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PRINCETON . NEW JERSEY

FROM THE LIBRARY OF
ROBERT ELLIOTT SPEER

BV 4832 .L3 1892
Larcom, Lucy, 1824-1893
As it is in heaven

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AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

BY

LUCY LARCOM

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1892

Copyright, 1851,
By LUCY LARCOM.

All rights reserved.

FIFTH EDITION.

The Riverside Press, Camhridge, Jlfass., U. S.A.
Electrotj-ped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

To P. F.

THE INSPIRING TEACHER AND FRIEND

OF MY EARLY WOMANHOOD

THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED BY

HER GRATEFUL PUPIL

PREFACE

E all have our intimate books, as

we have our intimate friends. They
are not always the greatest or the
wisest that we know, but we like them to
think and talk with, or to be silent with ; to
have near us, simply because they are they,
and we are ourselves. This one will be
little to any reader, unless it is admitted
to the close intimacy and seclusion of
thoughtful hours. It dares to touch high
themes, — as a friend may, when, alone with
friend, conversation deepens into commun-
ion.

Extracts of some length are introduced,
as persons conversing might draw other
and wiser persons into their conference,
leaving them full freedom of speech. Three
authors most largely quoted are E. H. Sears,

vi Preface

J. H. Thorn, and George MacDonald. Other
writers as well known appear in an occa-
sional paragraph ; and familiar poets here
and there give clearness and emphasis to a
thought that was striving for expression.

The intention of the book is spiritual
rather than literary. Heaven is written of,
— the character of the heavenly life rather
than its conjectured conditions ; the heaven
that enters into our human relations to
purify them and prepare them for a higher
development ; the heaven that is to be
lived on earth, making whatever glorious
life we may pass into hereafter both dear
and familiar ; so that

" When Time's veil shall fall asunder,

The soul may know

No fearful change, nor sudden wonder,

Nor sink the weight of mystery under ;

But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow."

f.

CONTENTS

Page
I. Our Father and His Family p

//. The Heaven that Is /p

///. Blending Atmospheres 2^

11^. A Transparent World 40

V. The Human Mirror 5/

VI. The Blessed Need 64

VII. All Things are Yours 77

VIII. The Threefold Cord 89

IX. Bridegroom and Bride 10^

X. Forever Young 116

XI. An Endless Life 1^0

Xll. The Joy of our Lord 142

AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

I.

Otir Father and His Family.

UR Father." Until we feel the
meaning of these two simple words,
we can have no true perception of
what heaven is. That little pronoun " our "
is the key to all blessedness, above and be-
low. It unlocks the door of every human
heart for the admission of every other
member of the great family of humanity.
We leave our egotism and isolation and
selfishness behind us whenever we sin-
cerely utter these first words of our Lord's
prayer.

" He setteth the solitary in families."
The human father is given to us as a dim
revelation of the heavenly one. The baby

10 As it is in Heaven

catches its earliest glimpse of heaven
through the blended look of tenderness in
its father's and mother's eyes, and the
children grow up together, bound to each
other and to their parents by ties of love
and obedience that foreshadow their deep-
er relations to their fellow-beings and to
God. For love of the Best and obedience
to the Highest are essential to the exist-
ence of heaven. God cannot make a dwell-
ing-place for Himself where these are not.
" Our Father ivho art in heaven."
If heaven were a region which could be
mapped out by definite descriptions and
geographical boundaries, it would no longer
be heaven to us, but only another earth.
The sky above us symbolizes heaven be-
cause of its limitlessness. The mind re-
fuses to think of the starry spaces as
bounded. We cannot believe that in ex-
ploring them we may at last come to a
wall which shuts the universe in upon it-
self. The infinite is more comprehensible
to us than the finite. The habitation of

Our Father and His Family ii

God must be everywhere. But it is a
spiritual habitation, which we can enter
only as spiritual beings.

What " place " may signify to us when
we shall have ceased to inhabit our mortal
bodies, we cannot guess ; but if there be
any meaning in the term which the Apos-
tle Paul so distinctly uses — "a spiritual
body" — spirit and form can never be
separated from each other ; their union is
sacred and eternal. It was not mere sen-
timent, but the utterance of tenderest hu-
man sympathy and divinest knowledge, —
the assurance of Jesus to his sorrowing
disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you :
that where I am, there ye may be also."
He bade his friends still to send up their
hearts' wishes to Him, after He should
have gone out of their sight.

Prayer is the door forever open between
earth and heaven. Sooner than sound can
reach a human ear through this lower at-
mosphere, the longing desire of the spirit
rises to the heart of the Eternal Friend.

12 As it is in Heaven

Before the petition has found shape in
words, the Parent-Soul has heard and an-
swered His offspring-soul. Whether we
believe it or not, we are living in an invisi-
ble world, where our wishes are understood
before our words are spoken.

In our hurried repetitions of the Lord's
Prayer, we forget what promises of our
own are involved in the intensely human
requests we are making in its three open-
ing clauses, and how closely they all are
interblended with that first thought of Our
Father, and of ourselves as His children.
We sometimes repeat the words as if we
were asking God to do something for us
without our cooperation, even though they
so plainly announce duties that we sol-
emnly bind ourselves to perform.

It is but mockery to say " Hallowed be
Thy Name ! " while we are treating any
child of His with indifference or contempt ;
for the Name of God is also the name of
our common humanity. In heaven the
name is no arbitrary appendage ; it is the

Our Father and His Family i^

Person, the Being. To hallow God's name
is not merely to repeat it with reverence :
it is to recognize His lineaments and to
honor Himself in every one of our breth-
ren ; or if in any His image seems lost or
obscured, to pray and strive with them to
have it restored.

Nor are we sincere in saying, " Thy
Kingdom come ! " while we are living only
for our own pleasure, in selfish indifference
to the welfare of others. On the lips of
Christ this was no listless, half-hearted
wish. He tells us that " the Kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence ; " that our ut-
most energy of body and soul, our most
eager and unwearying activity must be
given to hasten its coming. If we can look
on idly while injustice and oppression and
greed of gain are crushing human lives
around us, — if we are taking to ourselves
more than our fair share of the means by
which all were intended to find their
healthful and natural development, — if
we are unwilling to sacrifice our own small

14 ^s it is in Heaven

interests to the larger good of the children
of the Kingdom, our hearts are false to the
words of our prayer.

We say " Thy will be done ! " sometimes
with almost abject submission ; but it is
rather a prayer of earnest and fervent con-
secration. We do not really wish that the
will of God may be done, unless we intend
to do it with heart and soul and mind and
strength ; — even as Christ entered the
world saying with every throb of his being,
" Lo ! I come to do thy will, O God ! "
Thus only can the will of God be done on
earth as it is in heaven.

And so, when we utter this heaven-
breathing prelude to the more personal re-
quests that follow, — if we have indeed re-
ceived the Spirit of Him who is the Voice
of our universal humanity, — we are say-
ing that with Him we do hallow the Name
of God in our thoughts and actions ; that
within our souls His Kingdom of love and
righteousness is begun ; that we are doing
His will from the heart, as the one joy of
our lives.

Our Father and His Family 75

We know little of the angels, yet we do
know that these petitions which Our Lord
taught us must also be in their hearts and
upon their lips as they look down upon us
and are perplexed by "the riddle of the
painful earth." With what patient, pitying
wonder must those who have never known
anything but the love and obedience of
heaven lean earthward, longing to pierce
our darkness with their light ! Let us com-
fort ourselves with the thought that some-
where there are beings living so close to
their Father's heart that they have no wish
apart from Him, and are always faithfully
and successfully doing His will. What we
are attempting with weary struggles, with
falterings and failures, they are steadily
bringing to pass.

Imagine for a moment what it would be
for us to obey God without the least refer-
ence to self, — without our usual small sat-
isfactions with our own methods, and our
petty measurements of the methods of
others, — without our mean craving for

1 6 As it is in Heaven

approbation or reward, — without our
mockery of humility, our belittling vanity
and pride, — without our hesitating cow-
ardice and our headstrong rashness, — but
simply, spontaneously, unreservedly follow-
ing His impulses within us, and going
forth on His errands as if there were no
joy for us in doing anything else than this.
How fresh and free, how wholesome and
glad the vision that opens before us, of
those who have escaped from the thralldom
of their own will, and are released into the
liberty of the sons of God ! What inspi-
ration for us, to know that we may learn to
do His will on earth, even as it is done by
the child-hearted, obedient angels !

Separate thoughts, hopes, plans, ideas
peculiar to themselves they must have, else
were they not their Father's children, each
a distinct and unique expression of His
life, and each meant to fill a place for
which no other being in His universe is
fitted. But among them no impulse needs
to be stifled, no purpose changed : God-

Our Father and His Family ij

born, each thought and feeling takes at
once harmonious shape, and becomes a
full, clear note in the perfect hymn of the
spiritual creation.

These are our heavenly neighbors. We
cannot see how close they sometimes pitch
their tents beside our earthly tabernacles.
We feel their eyes upon us, but we are
less acquainted with them than the earth
is with her surrounding stars. One hu-
man life, however, has been lived in their
companionship ; Jesus Christ could speak
of himself as " the Son of man, which is in
heaven." He was in conscious union with
these his invisible brethren, and some-
times the clouds were swept apart, and
voices were heard, and faces were seen
out of the inner glory, and words of that
high communion of work and worship fell
upon mortal ears, and sank into human
hearts that only faintly comprehended
their meaning.

To us also come transfiguration-mo-
ments. They are rare ; they are too daz-

1 8 As it is in Heaven

zling to be constantly borne by our weak
vision ; but they are the true illumination
of our lives. Their light is left in our souls
that we may see to work more faithfully,
knowing that we toil not alone, knowing
that the eyes of our freer fellow-servants
are upon us, that their hands are helping
us, and that the lowliest service which we
heartily render to the least of God's chil-
dren here, is one with the lofty enterprises
which occupy the energies of these holy
brings, within His invisible Kingdom of
Light and Love.

They bend toward us, in sympathy with
our little conflicts and sacrifices, even as
their souls were stirred toward our Mas-
ter, in wonder at the approaching accom-
plishment of His glorious mission to man-
kind. And while He weaves our humble
work into His, our hearts acknowledge
Him as the Centre of all aspiration and
endeavor: we find in Him the key to our
largest, holiest relationships, — "Our Lord
Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in
heaven and earth is named."

II.

The Heaven that Is.

\S it is in heaven." The words slip
thoughtlessly from our lips : as
our Lord spoke them, they gave a
diviner meaning to the whole of His per-
fect prayer. They are the atmosphere in
which every one of its beautiful, familiar
petitions blooms like a separate flower.
The fragrance of His native air, the climate
of heaven in which His soul was breathing
while He walked in a visible form upon the
earth, suffused whatever wish or thought
He had for the world He loved ; and
through this pervasive sweetness, ever
since its first utterance, the Lord's prayer
has held its place in human hearts as the
universal prayer. When his friends asked
Him what they should pray for, — the most
natural answer, the only answer He could

20 As it is in Heaven

give them was, " Pray that earth may be
like heaven."

