer warriors engaged in the heat and
dust of the conflict,
" They walk the heavenly street,
Ai d ground their arms at Jesus' feet."




184            PARADISE.
(5.) Perfect and everlasting separation
from sinners. The glorified souls are no
longer called upon to endure the taunts
and the misrepresentations of the wicked,
nor to mourn their close proximity to, and
contact with, sin in its vilest forms.  Sin
and sinners alike are far away below the
confines of the beautiful land, and unable
to cause the first pang of grief in holy
souls.
We know experimentally nothing of these
blessings here.  No man enjoys them in
this world.  There is no spot on earth
where they can be found. No mere human heart this side the grave has ever
tasted them. But there they are, just beyond the Jordan, in the beautiful land. Our
glorified Christian friends have them now
in perfection.
2. Another great source of happiness for
the spirits of the just made perfect is found
in their simple presence in the home of
Jesus. They are with the Lord  "In my




THIE  1APPINESS OF SOULS.    I85
Father's house are many mansions. I go
to prepare a place for you. And if I go
and prepare a place for you, I will come
again and receive you unto myself; that
where I am, there ye may be also." John
xiv. I-4. And a place of great beauty that
is. The paradise that was was exceeding
fair. The paradise that is "is the holiest
and happiest region of the universe, bearing some proportion in its superiority to
Eden to that which the second man, the
Lord from heaven, bears to the first man,
who was of the earth, earthy."  Here the
soul, as it looks out through the narrow
avenue of the bodily eye, derives an intense
satisfaction from the contemplation of the
beauties of nature; there, we cannot doubt,
the glorified spirits are able to expatiate
over scenes of beauty and of grandeur
such as have never yet fallen upon our
vision.
3. But the most glorious and the most
beautiful object that they behold is Jesus




I86           PARADISE.
himself, with whom they are. The Lamb
which is in the midst of the throne leads
them to living fountains of water. This
expresses nearness of approach by him to
them. John saw him in the apocalyptic
vision. The saved souls worship him. How
they see him we cannot tell.  It is not
through bodily eyes.  They have some
other power of perception. Not only are
they permitted to dwell in Jerusalem; they
see the King's face. And the joy of that
sight! We would like to have beheld Jesus
of Nazareth while he was on the earth. We
earnestly desire now to look upon him in
his glorified body. We want to gaze upon
that form whose head and whose hairs are
white like wool, as white as snow, and his
eyes as a flame of fire, and his feet as fine
brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and
to hear that voice which is as the sound of
many waters; and to bask in the light of
that countenance which is as the sun shineth in his strength  We know that if we




THE HAPPINESS OF SOULS.       187
were to see and hear him now the vision
would kill us, unsanctified that we are. But
if it should be our privilege, completely
changed by the Spirit of God, to enter the
pearly gate, to gaze upon him would be almost happiness enough.  The redeemed
who have gone home to God have that
blessedness now. "They burn with seraphic love, like coals of juniper, and the
arch of heaven rings with their songs of
salvation to Him that sitteth upon the
throne and to the Lamb."
O Jesus! thy sweet memory
Can fill the heart with ecstasy;
But passing all things sweet that be,
Thine actual presence, Lord.
4. But closer still: they not only look
upon, they have habitual communion with,
the glorified Redeemer. Nothing clouds
or distracts or interferes with it. They are
ever with the Lord; the Lord is ever with
them. Seeing him as he is, they rest not
day nor night praising him. The commu



I88           PARADISE.
nion is enjoyed, not through ordinances,
but directly; no longer a communion of
faith, but one of sight; no longer of hope,
at times clouded and dimmed, but of full
yet increasing fruition. They have entered
into the joy of their Lord. From the sacramental table of earth they have gone up
to the richer feast of heaven.  Nothing
can ever come between them and Jesus.
In his work the body here may wear out;
there, they need never to rest from their
spiritual services and communion.
5. Communion with other redeemed spirits is another source of happiness in paradise. We know not how it is carried on.
We cannot tell how the separate souls
communicate to each other and to God
their thoughts and feelings. But the fact is
plain. The glorified souls retain their social nature; and how widely extended is
their communion! It includes the wise and
good of all ages. What a joy to be permitted to converse with Abel, and Moses,




