down to that solitary old man, the last of his family and the last of his generation, waiting to go home, and filled with pensive memories of the Long Ago! A question, which the bereaved heart has sometimes revolved painfully, receives now a full and satisfactory solution: "Shall we know our friends after death?" How do we know them here? We know them since their peculiar qualities of mind and affection are imaged in the features, and expressed and toned in the living form, made effusive of the soul within. But all this is more completely true of the spiritual man, since spiritual body is more quickly and perfectly the exponent of the soul, and the very effigy of its af fection; and hence it will result that we shall know those we have loved even better than we knew them here. For there when thought meets thought, and heart opens to heart, it will be the fond gaze of the old, familiar faces;-faces that have not changed except to be made more familiar, since more than ever they are the living transparencies through which we look into the well-springs of hearts that have beat in unison with our own. The doctrine of friendly recognition is once formally stated in the New Testament, and always implied. It needed no other * * 1 Thessalonians iv. 13, 14. statement than the doctrine of the resurrection, from which it comes as a necessary corollary, while it chimes in with the prophetic yearnings of human hearts. The resurrection body is not manufactured and put on afterwards, but it is the heart's most cherished love growing into its most perfect form and likeness, putting on robes bright with the colors of the spirit and wavy with its tremblements, and looking unclouded from its own features and aspect. Recognizing our friends! We hardly do as much now; for if we journey too far from each other, we find when we meet again that time has been so busy with our clay tenement, and has so beaten and battered it, that we look long, and must trace the old signs and lineaments as Old scriptions on the tombs. ate the handwriting, but the rubbish that had gathered over it, and the resurrection brings it out more boldly than altoreliefs. Death removes the mask of time and age, that the undecaying affections may take on the face and features that belong to them in the freshness of their immortal primc. Yea, further, it results, if we choose to follow out the deduction, that we shall not only recognize the friends we have seen and loved, but friends we never saw before, though they have long been near us; for souls congenerous with each other will meet as if they had been kith and kin from the begin Mortality traced the in- removes the moss and ning, just as here there are minds which on their first meeting seem each the complement of the other, and they will almost have it that they knew each other in some pre-existent world. Our present topic is exceedingly suggestive on the whole subject of the future retribution. The home-instinct constitutes the essential law that arranges the societies of heaven and hell. It is the "Come, ye blessed," and "Depart, ye cursed," not imposed as an arbitrary sentence from without, but executed by sure impulsions from within. The soul which is foul, and whose life is perverted, is excluded from heaven, because there it would be the most wretched. It has no homecentre there, and the clash of life opposed to life would be sharp and dreadful. It goes where its most cherished and ruling affection shall find its sphere and exercise, because there it will suffer the least of anywhere in the universe, and there it finds all which in the nature of things it can enjoy; though, alas! how baleful is the glow of unclean lusts, and how dense the smoke of false illusions that ever rise out of them! The homeinstinct is the law that dots the circles from highest to lowest, and concentres around them all spirits in their class and order; and they shine forth star-like up the terraces of the heavenly mountain, or they gleam out point beyond point along the vales of Gehenna, and constitute the downward range of its lurid fires! CHAPTER XVII. THE HEAVENLY PEACE. THE imagination paints the heavenly state as one of eternal peace, the sunshine after the storm, the haven securely reached after the waves of trouble have ceased to roll. But let us be careful not to confound two very different things. Peace is not rest or repose. It is the highest and most intense activity, but the activity of concording elements. When the elements conflict and counter-work each other, they produce a state of war; when they join and act as one, the result is the most perfect life and the profoundest peace. 1. This present preliminary state is called one of warfare; not primarily because we have to contend with evils external to us, but because the elements of the warfare are within us. Within is the battle-plain between self and God, between the opposing forces of heaven and hell. One comes on as the other recedes, one towers in its strength as the other becomes weak and slinks away. When the selfish nature is entirely subdued and expelled, then God becomes all in all, inspiring all our affections, tinging all our fancies, swaying all our faculties; and when this work is complete, we are lost in God; and this is heaven. There is no more conflict in the soul, for the victory is gained. All its powers are in harmony, and all its motions are sphere-melodies. Peace is the profound hush and tranquillity after all our evil dispositions have been expunged, and the activities of our higher nature are unimpeded and uncontrolled. Then come a new sense of the Divine presence, and clearer perceptions of the Divine attributes and person, fulfilling the promise, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Just in the degree that evil goes out of us, God comes within us, and he is the peace supreme. We get foregleams of this even now, for when sinful passions are hushed or expelled, and doubts that went over our sky have cleared off, the soul opens inward even up to God, and he floods all her faculties with sunshine,—suggesting that noontide of the Divine glory when, in the body celestial, with the susceptibilities quickened, and the faculties exalted and new-organized, God shall be her sun that never sets, and her moon that never wanes. |