A GOOD WOMAN PROMOTED.

"I go to prepare a place for you,”—John xiv., 2.

MONG the most startling stories ever recited are those

connected with the adventures of the Western emigrant. In the days before the rail train showered its sparks upon the darkness of the wilderness, people put out on foot, or in slow and cumbrous wagons, from their Eastern homes, and in the wild thickets of the Far West sought to clear for their families a home. Ofttimes leaving their tender little ones in the New England village, with blanket and gun and axe, they dared the forest, terrible with bear's bark and panther's scream, and the war-whoop cry of scalping savages. After a while the trees were felled, and the under-brush was burned, and the farm was cleared, and the house was built. Then word came back here say ing that every thing was ready. The family would get into the wagon and start on at slow pace for a very long journey. After a while, some evening-tide, the shout of recognition was heard, and by the fire of the great back-log the newlyarrived would recount the exciting experiences of the way.

Well, my friends, we are all about to become emigrants to a far country. This is no place for us to stay. Our older brother, Jesus, he of the scarred brow and the blis tered feet, has gone ahead to build our mansion and to clear the way for us; and he sends a letter back, saying he has it all ready, and I break the seal of that letter and read to you these words, "I go to prepare a place for you."

I might put it in another shape. solves to build a home for himself.

A young man re-
He has pledged

himself in one of the purest of earthly attachments. He toils no more for himself than for the one who will share. with him the results of his industrious accumulation. After a while the fortune is made, the house is built, the right hands are joined, the blessing is invoked, the joy is consummated. So Jesus, the Lover of our souls, has been toiling to make a place for us. He is fitting up our mansion, and is gathering around it every thing that can possibly enchant the soul, and after a while he will say, "It is all ready now," and he will reach down his hand, and take up to his fair residence "the Church, which is the Lamb's wife." "I go to prepare a place for you."

'But," says some one, "that implies that heaven is a place. I have heard a great many people say it was merely a condition, and that wherever the souls of the righteous are, there is heaven." Absurd idea! Christ ascended to heaven, and there must have been a heaven to go to. Elijah went up to heaven, and there must have been a heaven for him to go to. The Bible was not written merely for philologists and hair-splitters, but for common-sense people; and the plain reading of my text implies not only that heaven is a condition, but that it is a glorious locality. "I go to prepare a place for you."

Where is heaven? It is the question which every intelligent Christian sometimes asks, and he especially asks it in time of bereavement. When his loved ones go away from him, you say they are in heaven; but he says, "Where is heaven?" You know there are a great many theories in regard to it. The Mohammedans think that the good Moslems, as soon as they leave this life, come

to a fragrant pool of water fed by streams from paradise. They drink out of that fragrant pool, and their thirst is assuaged. Then they go into paradise, and the trees have bells hanging on the branches, chiming whenever the air strikes them. They gaze upon the tree of life, which they say has so broad a shadow that it takes a swift horse one hundred years to race across it. They think that there is a river made up of wine and honey, flowing between banks of camphor, over beds of musk. They suppose that every spirit that goes into the future world has many attendants with baskets and with chalices of pure gold. They sup pose that the inhabitant of the future world sits down to a great banquet without any satiety, so that, after a hundred years of eating and drinking, the appetite is as good as at the moment the soul sat down. That is the Mohammedan heaven.

The Hindoo thinks that heaven is all around aboutmerely a change of body. A vulture dies, and his spirit enters a man; the man dies, and his spirit enters the vulture, and after a great many transmigrations of the soul, it is absorbed in the spirit of the great Brahm. Our forefathers thought heaven to be a place of pastimes, heroic strife, and great banqueting; spirits would fight and be wounded, and then come to the celestial streams and wash off their wounds, and they would be well again; then they would sit down at a banquet and drink wine out of the skulls of their enemies, and rise up and romp, and dance and play.

The aborigines of our own country think heaven to be beyond the great mountains. After you get beyond the great mountains, there is a great river; and after you have passed that great river, there is a vast country; and after

you have passed that wide country, there is a world of water; and in that world of water there are a thousand isles, beautiful with streams and trees, and there are buf falo and deer there; and all the departed red man has to do is to whistle up his dogs and go a-shooting to all eternity.

I mention these things because I want you to know it is impossible for a man to get any idea of heaven without the Bible, and to kindle in your soul a feeling of gratitude to God that you have this Lamp, not only for your pathway here, but to throw its glories upon the world that is to come. There is, however, among Christian people great difference of opinion as to where heaven is or will be. Some of the best Christian people think that this world is to be the final residence of the righteous. I can see how God could take all the rigors out of our climate, and all repulsions out of our world, and make it fair, and bright, and beautiful, and fit for eternal occupancy. But I can not adopt the theory. It seems to me the world is not large enough for heaven. Considering all the myriads that have gone, and all the myriads that are to go, there would not be room enough on the continents and on the seas for such a great host. Besides that, heaven is already in existence. Tens of thousands of people have gone into it. It can not be that all our departed friends are floating about in space waiting for our world to get filled up, in order that they may have a heaven. Oh no. They are there now. Christ said, "I go to prepare a place for you;" and if, eighteen centuries ago, he began the work, I think it is done now. Besides that, the Bible declares that the world, and all the things that are therein, will be burned up; and if a thing is burned up, you can not repair it, and you can not make

it a fit residence for the righteous. If it is first destroyed, it will be an entirely new world. Besides that, the elements of dissolution are already in our world. I refer not to the coal-mines in the South, which have been twenty years on fire. I refer not to the vapors coming up from the hot springs, showing great heat underneath, but to the common geological idea that the centre of this world is already on fire. Besides, there is all about a subtle fluid. which, if decomposed or set loose from other combinations, would shatter this world into pieces so small that nothing but the eye of the infinite God could find the splinters of the wreck. It would destroy mountains and seas and air. So it will require no omnipotent pry to lift up the mountains in the last day. It will not require the blast of the red-hot furnace of God's indignation to set the sea on fire. It will not require the grip of Almightiness to pull down the pillar of this world. God has only to take his hands off it, and it is gone. The mere cessation of operation on God's part would be the cause of the wreck. Besides that, other worlds have burned. Fifteen hundred stars have disappeared. The astronomer, through his telescope, again and again has seen the conflagration of a world. Why not our world burn up? Ay, I adopt the theory that Peter declares in his epistle when he says, "The world and all that is therein shall be burned up."

There are other Christian people who suppose that each sun is to be the heaven of the surrounding system. You know that there are sisterhoods of worlds that join each other in bands of light around some great central orb, and Christian people have supposed that these surrounding worlds were merely schools in which souls went to be prepared for the central light, the central sun; and there is a