It was as if He said, " Love my Father
as oti7' Father, — hallowing His Name in
the lowliest of His Children as in Me, and
doing His will in all things, little and great,
and you will know what heaven is, for you
will be living in it with me. His Kingdom
will then have come on earth as it is in
heaven." It is like a traveler from an en-
lightened nation visiting some outcast col-
ony of his countrymen who had become
degraded by yielding through long genera-
tions to savage habits, arousing them to
shame at their brutish condition by telling
them of the beautiful home-life they had
forgotten, and so reviving in them the wish
to cultivate its dear, forsaken humanities,
even in exile.

For earth is nothing in itself ; it is alive
only through heaven, — the heaven from
which it can no more be separated than
the human body can exist apart from the
breath of life which God has breathed into

The Heaven that Is 21

it, or than this glad, fruitful world could
be a home for growing organisms without
the encircling air by whose mysterious
movements it is penetrated and sustained.
As dead and dreary as a planet without an
atmosphere is the life that knows itself
only in its externals, in its relations to
things alone, without the spirit through
which they unfold into realities. It is al-
most sadder than to have no life at all, to
live as if the outside of it were the whole.
It is dreadful to breathe God's breath, and
not become by it a living soul.

Heaven is. Around us all things are
wavering, sinking into illusion and decay.
We want to stand on firm ground. Heart
and soul and flesh cry out for the living
God — for that which is permanent and
real. We cleave to the Name by which
God revealed Himself to His ancient peo-
ple— "I Am" — as the Name wherein
our own immortality is hidden. We are
unsatisfied until we can find the / am in
ourselves, — in our human life, throughout

22 As it is in Heaven

all its associations and experiences. God
— Life — Heaven — these are no deceits
of the senses. In our soul of souls we are
sure that they are " the things that cannot
be shaken."

We are both spirit and form, and we can
only become acquainted with spirit through
form, with the invisible through the visi-
ble. And around us the spiritual is every-
where trying to express itself through what
we call the natural. If we knew how to
look for it, we should everywhere find the
heavenly hidden in earthly things. It has
been wisely written, that " no man ever
conceived of spirit without form, or of any-
thing without form, for the simple reason
that no one has the power of suspending
the laws of thought. Form and substance
are co-essentials of each other. As they
cannot be separated in the nature of
things, so it is not in the power of any
one to separate them in his idea."

Living in the human form, and in a
world of forms not unrelated to ours, it is

The Heaven that Is 2)

the one quest for us all, to find not only
their relations to us and to each other, but
also to make our way through them to the
substance within and beyond them, to that
through which alone they have reality.
To comprehend spirit and form in their
eternal harmony, — to live in their true
relations to each other, is to have won the
secret of Life.

This thought is not fanciful, but most
practical. We can do nothing well, with-
out a recognition of the inseparable union
of form and spirit. In it lies the secret of
all right expression, A poet has said —

" Natural things
And spiritual, — who separates these two
In art, in morals, or the social drift.
Tears up the bonds of nature and brings death.

" Without the spiritual
The natural 's impossible ; — no form,
No motion ! Without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable ; — no beauty or power !
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it, — fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through

24 As it is in Heaven

With eyes immortal to the antetj'pe
Some call the ideal — better called the real,
And certain to be called so presently,
When things shall have their names."

True it is that the earthly cannot com-
prehend the heavenly, because the earthly
has no life in itself. But heavenly charac-
ter can fill these earthly moulds with living
forms. For Earth also belongs to God, and
perhaps only waits our cooperation with
Him, to become pliant to His touch as clay
to the artist's hand and thought ; no longer
inanimate dust, but the revelation of a
beautiful ideal. In the clods we tread be-
neath our feet there are imprisoned angels
waiting for release.

We think of heaven as something that
must visit us from afar, replacing with un-
imagined wonders our familiar surround-
ings, a new creation for which new capaci-
ties must be created within us. But the
new heaven and the new earth will only
be the unveiling to us of what already is. .
It is only our blindness that needs to be

The Heaven that Is 25

removed — only our spiritual faculties that
need to be awakened.

We are too much in the habit of looking
forward to heaven as to something that
luill be, — an easier, pleasanter story for
us to read when we have finished this tire-
some earth-narrative, — a luxurious palace-
chamber to rest in after this life's drudgery
is ended, — a remote celestial mountain-
retreat where the sound of the restless
waves of humanity forever fretting their
shores will vex our ears no longer. And
so we stumble on, pitying ourselves for the
hard times we have to endure on earth, and
singing our songs of the " sweet by-and-
by," as if there were some saving merit in
having patience with time, and in dream-
ing of a broader and happier realm that
we call eternity. But the eternal issues
are now and here, in our thoughts and
deeds, in our simple, common, every-day
relations to God and to our fellow-beings.
To-day, or never, — here, or nowhere, —
is eternity.

26 As it is in Heaven

We know nothing of life, — of God's
life or of our own, — and we have no real
life but His, — except by living it. The
foundations of heaven are laid in human
character. The precious stones upon
which the Holy City is built are the lives
which, according to their own distinctive
nature, receive and transmit the light of
the Divine Life, each with a different lus-
tre. The glory of God and of the Lamb,
of the Father and the Son, is that City's
perfect illumination. The celestial glory
is the glory of love and truth and holiness.
Without these there were no heavenly life,
and therefore no heaven.

Holiness, truth, love, — these are the
realities which are unseen and eternal.
But they cannot be held as mere abstrac-
tions. They have no meaning to us ex-
cept as personal attributes. Only a person
can be righteous and loving and pure. In
loving God, we love the One in whom
these qualities are perfectly revealed. In
seeking heaven, we seek the region where

The Heaven that Is 27

they are recognized and welcomed as the
supreme law. So God makes and abides
in His own heaven, the heaven that He
Himself is. And so is He, through all
generations, the true and only dwelling-
place of His children.

To live unlovingly, untruthfully, unright-
eously, is to live outside of heaven, even
though one should build a house for him-
self in the full dazzle of the Great White
Throne : while the darkest corner of earth
is heaven to him who is living the life of
God therein, though he may be unaware
of the glory that surrounds him.

Heaven is. Already its atmosphere
touches this lower firmament ; already the
heavenly -minded breathe its air. The
same love throbs in their hearts that stirs
in the souls of those who have passed on
beyond all mortal hindrances. A little
while, and the realities in which they both
live will be fully unveiled.

Surprises doubtless await us all, across
the boundaries of this earthly existence.

28 As it is in Heaven

But none, perhaps, will be more surprised
than those humble, faithful, self-sacrificing
souls who have often almost dreaded the
strange splendors that might open upon
them beyond the gates of pearl, when they
find that it is the same familiar sunshine
in which they have been walking all their
days, only clearer and serener. They will
wonder that they have no new language to
learn, no new habits to form, almost no
new acquaintances to make. They will at
last discover what their humility hid from
them here, that while on earth, without
knowing it, they had already been living
in heaven.

III.

Blending Atmospheres.

^^A

OOKING out upon the landscape
from the upper slopes of a high
mountain, you cannot help seeing
how the earth and the sky are always try-
ing to blend with each other. They are
like lovers who cannot stay apart. The
breath of the valleys ascends in a soft mist
that creeps up, up, to the highest moun-
tain ranges, and gradually shapes itself into
clouds ; or it lies in long, clinging bands
about their bases, and makes their sum-
mits appear like islands in an ethereal sea.
And the sunset tints the clouds above and
the mists below with one loveliness of
color, and the wind weaves them together
so delicately that you cannot tell which is
mist and which is cloud. The lines of the
horizon gradually vanish ; river and valley

^o As it is in Heaven

and mountain and mist intermingle and are
fused in a glory behind and above them all,
and greater than their own. A mountain
sunset is like the marriage of the visible
and the unseen, the new heaven and the
new earth, the bride " descending out of
heaven from God, having the glory of
God."

And when it all fades away, and the
stars come out of the purple deeps above,
the feeling of our human nearness to the
infinite is intensified. In the loneliness of
night on the mountain -top we comprehend
something of our relationship to those
heavenly spheres ; we are at home on our
own star, moving beside these radiant
neighbors of ours through illimitable space.

The planets which give to our evening
sky its chief splendor are but illuminated
earth, of the same material as our own ; as
they shine for us, so we shine for them.
We are one body and soul with them. The
ether that throbs between seems to sep-
arate while it really unites us. Every par-

Blending Atmospheres ^i

tide of this solid world thus becomes lumi-
nous ; every pebble that we heedlessly
tread upon is precious, for it is of the very
substance of the stars. The soul of the
star is its light, that flows through it from
some unguessed Beyond. And the soul of
that light, of all living light, is Love.
And love cannot be, without a Being who
loves. God is at the heart of all beings
and of all things, seeking to bring them
into unity with each other, the unity of His
love and peace. Nature and humanity are
one in Him, and refuse to be put asunder.
Since we, too, can love, we know that
we are of God in some more vital way than
rocks or trees, or than our own bodies.
But Love has no contempts. She sees all
things in God, and she feels the throb-
bing of her own heart, the Life of God in
her life, beating back to her through what
are esteemed the meanest of His works.

" A weed, to him who loves it, is a flower."

And Love continually hears a sound as of
human expostulation and entreaty coming

52 As it is in Heaven

up to her from tangled and neglected
wastes, which, to other ears, are buried in
savage silence. The earthly palpitates with
a dim consciousness of its heavenly alifini-
ties and possibilities, which will sometime
be realized.

The mute eloquence of Nature around
us is often most pathetic ; — the beauty
that is everywhere taking crude shapes,
trying to find expression. Sometimes this
pathos is made audible to us through sweet,
half-developed voices. Waters murmur ;
winds whisper and moan ; grass and blos-
som and leafy bough sigh back to each
other, like children who cannot tell what
they want. The dumb rock tries to write
out its message with hieroglyphic lichens.
Sea-moss and fern conceal mystical secrets
beneath their spreading fronds. The
lowest forms of matter overflow with
significance. Even the slimy ooze of the
lake and the black coal in the mine hold
an essence of purity within them which
nurses the white life of the lily, and kindles

Blending Atmospheres ^5

the sparkle of the diamond. Nothing is
so dead that it does not seek utterance —
that it does not strive to blend itself with
some unattainable perfection above itself.
The silence of Nature is an unuttered
prayer for release — for reunion with her
Source.

For Nature is not yet released from
bondage, nor can she be while we permit
ourselves to be bondslaves to her. We,
whose birthright is the liberty of the chil-
dren of God, desire a King for ourselves,
— insist that Earth shall be our sovereign
instead of our servant, binding ourselves
down beneath her and with her in unnat-
ural fetters, and so turning her palaces into
dungceons. No wonder that the whole
creation groans, being burdened.