TIlE Iz4PPlIA7PS OF SOULS.   I89
and Samuel, and David, and Isaiah, and
John, and Peter, and Paul! It specially
embraces friends who had preceded them
to the happy land. Oh the heavenly joy
of recognizing earth's purest friendships
over again! "I trust to come unto you
and speak face to face, that our joy might
be full" (2 John 14), wrote the beloved
apostle to some of his dear Christian
friends.  Perhaps his wish was not gratified on earth; but their souls have met in
heaven. And so, if we go there, we shall
find those who have crossed the Jordan
before us, and shall live over again holy
friendships, though divested of earth's
carnal forms.
6. The society of angels is still another
source of joy to the spirits of the just made
perfect.  Here the angels are ministering
spirits sent forth to minister to the heirs of
salvation, but between the two orders of
creatures there is no joyous communion.
In paradise, however, the Bible represents




I 90                   PARADISE.
them as mingling intimately among each
other and joining in the same worship. "It
has been finely said one angel's history may
be a volume of more precious truth than
all the records of our race." Volume after
volume of such truth the glorified redeemed
are permitted to scan.
"Oh how beautiful that region,
And how fair that heavenly legion,
Where those men and angels blend!
Glorious will that city be,
Full of deep tranquillity,
Light and peace from end to end!
All the happy dwellers there
Shine in robes of purity;
Keep the law of charity,
Bound in firmest unity.
Labor finds them not, nor care;
Ignorance can ne'er perplex,
Nothing tempt them,.nothing vex;
Joy and health their fadeless blessing,
Always all good things possessing."




CHAPTER VIII.
TIE MANSIONS AND HOME LIFE OF PARADISE.
NE  topic remains which blends
especially with the employments
and the happiness of souls in paradise. But it also brings together and condenses in a winning form the substance of
all that has been presented. We, therefore, throw it into a separate chapter.
Our Redeemer, a few hours before his
crucifixion, said to his sorrowing apostles,
"In my Father's house are many mansions:
if it were not so I would have told you. I
go to prepare a place for you. And if I
go and prepare a place for you, I will come
again, and receive you unto myself; that
where I am there ye may be also." John
Xiv. 2, 3.
191




192             PARADISE.
A house; a father's house; the house of
our Redeemer's Father; mansions in that
house; and a place prepared there for us:
how suggestive these expressions are of
home life!
The Father's house is heaven. We have
seen that it is a particular place now existing in the universe. It is far away from
earth; but were our eyes keen enough, and
spiritual enough, we might see,
" Like the edges of a sunset cloud,
The beatific land before us lie."
The Psalmist calls it " the place of God's
habitation." Ps. xxxiii. I 4.
The prophet Isaiah (lxiii. I5) designates
it as the "habitation of God's holiness and
glory."
It is the holy home of the universe, where
the glory of God is especially witnessed,
and his society intimately enjoyed.  Not
the whole universe itself, as some would
suppose, with its different planets and stars,




ITS MAANSIONS AND HOM1E LIFE.   193
as the mansions spoken of; but a central
place in that wide and illimitable universe.
Our Lord also once called the temple at
Jerusalem his Father's house. John ii. I6.
That temple was the building in which
God was especially represented to the Old
Testament Church. Within it was the holy
of holies, which, as we have seen, was in a
pre-eminent manner a type of heaven.
Hence our Saviour might well apply the
same title to both places.
Round about and within that temple were
chambers in which abode the priests who
ministered in the religious services of the
place. I Kings vi. 5-Io. That, we suppose,
suggested to the Redeemer his expression
that there were many mansions, or "abiding-places," in the heavenly house which the
earthly shadowed forth.
At first sight it would seem incongruous
to speak of many mansions in one house;
but when it is remembered that in the temple, which was one house, there were those
13




