which we see manifested in the visible works of His hands-in short, if we have given our attention to art, or literature, or science, or any special interest under the sun, we cannot help speculating and hoping that He who made us, and taught us to acquire that interest, will allow us to carry on the work we have begun "with grander opportunities and to finer issues" in a world to come. Well, if the God whom we worship is our Father, what legitimate hunger and thirst of the soul is there that He may not be expected to gratify? If the love of husband, or wife, or child, or, it may be, the love you long for, be the noblest thing about you, is it likely that the Father who gave it, gave it only to disappoint and belie your hopes? or, if the intellectual thirst to know and understand the glorious works of God, as well as the hunger and thirst of the heart to love, has been the inspiring motive which has given interest and energy to your present lives, is it likely that He who implanted it in you will mock your hopes at the very moment of all others when it seems as if you were on the point of being able to see through the veil ?

Or, again, you are possibly anxious about the welfare of some of those you love, and tremble to think how far they have apparently wandered from the track along which you are travelling, to the city where you long to meet them. Is it not a consolation to be told to ask yourselves why you should suppose that your

love is greater than that of the Father who gave it you; and why you should not trust that, as no good human father ever punishes for punishment's sake, so the chastisements of our Father in heaven, whether in this world or another, may be remedial, and not destructive; and that He may even grant you the happiness on another shore of being able to give a helping hand to those about whom you are anxious— to aid them in casting off, or working through, the fogs and mists and errors which have blinded them to the light which you have yourselves learned to enjoy? When well-meaning people tell us that the enjoyments of the life to come are only spiritual and immaterial, that we must not hope to meet as relations those for whom we most care, and that we may not carry on our education where we have left off, we may well ask them where they got their information, and answer

"What if earth

Be but a shadow of heaven, and things therein

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?"

Of this, however, we may be assured, that heaven will be heaven to us just in proportion to what we are; that the works which we do, whether good or ill, are sure to follow us; and that it can never be lost time to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the lessons which God has to teach us by the history of

His dealings with the great and good of olden time, that so we, like them, may be able to endure as seeing Him who is invisible, and so find patience and strength to embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which God has given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.

VII.

Faith sighing for Something Better.

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth."-REV. xxi. 1.

How strange does it appear, at first sight, that the book, or collection of books, to which we are accustomed to turn for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, and for the deepening of our faith in the great Being in whom we live and move and have our existence, should begin by declaring that when God rested from the work of creation, He surveyed everything that He had made, and pronounced it “ very good," and then end by exhibiting some of the most conspicuous and faithful of His servants sighing for a new heaven and a new earth, as though the present scene of their habitation were so utterly corrupt and so hopelessly wicked, that the true city, commonwealth, or kingdom of God could only be expected to appear out of the ruins of the present order of creation, when everything they saw around them had been entirely swept away!

Look at the first chapter of Genesis, and see how the

man of faith, who, we feel sure, was also a man full of life and vigour, with a sound mind in a sound body, able to take interest in everything about him, gazed round upon the works of God in the childhood of the human race, and, lost in astonishment and admiration at the wondrous beauty and order and variety of creation, exclaimed, "God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good;" and then look at such passages as this, from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." Or look again at the words (of our text) of the Book of Revelation: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth;" or at those similar ones in the Epistle of St. Peter: "Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness;" and then listen to that other poem of the Creation which we possess in the hundred and fourth psalm, and see how another faithful worshipper of God in olden time seems at a loss for language to express the thoughts of gladness and exultation which rose up within him at the contemplation of the glorious works of God, crying, "Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, Thou art become exceeding glorious; Thou art clothed with majesty