It is one of the perplexing problems of
our being, how to find our right relations
to the natural world. In our best moods,
we feel, with the good mediaeval saint, that
the sun and the moon and the elements
are our brothers and sisters, children with

^4 ^s it is in Heaven

us in the same household. We cannot
believe ourselves unrelated to anything
that God has made, — and we are not.
Yet matter is not spirit, nor is spirit mat-
ter, though neither can find its true life
apart from the other. What if out of our
purified human hearts are to be the issues
of life to the lower natures which sur-
round us ?

" These material coverings which we
wear " — writes the author of "Foregleams
of Immortality" — "obey the law of the
immortal man within them ; let that be
purged of evil and it will transform the
whole outward nature, and make our ma-
terial clothings fit to us as our robe of
righteousness. Matter is neither good
nor evil except as magnetized by the spirit
within. ... In that day when the savagery
in men has been eliminated or softened
down, the savagery in brute natures will
be softened also, as reflecting his own
nature back upon them \ for there are
fine invisible nerves that pervade all the

Blending Atmospheres 55

universe and run down from man into all
the lower creation, and when he is himself
redeemed will draw the lower creation
towards him and harmonize it with him
in one great atonement. For in just the
measure that the lion in man's nature
lies down with the lamb, just in the same
measure will the peace be radiated on all
things about him.

" There is a sort of sympathy of all Na-
ture with all humanity. She copies out of
man what is in him, that he may see himself
face to face. And so her types beneficent
will grow fairer to us, and sparkle with a
more glorious beauty as we grow better
and drink more largely the spirit of mercy ;
and her ugly deformities will grow more
ugly if they become the looking-glass of
our own mind. . . . Man's redemption is at
the same time the redemption of all the
creatures over which he has dominion, and
the redemption of nature from the curse
that lay upon it, for the curse is primarily
in himself. Let his own heart and mind

^6 As it is in Heaven

become paradisiacal and he will enter Para-
dise again, for its light will be on the fields,
the rivers and the mountains."

We are awed by the sacred responsibility
God thus lays upon us, of being creators,
with Him, of the new heavens and the new
earth. His Spirit, breathed through us,
shall make this sad, half-dead world feel
within herself the stirrings of a living soul !
His Spirit, Soul of our souls. Breath of
our breath ! Ah ! beautiful it is to live
through Him, in Him, — beautiful both
for worlds and for souls !

We feel Him around us, above us, within
us, — the pure exhilaration of immortality.
The breath of the Spirit is like the air
which is astir everywhere, — choked and
smothered among the fetid growths of the
marsh, free and untainted on the mountain-
top. We cannot live among the miasmatic
exhalations of the bog, nor can we breathe
naturally upon summits clad in perpetual
snow. Being human, we belong in zones
where heaven and earth healthfully blend

Blending Atmospheres y^

their atmospheres ; though we are seldom
in danger, with our low earthly clinging,
of ascending into ether too pure. It is
from the highest heavens that earth and
our souls must be continually refreshed;
and there is no vigor like that we obtain
from accustoming ourselves to the air of
lofty spiritual altitudes.

Yet it is possible for righteousness to
be too hard, and purity too cold. The
flower will grow beneath the frowning
rock, and even upon the fringe of the ever-
lasting snows, — but not without the sun.
It must have warmth as well as light and
strength from the heavens. Love is the
mother-heart of the sun to the blossom.
Love is the fusing element of all life — the
tremulous, softly-defined horizon-line that
at once separates and unites the spheres,
terminating our human vision ; the tryst-
ing-place where earth and heaven meet.
Beneath its tender atmospheric suffusions
all imperfections are hidden and forgotten,
as if they were not. Life is at one with

^8 As it is in Heaven

itself, in its incompleteness, in its aspira-
tions and its prophecies.

The mysterious interblending of day and
night in all vast, lonely expanses, appeals
to a sense of deeper vastness within our-
selves. Grand as nature is, it only typifies
something grander in man ; unconscious
heights and breadths and depths within him,
waiting to embosom themselves within the
life and light of God. Seeking that in-
effable oneness with Him, man and nature
send up together one yearning response
through the holy silence : " Grant us Thy
peace ! "

The sunset ebbs down the mountain-
slopes, and village and wilderness fall asleep
quietly side by side. Twilight touches all
growths with its chrismal dews. Night
falls softly upon the earth, revealing to us
our near and glorious companionship of
stars, and leaving us to float away with
them through the solitudes of heavea
Home-lights twinkle up from the darkness
below with a radiance indistinguishable

Blending Atmospheres ^9

from the light of stars. Lifted into the
overbrooding stilhiess, we feel only the
throbbing of One infinite Heart. All
things, — all souls of things, — are indisso-
lubly one in the Eternal Love. Through
all the universe there is no longer any
sigh of separation.

" So when for us life's evening hour
Soft falling shall descend,
May glory born of earth and heaven
The earth and heavens blend ; —

" Flooded with peace the spirit float,
With silent rapture glow,
Till where earth ends and heaven begins
The soul shall scarcely know ! "

IV.

A Transparent World.

N some moods, and to some na-
tures almost habitually, Nature is
an open secret. Looking into her
mysteries, it is as if the gates between her
and heaven were of transparent crystal in-
stead of clouded pearl. This can only be
when the spiritual vision is free from ob-
scuring films. The prophet, the poet and
the little child are alike in their peculiar
insight : they see into things, and see
them as they are, because their eyes are
clear.

The ignoble prophet whom the heathen
king called to curse Israel could only un-
fold the vision of blessing from the Al-
mighty that he saw — " the man whose
eyes are open." And Elisha, "the man
of God," when his servant cried out in

A Transparent World 41

despair at the sight of the surrounding
Syrian army, had only to ask that the out-
dazzling heavenly encampment which en-
girded them yet more closely might be
shown him : — " Lord, I pray thee, open
his eyes, that he may see."

If the child sees heaven in its mother's
eyes, not less does the mother in the
child's. Who has not felt, in meeting the
calm, wonder-lighted, impenetrable earnest-
ness of a baby's gaze, that if it had but
words, it could reveal unfathomed secrets ?

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

" Thou little Child,"

" thou eye among the blind,"

*' That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind," —

" Thou, over whom thy immortality
Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by."

What wonder that Wordsworth, himself
a seer, should so often return to this idea
of the seer-like intuitions of childhood, and
through it should find highest assurance of
the Divine approach to our humanity ! —

42 As it is in Heaven

" Thou, who didst wrap the cloud
Of infancy around us, that thyself
Therein with our simplicity awhile
Might'st hold, on earth, communion undisturbed."

The clear vision of childhood becomes
gradually dimmed by earthliness, but
beauty and truth remain within all forms,
and the poet sees them " through a glass,
darkly ; " by signs and similitudes. Saint
Paul was giving utterance to the deepest
poetic reality, when he said that "the in-
visible things of Him since the creation of
the world are clearly seen, being perceived
through the things that are made." Na-
ture is one vast metaphor, through which
spiritual truth may be read. As our hearts
harden with worldliness, we must be
spoken to in parables. But to the children
of the kingdom the hidden mysteries
around them are continually unveiled. In
nature, as in all things and everywhere, the
pure in heart see God.

And the pure in heart not only see God
themselves, but they become a medium for

A Transparent World 43

transmitting His thoughts to others. It is
at last as if God were thinking through
every look and movement of the purified
soul. And two souls whose vision has
grown clear with His purity scarcely have
need of speech when they meet. The crys-
tal between them is without a film. They
"know as they are known." All living
things bear their messages from heart to
heart, as from heaven to heaven.

Who knows what language may be
among the angels ^ Their alphabet may
be the intonations of the wind, the colors
and odors of flowers, the changeful suffu-
sions of sunset tints, or the musical drop-
ping of twilight dews.

It is one of the greatest delights in life
to spell out God's meanings in the visible
world, or rather — for this is the privilege
of all our Father's children — to lie in His
bosom with our whole souls so open to Him
that His thoughts shine through our being,
seeming to us as if they were our own.
Then His mountains lift us up with their

44 -^s it is in Heaven

strength, His rivers flow through us with
their freshness, and on His shoreless ocean
we share the freedom of His infinity.

Said William Blake, "The man who in
his mind and thought never traveled to
heaven is no artist." "When the sun
rises, I see, — not a round disc of fire, —
but an innumerable company of the heav-
enly host, crying ' Holy, holy, holy is the
Lord God Almighty.' "

" It is," writes one who while on earth
looked far into heavenly things, " only a
fulfillment of the deepest prophesyings of
renovated souls — prophesyings that the
poet and the artist utter in broken speech
— when the Divine Revealers show us a
spiritual world that transcends the natu-
ral : a world of forms and substances so
much nearer in degree to spirit that they
pulsate with its life and breathe with its
fragrancy, and put on robes chromatic with
all its beauty, and quick with all the rus-
tlings of its love ; a world of objective
scenery, on which ever lies the sweet

A Transparent World 4^

morning-light of subjective peace ; a world,
therefore, whose leaf can never fade, and
whose flower can never wither, because
it wears the colorings of souls that are
flooded with the life everlasting."

Another, sitting under his quiet roof-tree
in the sunset of his years, hears the voice
of God in the garden in the cool of the
day, and meditates thus : —

" In cornfields and orchards, it is as
though, from among the yellow corn and
out of the tree-tops, it were said to thought-
ful listeners, * O taste and see that the
Lord is good ! ' And the westerly wind is
like a soft whisper out of the infinite, say-
ing ' God is love ; hope thou in Him ! '

Milton puts into the mouth of the fallen
spirit, at his first glimpse of the newly
created world, the envious cry —

" O earth ! how like to heaven, if not preferred
More justly, seat worthier of gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old ! "

This was the spiteful bitterness of one
who hated the perfection from which he

46 As it is in Heaven

had made himself an outcast. Raphael,
"the affable archangel," with the glory of
the invisible throne still lingering on his
brow, sees the resemblance also, but only
as a suggestion of the beauty which is un-
utterable. He says to Adam —

" What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought ? "

Since nothing in the visible universe, so
far as we know, is unrelated to the rest, —
since everything created points upward to
something higher than itself, impelled by
some hidden power of growth through an
ascending series, almost as if matter were
trying to find its way up to spirit, — since
the visible is so evidently a foreshadowing
of an invisible life, — it would be strange
if there were not in-shinings downward
through matter from that unseen realm.
And that is what the poet and the seer
and the believer do find, — spirit revealing
itself through form — the invisible through
the visible.