I94            PARADISE.
separate abiding-places, the striking beauty
of the expression at once appears.
Heaven is represented by it under the
similitude of a temple containing rooms for
all the members of the royal priesthood.
God's redeemed people are kings and
priests unto him. In his home there are
everlasting abiding-places from which they
go forth to its public services, and to which,
from those services, they return for meditation and social communion with each other
and with their Lord. Speaking with diffidence, and not intending to be as didactically positive as on points where revelation
is fuller and more varied, this seems to be
the Redeemer's meaning.
As has already been seen, this is not the
only form in which heaven is pictured to us.
Figures that, on the plane of earth, would
really exclude each other, are blended in
the Bible delineations in order to exhibit
the multiform characteristics of the place.
Thus it is




ITS MANSIONS AND HOME LIFE.   195
"A city, or a temple, or a home,
Or rather all'in one."
It is so rich, so infinitely above any and
all the things of earth, that no one description can embody its fullness. A home in
its social character, a temple in its aspect
of worship, a garden in its variety of delights, through the scriptural dissolving
views it brightens and enlarges into a city
in its size and the innumerable multitude
of its inhabitants.
As heaven itself is a really existing place,
a particular locality, we may suppose that
the mansions spoken of by our Lord are
real and circumscribed abodes in it.  It
seems to us that no other idea can fully
bring out what may be called the topographical promises of the Bible.
" Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness," says our Lord,
"that when ye fail they may receive you
into everlasting habitalions." Luke xvi. 9.
Through his strong faith the apostle Paul




1 96                   PARADISE.
was able to say, "We know  that if our
earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." 2 Cor. v. i.  There are some who
entertain the erroneous notion that the soul
cannot act without a material body; that it
depends on its union with an organism-at
least for its intelligent connection with external things and with time.* Therefore,
- The more recent and least unscientific form which this assumes, opposing on the one hand the materialistic heresy that
" life is the result of living matter, or one of its properties," but,
on the other hand, erroneously making too much of our present
experience, has thus been presented: "The more philosophical
view as to the nature of the connection between life and its material basis is the one which regards vitality as something superadded and foreign to the matter by which vital phenomena are
manifested.  Protoplasm  is essential as the physical medium
through which vital action may be manifested; just as a conductor is essential to the manifestation of electric phenomena, or
just as a paint-brush and colors are essential to the artist. Because metal conducts the electric current and renders it perceptible to our senses, no one thinks of therefore asserting that electricity is one of the inherent properties of a metal, any more
than one would feel inclined to assert that the power of painting
was inherent in the camel's hair or in the dead pigments. Be.




ITS IMANSIONS AND IfOME LIFE.  * )7
they think we are shut up to the conclusion
either that at death the soul ceases to be
active-at least with  externally  perceptive
powers-or that it is immediately provided
hind the material substratum, in all cases, is the active and living
force; and we have no right to assume that the force ceases to
exist when its physical basis is removed, though it is no longer
perceptible to our senses. It is, on the contrary, quite conceivable theoretically that the vital forces of an organism should
suffer no change by the destruction of the physical basis, just as
electricity would continue to subsist in a world composed universally of non-conductors. In neither case could the force manifest its presence, or be brought into any perceptible relation with
the outer world; but in neither case should we have the smallest
ground for assuming that the power was necessarily non-extant."
(Dr. H. Alleyne Nicholson's " Introduction to the Study of Biology," p. I I.)  " Electricity," however, " may be a force in nature
manifested to us, in our present state, only under certain conditions. But that does not prove that it is active only under
those conditions, or that beings constituted differently from what
we are may not be cognizant of its activity."  (Dr. Charles
Hodge's "Systematic Theology," iii. 714.)  And especially as
to the soul, if, as the Bible teaches,. it be a substance, and a different substance from the body, though receiving the latter into
union with it as the human person, "it has power-power of
self-manifestation, and productive power according to its nature."
And it is certainly unscientific to say that, because in this stage
of our existence it exerts and manifests its power in and through
a body, it can only do it in that way.