A Transparent World 4y

Mrs. Browning tells us

" That not a natural flower can grow on earth,
Without a flower upon the spiritual side,
Substantial, archetypal, all aglow
With blossoming causes, — not so faraway
That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared,
May not catch something of the bloom and breath.
Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed
Still apprehended, consciously or not."

Have we not felt the freshness of a cher-
ub's cheek and breath in the wild-rose
petal laid against our lips .■' Swinging upon
her rock as if just alighted out of the sky,
clad in translucent azure, have we not seen
the harebell as a spirit, rather than as a
flower .-• Who shall speak of the wild rose
and the harebell as dying things, when the
soul has once received their beauty and
known it to be immortal .-' The grass
withers and the flower fades ; but their
beauty was an utterance of the word of the
Lord, and that must endure forever. It is
only the earthliness of earth that decays ;
the spirit, the living form that was in it,
lives on. That which revealed God in an

48 As it is in Heaven

earthly image, re-blooming in the heavenly,
will reveal Him forever. From every ob-
ject that we look upon with love, we are
gathering greater wisdom than we know ;
we are learning lessons that we shall never
forget. A good man previously quoted
says, —

" In some age or other, I shall say of
some heavenly marvel, perhaps, * It is won-
derful ! wonderful ! ' And yet, in the earth
it was hinted to me by the tones of the
wind, and the way the clouds went over my
head ! I think perhaps every sight in the
world that now is may avail us in the world
that is to come. If I knew all that is to
be learned from a daisy even, I should be
less a stranger to God than I am. But I
shall know it some time. All about me
tree unto tree is uttering speech, and
flower unto flower is showing knowledge.
It is in a language that I do not well un-
derstand, but which I shall remember, and
so shall learn the whole meaning of here-
after."

A Transparent World ^g

Well may a poet sing —

" Woo on, with odor wooing me,
Faint rose, with fading core !
For God's rose-thought that blooms in thee
Will bloom forevermore 1 "

When Christ said " Consider the lilies ! "
He could not have been looking upon them
as dying things, but as white radiances in
the garden of God, bearing his message to
mortals. Behind them he saw humatt
spirits robed in purity and faith, the flower
and the disciple growing up together in the
light of God's love, and showing forth His
glory. More than a figure it is when we
speak of heaven as Paradise, — a garden, —
a place of growths, where our spirits shall
develop among other spiritual forms for-
ever. To love, to learn, and to grow, —
these three things the heavenly life must
mean, wherever it is lived.

Nature becomes a divine study, when
we see that things apparently inanimate
are alive, and may claim a share in our
immortality. Then everything that God

^o As it is in Heaven

has thought it worth His while to create is
seen to be sacred. And man at last —

" By contemplating these forms
In the relations which they bear to man,
Shall discern how, through the various means
Which silently they yield, are multiplied
The spiritual presences of absent things.

Science then
Shall be a precious visitant ; and then
And only then, be worthy of her name,
For then her heart shall kindle."

That time will surely come, and might
come now for us, if we would open our
eyes, — or rather, if we would but earnestly
desire that they might be opened. Then
we should see

" Every common bush a-fire with God.'

The stones of the wilderness would become
to us a stairway for ascending and descend-
ing angels. We should say, in the desert
which had seemed to us most dreary and
barren, " Surely the Lord is in this place ;
and I knew it not." " This is none other
but the house of God, and this is the gate
of heaven."

TJ)e Human Mirror.

E know the very first thought God
had about us, before we came into
visible existence ; — " Let us make
man in our own image." He thought it of
humanity as a whole, and He thought it of
every separate human being ; for humanity
is no abstract idea, but a family composed
of individuals, each his Father's child.
The grandeur of it ! The thoughts of God
are eternal, and so there never was a time
when He was not thinking of us, His dear
children who were to be. We were to be
like Him. What that means we cannot
fully comprehend, because finite creatures
can form no conception of an infinite na-
ture ; yet we know that if we are truly His
children, we must in some sense share His
infiniteness.

52 As it is in Heaven

In our childish endeavor to imagine
what it means to be made in the image of
God, we transpose the terms, and make a
God in our own image, with all our mortal
limitations and imperfections, — weak, par-
tial, revengeful, tyrannical. This attempt
to limit and describe God, to shape in the
moulds of our petty comprehension Him
who is invisible and incomprehensible, is
at the root of all idolatry. It sounds arro-
gant to speak of ourselves as bearing the
image of the Infinite One, but unless we
do, we are not the children of our Father
who is in heaven. And it is not arrogance
but humility to feel and acknowledge that
we have no life but His, and reverently to
receive from Him our immortal inheritance.
The lowliest wayside flower takes into its
tissues all the endlessly free elements that
compose the atmosphere ; the eye, by its
very construction, demands a boundless
horizon ; and the human spirit refuses to
be fed from any but infinite sources. It is
the little planet, shaped in the likeness of

^ The Human Mirror 5^

the sun, absorbing and reflecting his inex-
haustible overflow of Hght,

We must construct no gods for our-
selves, with our hands or with our imagina-
tion, A soul's worship of the Infinite Soul
allows no boundaries. We cannot define
God, but our lives can be the mirror of His
life ; and that is the very purpose of our
being.

If we alone among all the creatures in
this world are made in the image of God,
it must be through something wherein we
are different from them — through the pos-
session of a nature which can grasp moral
and spiritual truth, and can shape itself
thereby. In moments when we are truest
to ourselves, we know that we are capable
of this ; and with this certainty a glimpse
of the boundlessness of our being bursts
upon us. " Beloved, now are we the sons
of God, and it doth not yet appear what we
shall be." The children, when they see
their Father more truly as He is, through
loving Him will become like Him. But

54? ^5 // is in Heaven

they will never take in His full glory : it
will be growing upon them and into them
forever. And their humility must increase
as they are drawn nearer to His Heart, the
centre of His burning perfections. With
the archangels who cry continually, ** Holy,
holy, holy Lord God Almighty," they will
veil their faces as they sing His praise.

We are farthest away from God when we
cannot perceive Him in our fellow-beings.
The mirror of human nature is sadly
blurred, but in the meanest and wickedest
there are tokens of the Divine childhood,
— occasional flashes of the Father's image
through innumerable distortions. It is for
us to show a clear reflection of His life in
our own lives, before we judge others. And
it is not for us to belittle ourselves by de-
tecting flaws in those who by their charac-
ter and actions most truly reveal Him to
mankind. This is heaven on earth, — to
see our Father's face in the faces of our
brethren. There are those around us who
do so reveal Him almost without a blur.

71)6 Human Mirror ^^

Few of us but can say, with gratitude to
God —

" I know the face of him who with the sphere
Of unseen presences communion keeps ;
His eyes retain its wonder in their clear
Unfathomable deeps.

" He brings the thought that gives to earthly things
Eternal meaning ; brings the living faith
That even now puts on immortal wings,
And clears the shadow, Death."

These rare illustrations of human char-
acter are but the suggestion of possibilities
that lie dormant in men who appear to us
commonplace, — a term we should use far
less frequently regarding any person if we
kept in mind how crude and foolish we
must all seem to natures above us, who
have never failed to fulfil the laws of their
being. Angelic intelligences, we are told,
do desire to look into the developing capa-
bilities of regenerate humanity. We are a
mystery that interests them : and we, in
all humility, might well take a reverent in-
terest in those whom we now sometimes

56 As it is in Heaven

pass by with supercilious glances. Mrs.
Browning makes Aurora Leigh say

" Look long enough
On any peasant's face here, coarse and lined, —
You '11 catch Antinoiis somewhere in that clay,
As perfect-featured as he yearns at Rome
From marble pale with beauty : then persist.
And, if your apprehension 's competent,
You '11 find some fairer angel at his back.
As much exceeding him, as he the boor.
And pushing him with empyreal disdain
Forever out of sight."

Every human being, every form which
was meant to reveal the presence of a soul,
and so be a revelation of God, commands
our utmost reverence. These are noble
words of Novalis : —

" There is but one temple in the world,
and that temple is the Body of Man.
Nothing is holier than this high form. We
touch heaven when we lay our hands on a
human body."

Nor have we a right to think slightingly
of any of our natural faculties or affections ;
since, so far as we know, our whole nature

The Human Mirror ^7

is formed in the image of God. It is true
that through some of these we seem re-
lated to the animal creation, — as if the stir
of the Central Life eddied out to the ex-
treme, unknown boundaries of visible and
tangible being. All our powers have their
low and their high, their earthly and their
spiritual possibilities of expression. We
know that we belong to God, by the inward
consciousness that we can distinguish be-
tween these, — that we can recognize our
Divine alliances. The human mirror has
only then become hopelessly defective,
when it confuses these eternal distinctions ;
when it makes wrong appear as right, and
evil as good.

Let this truth sink down into our hearts
as a living, germinating seed. We have no
human capacity which is unworthy of an
immortal development. Whatever power
or faculty is in us is God-given, and may
claim a share in His eternity. Were it
otherwise, some part of His work in His
creation would be purposeless and vain.

^8 As it is in Heaven

If we have found out the secret of our
human life at all — not alone in what we
call its higher reaches, but in its every-day
experiences — we have found that its hum-
blest conditions overflow with immortal
meanings : that the whole of it is " hid
with Christ in God." If we sincerely pray
that His Kingdom may come, we shall
strive to do His will in all the common-
place corners and lowly chambers of our
being, as well as in its widest expanses of
free and joyous aspiration.

Especially is this idea of heavenly perma-
nence applicable to our affections. Every
outreach of life to life, every impulse of
this God-born nature that finds its joy in
giving what is richest and sweetest in
its own being, and in receiving the same
from other beings, is and shall be found
by the purified heart to be as holy as it is
human. Earthly desires are wrong only be-
cause of their perversions of the heavenly
meaning that they inclose. The earth is
still the Lord's, though it mixes itself so

The Human Mirror ^g

strangely with the spiritual in our thoughts ;
there, out of its own depths, crying and
struggling painfully upward, longing to be
released from the bondage of evil, and to
share the adoption of the children of God.

Our sin lies in yielding the higher im-
pulse to the lower ; so impeding the up-
ward progress of the creation beneath us,
and bringing about disorder and disinte-
gration and ruin instead of harmonious
union. The misery and the horror of sin
is that by it the image of God in humanity
becomes defaced, until sometimes it seems
wholly obliterated. We speak of those who
have given themselves up to their animal
impulses as brutal ; but that is an insult to
the brutes. Man cannot sink to their level
without degrading himself far below them.
Through his higher intelligence he becomes
a fiend.

By every impulse within us, we were
meant to ascend to the heavenly life.
Every human affection, could it take the
course God meant for it, would link us to

6o As it is in Heaven

the angelic and the divine : and indeed, it is
through our affections, perverted and mis-
placed as they often are, that we feel most
profoundly our immortality. From her
deepest intuitions Love declares to the
beloved, —

" Were not our souls immortal made
Our equal love would make them such."