198            PARADISE.
with another body. And as it is plain that
the apostle, in the passage we have quoted,
is describing the period immediately after
death, they adopt the latter inference. But
it is very unphilosophical to declare that,
because in this state of our existence our
souls manifest their activity in connection
with bodies in which they dwell, it must
always be so. God, the great Spirit who
is ever active, has no body. On the other
hand, there is no intimation anywhere in the
Bible of any bodies other than those which
we now wear, and which shall be reconstructed as spiritual bodies at the last day.
The apostle's declaration, therefore, was
that at death his soul would immediately
pass into heaven; and we see not why we
should be content with the vague notion
that the "building," the  "house," was
"heaven" itself, and not "in the heavens."
He seems to assert that there was in
heaven  a  "building,"  a  divinely-made
"house," a distinct "mansion" for his soul.




ITS MANSIONS AND HOME LIFE.  199
Of course we do not conceive of those
mansions as anything like the brick-andmortar dwellings or the marble palaces of
earth. We are inclined, however, to suppose they are real and circumscribed places
of abode for souls, and "counterparts for
their spiritual characteristics."
It has been seen that the predominant
character under which the Bible represents
the life of heaven is that of praise. The
inhabitants of the blessed land appear in
magnificent choirs, harping upon their harps
to the glory of the Most High. They rest
not day nor night from this service. Worship never ceases in the heavenly temple.
Never is the place silent. Always some of
its inhabitants are engaged in praise.
But the glorious temple may have its
grand convocation seasons. As it is written in the book of Job that there was a
day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the Lord, so there may
be seasons when, in a way which is possible




200           PARADISE.
for pure spirits, though inconceivable by us,
the whole redeemed and angelic hosts may
make the universe thrill with a mighty
volume of praise, that rolls out from their
home through stars and planets and worlds,
to the infinite glory of their God-seasons
imaged forth to us in the fifth chapter of
the Revelation, where, before the Lamb in
the midst of the throne, redeemed sinners
with harps, and golden vials full of odors,
sung the new song, Thou wast slain, and
hast redeemed us to God by thy blood;
and ten thousand times ten thousand
and thousands of thousands of angels followed with a loud voice, saying, Worthy
is the Lamb that was slain; to whom succeeded the whole intelligent creation, saying, Blessing, and honor, and glory, and
power be unto him that sitteth upon the
throne and unto the Lamb for ever and
ever; after which the redeemed sinners
closed the song in humblest prostration,
saying, Amen! Amen!




ITS MANSIONS AND HOMfE LIFE.  20 
Nor have we any doubt that, in addition
to these public services of praise, there are
many active employments in paradise for
the redeemed. We hesitate not to believe
that every native or acquired sinless habit
of the soul, every developed capacity and
cultivated power here used in the Redeemer's service, which sometimes the soul,
taken away in early life, never employed
fully on earth, finds a field for exercise in
the heavenly world. The spiritual and active life of this world is a training-school
for the land beyond the Jordan.
But it does not seem irrational or unscriptural to suppose that there are periods
when the redeemed withdraw from that
public praise, and from those public employments, to their own mansions for holy
purposes similar to those which mark the
spiritual social life of this lower world.
Those mansions speak to us of seasons
of' "calm, unbroken solitude for lonely meditation."  From  the scenes of surpassing