Emerson grandly says : " Neither is
life long enough for friendship. That is a
serious and majestic affair, like a royal
presence, or a religion, and not a postil-
ion's dinner, to be eaten on the run."

The word " passion " has been so mis-
used and degraded that we scarcely know
it except in its lower, earthlier accepta-
tion. But passion is love energized, glori-
fied with utter forgetfulness of self, —
with an intense divine necessity of giving
itself unreservedly in sacrifice and conse-
cration to that which it loves. Our Lord's
passion has made the word a sacred one to
our human hearts. By that passion we
have learned that God-like sacrifice is pos-

The Human Mirror 6i

sible to our humanity, having been made
real in a life like our own, through love
that was stronger than death. God, in
sparing not His own Son for our sakes,
has revealed to us that the innermost
depth and the uttermost overflow of love
are essential to His being, and must there-
fore be so to ours.

By holy human character, by purity and
devotion of soul like Christ's, and by these
only, is the purpose of God in our creation
made known. " We all, with open face
beholding as in a glass the glory of the
Lord, are changed into the same image
from glory to glory, even as by the spirit
of the Lord."

How beautiful it would be to live in a
world where every being we met uncon-
sciously revealed in look and word and ac-
tion, in the slightest gesture and movement,
the Divine intention in his creation ! It
is because little children do so, for the first
brief months of their lives, that they charm
us and captivate us. And it is in the sim-

62 As it is in Heaven

plicity of being without dissimulation, and
from the depth of our souls, just what we
were meant to be, that we become as little
children, and with them enter into the
kingdom of heaven. The world seems to
force us to put on masks and veils, — to
hide what is most real in us behind some
conventional caricature of ourselves. But
both life and death strive with us, compel-
ling us to show, if only by glimpses, what
we truly are, as the children of God, and
mirrors of His holy nature.

" Often from the depths of his being a
man gives out a clear image of what he is
at heart, of what he is in spirit, though his
outward life, through stress of circumstance,
may be feeble, broken, or discordant. And
beyond this, even with those whose whole
soul is most fully expressed in their out-
ward life, the expression is at best only
partial and prophetic ; there is always
something more indicated, intimated, as
the innermost beauty and goal of the
spirit, that is not and as yet cannot be

The Human Mirror 6)

expressed. There is no true life that docs
not reveal a purer, a richer and more
blessed life visioned in its depths, seen
like lovely grottoes in the deep, radiant
with light beneath a heaving and a broken
surface. Now that image is the true man,
the real impress and outgoing of his spirit ;
and when mortality takes away the trou-
bled setting of circumstance, that is the
spiritual portrait which alone remains in
our hearts. And those upon whom this
spiritual stamp is strongest are those who
when parted from us leave their real image
with us, and as already caught up into
heaven, speak to us of where they are, in
the look of angelic beauty, the return of
immortal youth, on the face of the dead
who die in the Lord."

VI.

The Blessed Need.

HERE is no wider-spread miscon-
ception of heaven than that it is a
place where all our wishes will be
gratified. We criticise loftily the Moham-
medan's dream of a sensual paradise, while
our own thought of happiness hereafter is
only a little less selfish. It is the mistake
of hearts that were made for right desires,
and that ought never to have had any
other ; but from that perfect condition,
we know that we have gone very far astray.
Our wishes have become our chief tempt-
ers and betrayers. Almost all the sorrow
and degradation under which humanity
groans is the result of gratified human
desires, consciously or unconsciously per-
verted into inhuman ambitions and pas-
sions.

The Blessed Need 65

To insist upon having our wishes grati-
fied, even when it does not cause depriva-
tion and injury to others, involves the
dwarfing of ourselves, the starving out of
our diviner aspirations. Always to have
our own way is not a blessing, but a curse.
The indulged child is the spoiled child,
most hopelessly spoiled in that he at last
finds no satisfaction except in self-indul-
gence. The children of Israel refused
bread from heaven, and cried out to God
for flesh to eat. " And He gave them
their request, but sent leanness into their
soul." Scarcely a more awful retribution
is recorded in the sacred Book. A surfeit
of earthly enjoyment — quails preferred to
manna — and spiritual starvation ! The
result is no less dreadful for being a nat-
ural sequence of events ; the most misera-
ble state of the soul's health is when it has
lost its relish for heavenly food.

Getting, the gaining by mere accretion,
is of the earth, and pertains to lower sub-
stances or growths, as rocks, clay, fungi,

66 As it IS in Heaven

and lichens. As things ascend and live
after the heavenly fashion, they live by giv-
ing themselves away, — they must flow-
forth, or blossom, or radiate, — must enter
as light and warmth into the harder na-
tures beneath them. Getting is of the
earth ; giving is of the heavens.

We may desire both knowledge and love
selfishly. Whatever we want for ourselves
alone, we do not seek in the heavenly way.
Friendship may be to us merely a cut
flower, that graces our banquet for a day,
and then dies a natural death, or it may be
a live plant, daily unfolding its blossoms
with sweetness and beauty that all may
share. One of the blessed, unending needs
of heaven must surely be the need of giv-
ing forth into other lives the blessedness
which God has poured into ours.

It is only the most pitiable of heart
poverty that feels as if it could do nothing
to add to the happiness of other lives, and
does not even care to make the attempt.
And where no love is given, the life shriv-

The Blessed Need 6j

els and narrows until none can be received.
The soul itself is refreshed and enlarged
by the stream of love that flows through
it : — this is the true well of water spring-
ing up within unto everlasting life.

Opportunities come reaching out their
hands to us every moment, — not to do
great things, perhaps, but for the

" little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love,"

that take off the chill from our undemon-
strative, matter-of-fact intercourse with
one another, and keep our hearts from
starvation. Who does not know what it
means to be " hungry for a little love .'' "
Who has not often become aware that he
was telling God of his heart-hunger, rather
than of any physical need, while he re-
peated the words, " Give us this day our
daily bread .? " And even when we have
been the recipients of such affection as
falls naturally to almost all of us, has it
not often only created in us a longing for

68 As it is in Heaven

more satisfying food, as if we felt that at
the human board we were but tasting

" Mere crumbs of nourishment, while our strong hearts
Are shaping ever an ideal love,
And thirsting for a sympathy of soul
Which angels only know ? "

But the craving for affection is not al-
ways wholesome ; it may be entirely and
miserably morbid. It may be only a cov-
etous outreach after a blessing which be-
longs to another, and without which that
other life miist be left wholly unsunned
and unrefreshed. The heavenly love is an
immortal flower : no deathly blight of self-
ishness can creep into its core. Of this,
as of all the most precious things God
has given to man, our hearts make no mis-
take in assuring us that " it is more blessed
to give than to receive." To love is an
eternal need of the soul : it is the free and
spontaneous giving forth of our inmost and
best. To be loved is not in our own power :
it may come to us as the reaction of our
own love back upon ourselves, or, more

The Blessed Need 69

blessedly, as the gracious and undeserved
bestowal of Him from whom cometh down
every good and perfect gift.

" Love of every kind is God's love." In
knowing that it is such, human love be-
comes most sacred and solemn. It is God's
heart that throbs in ours when it leaps up
within us at the sound of a beloved name,
at the pressure of a hand, a glance, a voice,
a presence which is like music felt along
all the chords of our being.

" As he hath loved us," In His own
glorious way, through His own holy inspi-
ration, we know what it is to love one an-
other. Like His, our love, when it is true,
is no self-seeking, but a perpetual giving.
And the desire to bear a blessing to any
soul must sooner or later bring us near
that soul.

There is a passage in one of George
MacDonald's books that beautifully em-
phasizes this thought : —

" I know now that it is by loving, and
not by being loved, that one can come

JO As it is in Heaven

nearest the soul of another : yea, that
■ where two love, it is the love of each other,
and not the being beloved by each other,
that originates and perfects and assures
their blessedness. I know that love gives
to him that loveth, power over any soul be-
loved, even if that soul know him not,
bringing him inwardly close to that spirit ;
a power that cannot but be for good ; for in
proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love
ceases, and the power that springs there-
from dies.

" Yet all love will one day meet with
its return. All true love will, one day,
behold its own image in the eyes of the
beloved, and be humbly glad. This is pos-
sible in the realms of lofty Death."

And possible here also. For the breath
of blessing that goes forth from our life
is given back to us in fragrance from
other lives. Love creates its own atmos-
' phere, and is its own heaven. Who can
guess how the air of earth is still sweet-
ened, as with ever-blooming flowers, by the

The Blessed Need 7/

loving thoughts that loving human beings
have sent forth into it from the depths of
their spirits since time began ? Are not
faithfulness and self-sacrifice well worth
what they cost to us, if, by our heart's
blood, we may but water the plants of
heaven on earthly soil, for the refreshment
of generations to come ?

The friends who have been truly ours
here, we must find in the hereafter, for '
they are part of ourselves : our life and
theirs is one, and is " hid with Christ in
God " where it is safe forever. But not
even in heaven can we be sure of at-
tracting to our side, whenever we will,
those whose presence we most desire. We
and they may be called apart on widely-
separated embassies, each to our own spe-
cial and peculiar ministries, there as here.
And we shall learn to love each other bet-
ter because of our capacity for separate
service. When we do meet, it will be to
find in each other, through our new expe-
riences, an unexplored and undreamed-of

73 y4s it is in Heaven

region of God's ever- widening heaven.
He will always prepare us for and prepare
for us our work, our place, and our com-
panionships ; and our deepest mutual
yearning for soul-communion will go forth
to Him forever on the wings of the prayer
that is unceasingly heard in heaven —
"Thy will be done ! " Never can we be
so glad in anything that concerns ourselves
only, as in yielding our desires to His per-
fect will.

Slowly, falteringly, we are here learning
how to say this prayer aright, — how to
ask that God's will may be done, — not
merely in a spirit of submission, but be-
cause His will is dearer to us than the
dearest and deepest wish of our own
hearts.

"A prayer in its simplest definition is
merely a wish turned God ward," one has
told us. The same earnest thinker says :
*' What Christ's prayer was, all true pray-
ers must be. You must pray with the
great prayer in sight. You must feel the

The Blessed Need yj

mountains above you while you work upon
your little garden. Little by little your
special wishes and the eternal will of God
will grow into harmony with one another.
All conflict will die away, and the great
spiritual landscape from horizon to horizon
will be but one. That is the prayer of
eternity — the prayer of heaven — to which
we may come, no one can say how near,
on earth."

Yes ; when we say " Thy will be done,"
we are praying on earth as they pray in
heaven. Up towards the glory of infinite,
ever-receding summits winds the path of
the immortal traveler. Already, on these
lower ascents, heaven is in bloom around
us ; for there is no true human joy that is
not an outgrowth of the Holy Will. The
peak hidden in clouds, and the cleft of the
mountain-side that roots the timid flower,
are formed of the same Eternal Rock.

" The hill of Zion yields

A thousand sacred sweets,
Before we reach the heavenly fields.
Or walk the golden streets."

^4 ^5 // is in Heaven

And as we go on, we shall find every
wish of our hearts blossoming into a prayer
whose fragrance is the breath of the one
adorable Will. Our little lives will feel
their unity with the all-surrounding, all-
pervading Life, in being at one with God.

It is not our wishes, but our needs, that .
God will eternally satisfy. Our desires
are often so near the surface that they
change with every passing current of
thought ; we do not ourselves know what
we want ; and we get only a little brief
sparkle of pleasure from their gratification.
But our needs take us down into the deep-
est depth of ourselves, — into those re-
cesses of love and aspiration and resolve
where character is shaped, — into the veiled
sanctuary of our inmost personal being,
where, whether we have ever caught a
glimpse of His glory or not, we know that
God abides. Our highest blessedness it
is, that we have immortal needs, — needs
which require eternity for their fulfillment.
Eternally we shall need to be taken deeper

77?^ Blessed Need y^

into the unfathomable heart of God, that
we may learn to love as He loves. Eter-
nally we shall need to pray the lofty prayer
of Christ, " Thy will be done ! " for eter-
nally the mysteries of that Will which is
indeed God Himself — His character —
His personality — will rise as inaccessible
mountain-tops above us, — yet as heights
towards which we must ever ascend to
breathe our native air.
Tennyson has sung of

" Tears from the depth of some divine despair ; "

and there is a despair which is more heav-
enly than any attainment ; a glimpse of
white, unapproachable Holiness — of the
Holy One himself — that humbles us to
the dust while at the same time it lifts
us up and draws us irresistibly onward.
Thank God that we shall feel this holy
despair forever ! — that we shall never
come to any level, however high, where we
can rest in ourselves, and feel Him no longer
above us, who is Himself our heaven !
By the aspiration that climbs upward and

^6 As it is in Heaven

unfolds its flower toward Him more glori-
ously for the depth of humility in which
it is rooted, we know our eternal need of
Him. We know that we shall be seeking
Him and finding Him forever and forever,
growing into His infinity as it heightens
and broadens and deepens beyond us.

Never can there come a time, in the far-
thest onward reach of the celestial journey,
when a living soul will no longer hunger
and thirst after righteousness, for to do so
is to hunger and thirst after God. Angels
and archangels must stoop beside us to fill
their golden chalices, as we our cups^ of
clay, at this inexhaustible Fountain. To
hunger no more and to thirst no more is
but to have our ever-returning need per-
petually satisfied ; and from the overflow
of our blessedness to become wells of the
water of life to other souls.

Blessed be God, who has made earth
and heaven one, in the heart's unquench-
able thirst for Him !

VII.

All Things are Yours.

HAT can an angel regard as riches ?
Certainly nothing that is apprecia-
ble by our mortal senses, — not
such things as we see with covetous eyes,
and touch with miserly hands, and lock
away from thieves in tomb-like coffers.

Milton has drawn for us a fancy-sketch
of one such sordid angel, among the rebel-
lious host : —

" Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell

From heaven, for even in heaven his looks and thoughts

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold,

Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed

In vision beatific."

But the messengers of God, who fly abroad
on His errands through the universe, can-
not travel with their winged thoughts
weighted by any material burden. An

y8 As it is in Heaven

angel's riches are the messages he bears, —
messages of love and truth from the heart
of God to His creatures. The messenger
knows that he is the bearer of inestimable
wealth, but he has no desire regarding it
except that it may reach its destination,
and bless the souls for whom it was in-
tended. If any selfish hoarding of truth
and love were possible, the truth would
turn to falsehood, and the love to hate —
and heaven would be hell. The heavenly
riches must be given away, freely as the
air we breathe, or it is no longer heavenly.
Again the plural gives the pronoun its
value. "All things are j<?«;x" We are
not the real possessors of things earthly or
heavenly, while we persist in saying " They
are mine ; " the only permanent claim we
have upon them is that they are ours. God
never gives us anything for our individual
self alone. The divineness of His gifts is
proved by our desire to share them with
others. It is only perishable objects that
we can hold selfishly, and in so holding
them, they and we perish together.

All Things are Yours yg

The Apostle does not leave anything
out ; — the friends who have come nearest
to our spiritual life, — the things that live,
and the things that die, — the things we
have now, and the things that are coming
to us here or hereafter, — all are ours, to
be held as God's gift through Christ, not
by any exclusive claim, but for the benefit
and blessing of others. Nothing is ours
for hoarding or for display ; all things are
ours to share.

But what, to Saint Paul, was the meaning
of " things ? " Not that in them which can
be touched and handled ; that only in them
which is spiritual, or which symbolizes the
spiritual, made them realities to him. A
soul cannot possess anything material : its
grasp is too large : the material slips away
from it, and leaves only the indestructible
essence. The soul of man can possess only
the soul of things. That is why the rich
man is often so poor ; he only owns the
outside husks of things ; not the sweetness
and richness of their life.

8o As it is in Heaven

The rich and the poor alike need to change
their estimate of values. If the poor man
wants the rich man's nothings, he would be
no better off for having them than the mis-
taken rich man who thinks they are some-
thing. The envious poor and the purse-
proud rich are in a state of equal poverty.
Every accumulation of things, merely as
things, shuts out the light of heaven from
the soul. If the rich man's possessions are
not, to himself and to others, a medium of
spiritual knowledge and love, he had better
scatter them abroad, like the dust they are,
to mingle with their kindred dust. If the
poor man, the emptiness of whose earthly
condition God has made especially favorable
for the inflow of the riches of faith, would
be willing to exchange his faith for money
or houses or lands, let him put on sackcloth
and ashes, and pray that his eyes may be
opened to see what are the true riches !

Should the dreams ever come to pass,
that to-day are floating in the air around us,
of a time when earthly conditions shall be

All Things are Yours 8/

equalized, and all shall share evenly in
earthly comforts, luxuries, and opportuni-
ties, men will perhaps find themselves in
an earthly Paradise, but it v^ill not be
the kingdom of heaven. That can come
only in the souls of men, in loving hearts
and righteous lives. The dwellers in that
kingdom know nothing of riches or pov-
erty, except as they are revealed by char-
acter. They are regarded as richest who
have most life to impart to others. There
are no />oor souls in heaven.

Christ pitied rich men because it is so
hard for them to find their way over their
heaped-up wealth into the kingdom of God.
And yet we see around us many who have
been baptized into His name eager to be-
come rich, making it the absorbing purpose
of their lives. What is the meaning of
their baptism to them } Do they remem-
ber that their Master, the Son of Man, had
not where to lay His head .? Has He
changed His opinion regarding riches, to
suit the changes of these latter days ? The

82 As it is in Heaven

poor rich man who went away sorrowful
from Christ may have seen how worthless
his great possessions were in comparison
with the Divine friendship he craved, and
may have returned with joy, scattering his
gold among the suffering poor as he came.
So only could he have shown that he was
sufficiently in sympathy with the lofty na-
ture he had approached, to become his dis-
ciple. Yet so would he have found that in
having nothing, he possessed all things.
For things are only valuable to us as the
instruments of spiritual truth in shaping
our lives. When they have done all such
service as they can for us, God has some
finer instrument ready for the finer work
that is required. Sometimes the coarse
instruments are wealth and luxury> and the
fine ones poverty and discomfort.

We must count even our circumstances,
whether they seem favorable or the oppo-
site, among "all things " out of which we
win our everlasting inheritance. The Hand
that is at work upon us knows just what

All Things are Yours 83

discipline our nature needs to mould it
anew into the image of Christ, and we can
welcome His touch, though it brings disap-
pointment, sorrow, sickness, or death.
Therefore,

" O ye that faint and die, arise and live 1

Sing, ye whom all things have a charge to bless
If He is faithful who hath sworn to give,
Then be ye also faithful, and possess ! —

" Count all the pains that speed thee to thy rest
Among the riches of thy purchased right :
Yea, bind them in His name upon thy breast
As jewels for the Bride, the Lamb's delight."

"And ye are Christ's." Things that we
hold as our best treasures, we value most
for the giver's sake : and to this gift of all
things is added the name of Him who has
given us all. By freeing us from the blind-
ness and the fetters of sin, by saving our
souls. He has saved also the soul of all
things for us. The marks of His sacrifice
are upon all that is lasting in our earthly
possessions, upon all that is grand or lovely
in nature, and upon our dearest social at-

84 As it is in Heaven

tachments and home affections. He has
redeemed them from the moth and rust and
decay of mortality, and has given them
back to us as heavenly treasures. We hold
the whole as He holds it, in the name of
His Father, God.

It is a holy world. There is nothing in
it that is not signed with the sign of His
cross, that is not baptized into the eternal
purity of His consecration.

We are commanded not to love the world
nor the things that are in the world ; nor
must we love them, as things, as material
and perishable. The worldling cares for
things only in their external value ; the
ascetic cannot see that they have any other
value. One would accumulate and hoard
them, while the other would sweep them
all away ; ascetic and worldling both mak-
ing the same mistake ; both regarding even
human love and home affections — God's
most sacred gifts — as of the earth, and to
be possessed or despised at will. But it is
not earth, it is earthliness, that we are to

All Things are Yours 8^

put away from our hearts. He has made
nothing through which His love cannot be
breathed upon us, through which our grat-
itude cannot be breathed back to Him,

" Who hates, hates Thee ; who loves, becomes
Therein to Thee allied ;
All sweet accords of hearts and homes
In Thee are multiplied."

The heart that appreciates most deeply
the beauty and the richness of created
things, most earnestly prays,

" In all things nothing may I see,
Nothing desire or seek, but Thee ! "

" What," inquires one, " is Christianity it-
self but living to the whole instead of living
to the part ? It gives the heart Christ in-
stead of self for its spring and centre. In
the meanest things of every day, no man
liveth, no man dieth to himself, so inwrapt
and interfolded are human destinies in the
continual action and reaction that goes on
through life. The Christian is one who
belongs consciously to a kingdom in which
there is nothing unrelated."

86 As it is in Heaven

Character is the possession that seems
most exclusively personal, as it is that
which distinguishes us from others of the
race. But even in that, we are not our
own. By just that distinctiveness, we be-
long to the rest. By just that difference
in us, we contribute something that was
lacking to the whole. And how much
others have given, to make us what we
are ! If there is anything good or true or
beautiful in us, the saints and the poets
and sages have entered our lives, and have
helped to develop those qualities.

We say that our friends are everything
to us, and it is no exaggeration, if we have
known what real friendship is. They are
always more than themselves to us. They
are what their alliances with grander na-
tures than ours have made them. We are
richer for all the goodness they have loved,
and for all the greatness they have aspired
to share. Our friends are always uncon-
sciously giving us other friendships, in giv- .
ing us themselves.