202             PARAlDISE.
glory, and from the public services of unutterable joy, that crowd heaven, the redeemed need places of retirement where
they may gather and compose their thoughts
in meditation, and receive the full benefit
of their public outgoings.
They point us also to the domestic communion of friends in each other's mansions.
For the sanctified friendships of earth, divested of their carnal relationships, renew
themselves in paradise, and new friendships are formed. Love cannot be
"Without the chosen specialties of love,
The nearest to the nearest most akin."
The redeemed friends of earth and new
friends of heaven mingle with each other
in their abiding-places.
More delightful still, the Redeemer's
comforting words whisper to us of home
visits from the Lord himself, of times when
the glorified humanity of Christ comes
specially near and communes with each
soul as friend with friend. When he was




IrS MANSIONS AND HOME LIFE.  203
on earth, he was often found beneath the
roof of the little family of Bethany, in
friendly communings with its members.
He is the same Jesus still. It is precisely
this which was the great comfort of his
words as they were addressed to his apostles. They had been, and were then, enjoying direct and personal communion with
him. After his death and ascension, and
until their death, they should be deprived
of that bliss. But it would be restored to
them. And surely that element of their
happiness will be granted to all the saved.
All Christians have a longing desire to see
their Redeemer. The desire shall be gratified; not here, but above. And not merely
do the glorified redeemed gaze from a distance upon him as "the enthroned monarch
of the whole infinity of being;" it must be
their privilege to be at times as near to him
as the two disciples were during their walk
to Emmaus on the evening of his resurrection-as our first parents were when he




204                  PARA1DISE.
came down to visit them in the innocency
of the first paradise.
The joy and the glory of those mansions,
the  endless capabilities of their mutual influence for happiness, are increased by their
innumerable multitude. There are "many"
of them. In the earthly temple the number
of chambers for the priests was very small;
in the heavenly, the abiding-places of redeemed souls cannot be counted by man.*
Moreover, the happiness of the blessed
place is diversified by the differences which
exist in glory, in brilliancy,- in degree of
dignity, among the mansions.
All saved souls enter heaven perfectly
holy  and  happy.   But in other respectsin their knowledge, in the treasures of
* We do not know on what authority Longfeliow has presented heaven under the description of "a great cloister's stillness and seclusion."  Certainly, it is not based upon the Bible.
The place is large. Already it has multitudes of inhabitants.
It will be crowded. Instead of a secluded and still life, the
Bible represents it as for ever vocal with praise, and its denizens
as actively engaged Fwith each other and for God.




ITS MANSIONS AND HOME LIFE.  205
their memories, in their cultivated habits
of usefulness-there must be as great a
variety among them as exists here; and if
their mansions be counterparts for their
spiritual characteristics, the same variety
may exist among those mansions.
The angels have their mansions different
from those which belong to redeemed sinners; redeemed infants different from the
aged saints; lifelong laborers in the Master's cause different from eleventh hour
penitents.
All are indeed glorious. But the starry
heavens, with their bright worlds of light,
are glorious. Yet "there is one glory of
the sun, and another glory of the. moon,
and another glory of the stars; for one star
differeth from another star in glory." I Cor.
xv. 4I. So also may it be with the inhabitants of the Father's house, and with their
mansions in it.
Degrees in heaven?  Yes! Degrees of
capacity to enjoy, while all are perfectly




206            PARADISE.
satisfied according to their capacity. Degrees of brilliancy with which the light that
beams from the countenance of the King is
reflected. Degrees of nearness to his
throne. Degrees, therefore, in the splendor of the mansion in which the redeemed
abide.
Whose mansions are the most glorious?
Not necessarily that of the rich saint
who on earth dwelt in a magnificent house,
richly furnished and munificently adorned
with works of art.  All the wealth of
"Ormus and of Ind" cannot buy the heavenly splendor.
Not necessarily that of the man of power
who, from his kingly or presidential palace,
issued the orders which swayed the affairs
of millions. Earth's imperial words have
no influence over heaven's court-not as
much as the pauper's trembling breath of
faith.
Not necessarily that of the learned man
who, from his splendid intellectual stores,