All Things are Yours 8j

In heaven, life is all that there is to en-
joy or to give. Love there is the natural,
unrepressed interflow of life between soul
and soul. The longing to bless and the
need to be blessed meet each other on the
way like expectant pilgrims, and giving and
receiving are an equal joy. Character re-
cognizes what is nobler than itself, and
bows itself instinctively before the superior
nature for a blessing ; or, where a beseech-
ing glance is met, its own hand is ready to
bestow benediction. There is no withhold-
ing or refusing of gifts, lor only what be-
longs to another is offered him. It is the
business of the angels to find for their
heavenly bestowals the rightful place.
Love and Duty sing together one song, and
all discords subside into the eternal har-
monies. This we know is true of heaven,
because it is true of the heavenly life as we
have seen it here. We have known angelic
natures on earth, and have received from
their hands treasures which cannot be
stolen or destroyed.

88 As it is in Heaven

All things ai'e ours. We need not wait
for heaven until we die. If our hearts
would but open to receive it, the kingdom
of God would be within us now. We are
heirs together with Christ. Have we not
sometimes caught a glimpse of our immor-
tal inheritance ? —

" O awful joy ! O life divine I
O bliss too great, too full !
Earth, man, heaven, angels, all are thine,
And thou art God's, my soul ! "

VIII.

The Threefold Cord.

' O TWO imperfect beings can form
a perfect friendship. But let them
be united in the love of another, a
perfect being, — there is but One such, —
and their friendship is firm as eternity.
This is the threefold cord which is not
easily broken. Two lives which depend
only upon each other will always be loosen-
ing their hold and slipping apart : they
must feel themselves interwound with a
stronger, invisible Life before they can be
really sure of each other, — with an inde-
structible uniting substance which pene-
trates their mutual affection, and makes
it enduring. That Substance, that Being,
is God.

All love is of God. Every true friend is
a glimpse of God. The affection that

po As it is in Heaven

leaves Him out loses its divinest sweet-
ness. No friend is truly known or loved
until loved and known in God.

Adhesion is not union. To claim a friend
is not therefore to be a friend. Friendship
between two persons, or rather the bond
that they call friendship, is often only a
doubled selfishness. They wish to shut
themselves into their own little Paradise,
and to shut the rest of the world out of it ;
and a very small and stifling Paradise it is
soon felt to be, by one or the other, or by
both.

Like other exiles from Eden, human
friendship finds its healthiest life in facing
the fierce winds of the desert, and in win-
ning from a rough and thorny earth the
food which it gladly shares with all fellow-
wanderers. Nothing draws us so close to
each other as the things we struggle after
together, the knowledge that is to be
won from this reticent universe, the
great interests of humanity in which we
forget our own petty wants and cares,

The Threefold Cord gi

and the ever approaching and receding
mysteries of the heavens. There is no
sweeter heart-growth than friendship ; but
we must not expect that this loveHest blos-
som born under earthly skies will flourish
without freedom and fresh air.

It is that which underlies our relation-
ships which makes them real and strong.

" How were friendship possible ? " asks
Carlyle. "In mutual devotedness to the
Good and True: otherwise impossible, ex-
cept as armed neutrality or hollow com-
mercial league." Elsewhere he expresses
the same sentiment with a finer shading : —

" Only in looking heavenward, take it in
what sense you may, not in looking earth-
ward, does what we call union, mutual love,
society, begin to be possible."

The reality of an affection is best tested
by its power of going beyond a single ob-
ject, and giving itself to the whole.
" The love for one from which there doth not spring

Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing."

The threefold cord has not shown its full

p2 As it is in Heaven

strength until it has wound itself around
the great lonely heart of humanity, binding
it to each separate heart, and drawing all
together upward and homeward : —

" For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound with gold chains about the feet of God."

" The love that enlarges not its borders,
that is not ever spreading and including
and deepening, will contract, shrivel, decay,
die. . . . That we are the sons and daughters
of God, born from His heart, the outcom-
ing offspring of His love, is a bond closer
than all other bonds in one."

" In God alone can man meet man."

Whoever truly loves one of God's chil-
dren must feel his heart going out in God-
like tenderness towards all the rest. In all
souls he recognizes the kindred of the one
soul that has been to him the fullest ex-
pression of humanity and of God. He
who really loves has tasted of immortality.

It is our human privilege to know, even
as Christ knew it, that we live enveloped
with eternity ; that it enters every part

The Threefold Cord 93

of our nature, through root and bough and
remotest leaf-bud, making our whole life
eternal life. Thus He spoke of Himself as
"the Son of Man which is in heaven," and
thus, truly sharing His life, we may and
ought to feel about ourselves.

We are here to develop, through our
visible relationships, the invisible Life
within them and beyond them, and so make
them and ourselves true unfoldings of the
kingdom of heaven. What a deep, calm,
holy unity would enter these apparently
fragmentary and entangled lives of ours, if
our souls were penetrated with the con-
sciousness of what is true regarding them,
that they are already lived beforehand for
us, in the heart and mind of God ; that we
have only to follow His leadings, and not
our own inclinations, to be in perfect
peace ! Heaven, as we may know it here,
is the harmony of our thoughts with the
revelation of God's thoughts regarding us.
" Our thoughts are heard in heaven."
And our feelings are felt in heaven ; our

g4 ^s ii i^ in Heaven

impulses, our desires, our deeds, make har-
mony, or cause a silence, among the angel-
choruses. For what we humanly think,
and feel, and are, is indeed but our re-
sponse to our own deeper being, to the
Life in which we are embosomed, and of
which, as an eternal, divine conception,
we are an inseparable part. Our own sin
can tear us asunder from that Life, but
nothing else can.

Everything was planned for us before
our entrance into humanity, the expected
children of God. Our human relationships
were already heavenly relationships, be-
fore we knew anything about them. No
family or national tie, no sacred social
bond, no real friendship is of our own
seeking and planning ; it was all prepared
for us in the beginning by the Father to
whom we belong, who knows our needs of
body and soul and mind. But it is left to
us to discern the beauty of these relations,
as they are unfolded to us, to take every
joy that one life can impart to another life as

The Threefold Cord p5

the touch of His hand, and the embrace of
His love ; otherwise we lose their strength
and sweetness, and weave about our daily
path a network of mistake and bewilder-
ment.

We all belong to each other, but friend-
ship is the especial accord of one life with
a kindred life. It is harmony felt .at the
foundations of conscious being, not obliter-
ating personal differences, but so pervading
both natures as to help each to a happier
and truer expression of itself. It is because
they are what they are, in the heavenly life
out of which this earthly existence unfolds,
that they are friends. It is not that they
seek each the other, but that God sends
each to the other, because they belong to-
gether. Should they never meet on earth,
should they even be unaware of one
another's existence here, somewhere in
God's eternity they must be drawn to-
gether, because they are one in Him.

We tremble at the threshold of any new
friendship, with awe and wonder and fear

96 As it is in Heaven

lest it should not be thus real ; or, believing
that it is, lest we should prove ourselves
unworthy of this solemn and holy contact
of life with life, of soul with soul. We can-
not live unworthy lives in the constant
presence of noble beings to whom we
belong, who believe that we are at least
endeavoring after nobleness. This is our
truest loyalty to our friends : loyalty to the
God who has been revealed to us through
them. The heaven by which we are sur-
rounded never draws so near to us, never
opens upon us so clearly, as through the
eye and the voice, through the heart and
the being of a friend. Who can question
the personal being of God, when the most
heavenly-minded persons we know are only
great and beautiful to us because they
always suggest the Presence of Some One
greater and purer and more beautiful than
themselves, — some diviner Person who is
their inspiration, — to whom their whole
being bows in allegiance ?

We hold only sacred relations to one

The Threefold Cord 97

another. To be unfaithful and unloving is
to be profane. For God inhabits the sanc-
tuary of our affections. It is His love,
beating in our hearts, that is felt by those
whom we touch with the lightest finger-
tips of mercy or of tenderness. Whatever
of purity or of truth we can imjoart to
others, is wholly of His inspiration.

We say that there are no separations in
heaven ; neither are there in the heavenly
places of earth. Time and space have
nothing to do with the soul. " He that
is joined to the Lord is one spirit "
with Him, and He cannot be separated
from Himself. The prayer of Christ
to His Father for His friends was " that
they may be one, even as We are one."
The children are no more apart from
each other than from their Father, if
they are lovingly doing His will, though
they may seem to be sundered by the
width of continents and the silence of the
grave itself.

The loftiest test of friendship — under-

pS As it is in Heaven

stood as companionship — is the power to
do without it. And in this world of ex-
ternal confusions and separations, there is
often such a need. We do not yield the
friendship, but we must again and again
forego the companionship. Then comes
the proof of our capacity for sacrifice, our
loyalty to the Highest of all. We turn our
faces from each other, but never our
hearts, and walk our opposite ways.
Gradually the heavens widen and deepen
above us ; we find ourselves breathing new,
yet strangely familiar atmospheres, sweet
with the breath of the old affection ; we see
ourselves — each sees the other — met once
more in a Presence which has never for-
saken us, — the presence of One who puts
His cross into the hands of all holiest
friendship, saying, " Conquer by this ! "

There is no danger of losing love, here
or hereafter, if it is only real ; for love is
the one indestructible element in the uni-
verse.

Jesus, when He was about to leave his

The Threefold Cord gg

disciples, shared with them the sorrow with
which they received the announcement of
it, knowing that they could not understand
it as He did. In words tremulous with
tenderness He tried to tell them that He
was not indeed going away from them, —
that He was really coming nearer to them
in the Spirit. He showed them that they
had not in their closest daily intercourse
known Him truly, except as they had drawn
spiritually near to Him and to his Father.
Even in their " Lo ! now speakest thou
plainly," He saw that there was no clear in-
sight, — that they could only learn the truth
of his eternal presence with them through
the experience of apparently losing Him,
And so all that even He could do was to turn
to His Father and pray for them, — and
then lay down His life for them and for
the world.

" As I have loved you, that ye also love
one another," And how did He love these
friends of His } Not with that partial affec-
tion that refuses to see faults and errors,

lOO As it is in Heaven

but with the devotion that loves in spite of
them, and that wins the mistaken soul to
truth by imparting its own wisdom and
fervor and faithfulness. His love for every
one of those separate souls was enriched by
His divine grasp of all souls besides. He
saw His Father's whole family in each of
these His children ; and so to us also His
parting charge was given, " Love each
other as I have loved you."

The tenderness that we feel for those to
whom we are bound by natural ties is only
typical of the deeper union which exists
between those who are kindred in soul,
who are joined to each other through sym-
pathy with God's thoughts for us all, and
in working with Him to restore His scat-
tered family to their Father's hearthstone.
It was the most profound love for Mary,
and for the family of Joseph into which He
had been born, that made Jesus say, —

" Whosoever shall do the will of God,
the same is my brother, and sister, and
mother."