ITS MANSIONS AND HOMItE LIFE'.  207
fed his own mind and in turn nourished the
craving minds of his fellows. The wisdom
of earth cannot provide a key wherewith to
open a celestial mansion.
All earthly things, when not accompanied
by true piety, go for nothing in the kingdom of heaven. They help nothing in the
glory of the Father's house unless they are
subsidized to the service of the Lord.
But says the Redeemer, "Whosoever
shall do and teach my commandments, the
same shall be called great in the kingdom
of heaven." Matt. v. i.
Many a poor man shall have a more glorious mansion than his rich neighbor; many
an ignorant man, as to the learning of the
earth, a more shining position than the
splendid intellect; many a woman unknown to the world, but laboring for Jesus,
a more brilliant standing than any of earth's
queens.
Zealous lives of faith, and love, and service for the Lord, —these graduate the heav



208            PARADISE.
enly scale. They that do most, according
to their opportunities, for the salvation of
other souls, are nearest to Him who came
from  the throne to save the lost.  They
that are most like him in spirit, in life, and
in labors here, shall shine the most resplendently in his court through eternity.
"They that be wise shall shine as the
brightness of the firmament: and they that
turn many to righteousness as the stars
for ever and ever." Dan. xii. 3.
Our crucified Lord ascended to heaven
to prepare their mansions for his people:
"I go to prepare a place for you."
The whole extent of his work of preparation there and now, in addition to his
presentation as our advocate, we know not.
The number of the mansions has been determined from eternity. But who can positively declare that some perpetual creative
work of the Redeemer is not going on, by
which he prepares for each soul its special
mansion?




ITS MANSIONS AND HOME LIFE.  209
There is also a preparation-work in his
people themselves for their mansions; and
when that is finished, he comes to each of
them in turn and takes them to their home.
"If I go and prepare a place for you, I
will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also."
He comes to his redeemed by his Spirit
in the act of regeneration; and through
the continued work of sanctification he prepares them for their holy and happy abodes.
Then he comes at death, when the mansions are fully prepared for the souls and
the souls for the mansions, and takes each
soul in its due time to be with him.
With this truth, and with all the scriptural teaching in reference to the glorious
world which we have exhibited, a chastened
imagination may follow departing saints
from their earthly tenements amid a
brighter atmosphere than that which darkens the German verses which we quoted
at the beginning of our book.
14




210           PARADISE.
Liberated from the confining trammels
of earthly bodies, they are swiftly carried
by angels aloft through "clouds of glory
to the heaven of heavens."
As they enter the pearly gate a host of
the unfallen creatures who rejoiced over
their conversion greet them, and sing hallelujahs for their safe arrival.
A guard of honor escorts them to the
throne on which is seated the great Judge,
who declares their everlasting acceptance
and ravishes them with the declaration,
"Thou hast been faithful unto death; I
now give thee a crown of life. Enter thou
into the joy of thy Lord."
Redeemed friends who had gone before
them welcome them with a joyous chorus.
The Christian father or mother who was
taken from one in the days of his youth;
of another the child who was cut down as
a flower, and the lock of whose silken hair
was so tenderly kept in a well-guarded
drawer; the wife who drooped and fell




ITS MANSIONS AND GHOME LIFE.  211 I
from her partner's side; or the husband
whose supporting arm was suddenly paralyzed and his form laid in an untimely
grave; the friends with whom sweet converse was often held, but the bond with
whom was severed by the angel of death,
-all who died in the faith meet them
again before the great white throne, and
with joy accompany them to their beautiful
and blissful mansions. They inquire with
eagerness as to the course of events in
their circles on earth since their departure,
and of the progress of the Church of
Christ in the great work of subduing the
world. And they tell, in heaven's language,
of their experience in the glorious land, and
of the riches of knowledge which they have
already acquired from its older inhabitants.
From their communings with reunited
friends the newly-arrived souls go forth
with burning zeal to the public praise of
the temple, and to the active life to which
the Lord calls them.




212           PARADISE.
Their mansions are gladdened by the
presence of Him whose look makes
heaven, and who shall make them live
for ever in "tremulous waves of joy."
Thus the gracious life of earth purifies
and expands itself into the glorious life of
heaven.
Alternations of public service and private meditation; the clear study of the
past and the piercing look away through
eternity and infinity; outside activities and
restful contemplation and mutual intercourse; public life and home life,-make up
the one holy and happy existence in the
FATHER'S HOUSE.




CHAPTER IX.
CONCL USION.
HE  exhibition of this most delightful subject has at every step
presented truths which possess a
comforting and practical power upon the
heart. From beginning to end it is full of
consolation and of an inspiring influence.
But, in addition, we shall close our little
book with direct appeals to three classes
of readers.
I. Has death removed Christian friends
from you? Think not of them as dead, nor
even as asleep in some obscure place that
you know nothing about, but as living in
the most beautiful part of God's universe,
with Jesus and all the blessed, and in the
213




214                    PARADISE.
enjoyment of a happiness which it is beyond our power adequately to express,
which we can indeed scarcely conceive.
And so live, in view of your own death,
as to be able to adopt these exceedingly
touching words:
"If death my friend and me divide,
Thou dost not, Lord, my sorrow chide,
Or frown my tears to see;
Restrained from passionate excess,
Thou bid'st me mourn in calm distress
For her that rests in thee.
"I feel a strong immortal hope
Which bears my mournful spirit up
Beneath its mountain load;
Redeemed from death and grief and pain,
I soon shall find my friend again
Within the arms of God.
"Pass a few fleeting moments more,
And death the blessing will restore
Which death has snatched away;
For me thou wilt the summons send,
And give me back my parted friend
In heaven's eternal day."
2. If you are a Christian, live above the
dread of death. A sting there still is in




CONCL USION.          2 5
this penalty of sin, but it is soon withdrawn.
This Jordan is a wildly rushing stream, but
the crossing is quickly made; and then the
bliss! Jesus has passed over it before you;
an innumerable multitude of spirits made
perfect have also gone through it, and just
on the other side of it they are waiting to
receive your soul as it is borne by angels
to the presence of the glorious One. Be
faithful unto death. Make the most of the
time that still remains on earth to increase
your treasures of grace in heaven. Whatever talent has been given to you, whatever
opportunity of usefulness is afforded to
you, employ it liberally for God. Make
five, ten, twenty, a hundred, out of it if you
can, knowing that accordingly your gracious
and glorious reward shall be five, ten, twenty,
a hundred, times as great. When the happiness of heaven is so varied and so multiplying, and is so connected with our activity,
can any one be satisfied with merely getting
in the gate? Work for God. If it is some



216                   PARADI~SE.
times  a toil and weariness to do it, remember that there is an eternity of rest. Strive
manfully against sins, even against the most
cherished  ones.  Seek to bring  heaven
down to earth now in your character and
in   your  life.    Patiently,  calmly,  submissively, bear the trials which the Father may
send upon you. Then the more sufferings
you pass through, the more weary you become and the older you grow in this world
of strife and pain and corruption, the nearer
will come to you such words as these:
*' I'm kneeling at the threshold, weary, faint and sore,
Waiting for the dawning, for the opening of the door;
Waiting till the Master shall bid me rise and come
To the glory of his presence, to the gladness of his home.
"A weary path I've traveled,'mid darkness, storm and strife,
Bearing many a burden, struggling for my life;
But now the morn is breaking, my toil will soon be o'er;
I'm kneeling at the threshold, my hand is on the door.
"Methinks I hear the voices of the blessed as they stand
Singing in the sunshine of the sinless land;
Oh, would that I were with them, amid their shining throng,
Mingling in their worship, joining in their song!




CONCL USION.                   217
"The friends that started with me have entered long ago;
One by one they left me struggling with the foe;
Their pilgrimage was shorter, their triumph sooner won;
How lovingly they'll hail me when my toil is done!
"With them the blessed angels, that know nor grief nor sin,
I see them by the portals prepared to let-me in.
O Lord, I wait thy pleasure-thy time and way are best;
But I'm wasted, worn and weary; O Father, bid me rest!"*
And when the summons of the Father
comes you will enter upon the joy and the
glory of the following description:
"At length the door is opened, and free from pain and sin,
With joy and gladness on his head, the pilgrim enters in;
The Master bids him welcome, and on the Father's breast,
By loving arms enfolded, the weary is at rest.
* These yearning verses appeared originally in the Suzn.lay
_Magazine, vol. i., p. 352, under the title of " The Aged Believer
at the Gate of Heaven."  We have seen them more than once
quoted as the production of Dr. Guthrie, who was then the editor of that periodical; but the initials appended to them, " W.
L. A.," belong to the Rev. W. L. Alexander, D. D., who supplemented them by the other little poem we have quoted, which
he published in the same magazine, vol. iii., p. 372, under the
title, " The Aged Saint entering Heaven." Perhaps it is not as
widely known as the former. We think it even more beautiful
and enrapturing than the first one in some respects, especially for
aged saints; and have therefore ad led it.




2I8                  PAR'ADISE.
"The pilgrim's staff is left behind, behind the slg ird, the shield,
The armor dimmed and dinted on many a hard-fought field;
His now the shining palace, the garden of delight,
The palm, the robe, the diadem, the glory ever bright.'The blessed angels round him,'mid heaven's hallowed calm,
With harp and voice are lifting up the triumph of their psalm:'All glory to the holy One, the infinite I AM,
Whose grace redeems the fallen! Salvation to the Lamb!
"'Another son of Adam's race, through Jesu's loving might,
Hath crossed the waste, hath reached the goal, hath vanquished in the fight:
Hail, brother, hail! we welcome thee! join in our sweet accord,
Lift up the burden of our song, Salvation to the Lord!'
"And now from out the glory, the living cloud of light,
The old familiar faces come beaming on his sight;
The early lost, the ever loved, the friends of long ago,
Companions of his conflicts and pilgrimage below.
"They parted here in weakness, and suffering, and gloom;
They meet amid the freshness of heaven's immortal bloom,
Henceforth in ever-during bliss to wander, hand in hand,
Beside the living waters of the still and sinless land.
"Oh, who can tell the rapture of those to whom'tis given
Thus to renew the bonds of earth amid the bliss of heaven?
Thrice blessed be His holy name who for our fallen race
Hath purchased by his bitter pains such plenitude of grace."
3. Are any who read these pages unconverted?   If  the  soul ceases  not to  exist




CONCL USION.        2 9
when the body dies; if it never becomes
unconscious for a single instant; if it
passes from the body with the mental and
moral habits which it has acquired here
in full and even increased activity: then,
reader, if you be not changed by the
power of God's Spirit, if the atoning blood
of Jesus, received by faith, do not wash
away your guilt, if a holy principle be not
implanted in you and be not active in putting
away evil habits and forming good ones,
behold your dangerous condition! Should
you thus die, into heaven you could not
enter. With God you could not dwell.
The society of the saved you could not
enjoy. Therefore turn to the Lord. Remembering that the sooner you enter upon
the narrow path, and the more fervent your
zeal and the greater your activity for God
in it, the more thorough will be your education for the heavenly service and the
greater your preparation for its glorious
joy, at once breathe the prayer of faith,




220            PARADISE.
"Lord, remember me when thou comest
into thy kingdom," and commence earnestly to live the Christian life, so that whensoever the messenger of death comes to
you, be it suddenly or through the slow
march of disease, be it with warning or
without, your soul may receive from Jesus,
with an abundant richness for which the
dying penitent was not prepared, the sweet
assurance,
"TO-DAY SHALT THOU BE WITH ME IN
PARADISE."