The Threefold Cord loi

He cared for His family as he cared
for the thronging souls who were eagerly-
listening to His words, in their spiritual
relationship to Him. He could not have
loved them so much, if He had not loved
His Father more.

There is no inspiration like that we re-
ceive from a great heart, all-embracing and
self-forgetful, in echoing whose deep throb-
bings our own forget every want, even to
the craving for a recognition and response
from that very heart. The best proof of
our love for a large, unselfish nature is that
we are growing larger and more unselfish
ourselves. In friendship we often feel
that it is more blessed to receive than
to give, to take the richness of the
higher nature which we revere into our
own, conscious that we have nothing in
ourselves to give back, except our grati-
tude and loving appreciation. It is in
this way that we obtain our best spiritual
education ; —

102 As it is in Heaven

" And what delights can equal those
That stir the spirit's inner deeps.

When one that loves, but knows not, reaps
A truth from one that loves and knows ? "

It is like the sunshine and the rainfall
upon the thirsty flowers, developing the
common life of all, and the separate life of
each. We receive, that we may give.

That large expression of the Apostle's,
"The love of God is s/ied abroad in your
hearts through the Holy Ghost," may be
applied to a pure and strong human friend-
ship, that flows into our souls, as all truest
love does, to flow forth again in blessing
upon other souls. To try to hoard love,
to shut the affluent stream in upon our
narrow boundaries, is only to bring stag-
nation into our being, and to force the free
current away through other channels,
where it may quench the thirst of a more
grateful soil.

"As I have loved you." With a love
that blossoms with holy sweetness on
earth because its roots are fed by the

The Threefold Cord loj

power of an endless life : with a love that
is to expand forever in the light of God's
smile, taking into itself, as it grows, the life
of all His worlds, and filling the universe
with its ineffable fragrance. The sorrow-
ing poet may well say, looking onward into
the heavens after a beloved one who has
gone before, that he feels

" Less yearning for the friendship fled,
Than some strong bond which is to be."

We must wait patiently for many bless-
ings that we now most deeply desire : but
we may every day strengthen our friend-
ships by a more thoughtful human faithful-
ness and a diviner consecration, —

" Until we close with all we love,

And all we flow from, soul in soul."

" In whatever relates to the higher
human affections, every true heart discerns
that their spirit infinitely transcends the
life we give them ; and Faith argues that
God, who leaves nothing unfulfilled, means
to bring out of them all the beauty which
their own nature contains." "Our spir

104 -^^ ^t is in Heaven

itual life is all prophetic, and what is yet
unfulfilled is the kingdom of heaven within
us. Men of deep hearts know this in the
failures of expression. Their words and
tones have unfathomable meanings."

We know but little of what we really
are to one another. " Man cannot utter
it." There are no words in any human
vocabulary to express what friend may be
to friend, even in this earthly life. It is
best revealed through the warm, palpita-
ting, fathomless silence of love — the love
of God, in which, as if we were but one
heart, we are all together enfolded.

IX.

Bridegroom and Bride.

S it true, that the relation between
human beings which we regard as
the perfect ideal relation, is not to
be continued beyond this life ? It is the
Sadducee in us that asks — the skeptic who
cannot comprehend the spirituality of hu-
man ties — who considers the external and
visible bond as the only real one. That
which binds earth to earth must end with
the earth : that which unites spirit to spirit
is of the Spirit ; the interflow of Love
which is in its nature eternal. This love,
in which all human life is one with God,
which joins us to Him and to one an-
other as spiritual beings, in companion-
ships and groups and close friendships,
may blend one spirit with another spirit
more intimately still ; so closely that it

io6 As it is in Heaven

will seem as if there were but one con-
scious life - throb in the twain thus united.
So may angel be wedded to angel in the
resurrection. Such marriages are not un-
imaginable, but most probable and na-
tural. All things else around us, all cir-
cumstances and conditions, are symbolic
of something similar to themselves which
yet is higher than themselves ; all seem
waiting to unfold their holier hidden mean-
ing. This strongest human tie of all must
point to something like itself, beyond itself ;
more glorious and more permanent.

We may picture to ourselves the beauty of
a celestial union like this, as if two separate
rills of love, flowing from hidden sources
in the heart of God, found themselves ap-
proaching each other, sparkling in the light
of His smile, and blending themselves in
one shining, musical current, to swell the
" pure river of the water of life, clear as
crystal," which nourishes all sweet and
wholesome and immortal growths. Blessed
are the pure in heart ! for through their

Bridegroom and Bride wy

lives may glide in beauty, even on earth,
that river of holiness, " proceeding out of
the throne of God and of the Lamb." It is
the joy of all true love, none the less a joy
for its unconsciousness, that it is a flowing
stream ; that it imparts its vitalizing re-
freshment to the thirsty, outreaching fibres
of other lives.

There is no sadder possibility on earth
than that two human hearts should pass a
life-time together, holding love and mar-
riage only in their mortal, selfish signifi-
cance. If marriage shuts two beings in ex-
clusively upon each other, it is because they
are too small to receive the great gift which
their union might have been to them. Sun-
beam marries sunbeam that there may be
more splendor and warmth in the world.
Soul rushing to blend with soul, each lumi-
nous with love, must radiate the light and
the joy which each has received from the
other. In moments when the heart is
filled to overflowing for the one best be-
loved, there is an almost infinite enlarge-

io8 As it is in Heaven

ment of the whole conscious being, a
feeling as of warm oceanic currents going
forth to touch the shores of other lonelier
lives, a divine necessity for sharing with
other souls a blessedness too great for one
life to contain. And such love often proves
itself capable of the loftiest sacrifices.

Perhaps one of the best interpretations
of our Lord's words concerning marrying
and giving in marriage is that of Brown-
ing, through the lips of his dying Pompi-
lia: —

" Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,

Mere imitation of the inimitable :

In heaven we have the real and true and sure.

'T is there they neither marry nor are given

In marriage, but are as the angels : right,

Oh, how right that is, how like Jesus Christ

To say that ! Marriage-making for the earth,

With gold so much, — birth, power, repute so much, —

Or beauty, youth, so much, in lack of these ! —

"Be as the angels rather! who, apart,

Know themselves into one, are found at length

Married, but marry never, no, nor give

In marriage : they are man and wife at once.

When the true time is."

Bridegroom and Bride log

In the " Light of Asia," Siddartha says
to Yasodhara, foreseeing that he must go
away from her for the world's sake : —

" Yet kiss me on the mouth, and drink these words
From heart to heart therewith, that thou mayest know
What others will not, that I loved thee most
Because I loved so well all living souls."

The highest natures can be satisfied with
nothing less than this self-forgetting, spiri-
tual relation. And the truest-hearted will
live soberly together in their wealth of hu-
man happiness, —

" Foreseeing that fair love which doth not feed
On fleeting sense, that life which knows no age,
That blessed last of deaths when Death is dead : " —

no empty Nirvana, but conscious, eter-
nal oneness with the loving life of the liv-
ing God.

It is sacrilege to hold love or marriage
as mere earthly relations, and as having
nothing to do with our relations to God.

" That man knows little either of love or
of religion who imagines they ought to be
kept apart. Of what sort is either, if unfit

no As it is in Heaven

to approach the other ? Has God decreed,
created a love that must separate from
Himself ? Shall not love to the heart cre-
ated lift up the heart to the Heart creat-
ing ? Alas for the love that is not trea-
sured in heaven ! for the moth and the
rust will devour it. Ah, these pitiful old
moth-eaten loves ! "

And alas for a love-literature too well
known among us, light and flimsy indeed,
when not coarsely false in its treatment of
the most sacred relations ! How can it
help in developing human character, or in
shaping communities into stable founda-
tions for the kingdom of heaven ?

The Sadducee believes only in this world,
and so can comprehend nothing beyond its
mortal relationships. He knows nothing
of the eternal sanctities of being. The
bridal truth has its roots down deep in the
unexplored abysses of God. In the perfect
time foretold by prophecy, the land itself
is said to be married. And to Zion it is.
declared: "Thy Maker is thy husband."

Bridegroom and Bride in

When the Apostle seeks for a suggestion
of the mystical union between Christ and
the Church, marriage is the holiest symbol
he can find. The City of God on earth,
the New Jerusalem, is compared to " a
bride adorned for her husband." Perhaps
it would not be far from the truth to say
that heaven itself is marriage. It is one
vast union of souls with God. The new
heaven and the new earth will at last meet
and know themselves one ; that will be the
bridal day of eternity.

It is unutterably sad to see how this love-
liest thought of God for His children is
everywhere cheapened and defiled. No
one can believe in a holy God who does
not believe in the holiness of faithful hu-
man love. Yet not all who comprehend
best the marriage-mystery have accepted
the earthly bond. They are too well aware
of its inadequacy, of the rareness of the real
experience. But in their hearts is ever un-
folding the beauty of an immortal Beulah.
They do not withdraw themselves from

112 As it is in Heaven

other lives ; their family-ties are universal,
and closer and more gracious and tender
for their own especial denials. Through
every inmost seclusion of their being is
heard the voice of the Heavenly Bride-
groom, the answer of His consecrated
Bride. Such souls live for the regeneration
of earth, and beauty and truth and righteous-
ness spring up around them in living forms.
Childhood and youth gather to them for
inspiration ; and older and wiser ones feel
their life renewed through them, as from
fountains unfailingly fresh.

The true fathers and mothers of the race
are not always those through whom mortal
birth is received. " More are the children
of the desolate than the children of the
married wife, saith the Lord." The dreari-
est orphanhood is not always among earth's
poor. It is often found in the houses of the
rich, where parents suffocate their own
souls and the souls of their children with
pleasures and luxuries ; where the little ones
find nothing; to remind them of their Father

Bridegroom and Bride ii^

in heaven. Whether it is spiritual or phy-
sical starvation that claims our aid, God has
made it the privilege of every man and
woman to share in His loving parentage.
We may all take to our hearts and com-
fort and nourish and educate His neglected
children.

" To be," it has been said, " is to be in
relations." There is no such thing, spiri-
tually, as living apart and alone. To sepa-
rate ourselves wholly from human beings
is to separate ourselves from God, and
that is death. Self disintegrates : love
unites. Our family and social ties —
brotherhood, sisterhood, neighborhood, citi-
zenship — take us back to one organic cen-
tre in marriage, the mystical bond wherein
God unites humanity, through all its tribes
and races, to Himself. Whoever holds a
low ideal of marriage does not believe in
the sanctity of his own being. In it our
human lives are rooted, and apart from it
we have no conscious existence. All that
is best in us, from our earliest breath, bios-

114 As it is in Heaven

soms and ripens out of its inner sacred
sweetness, and what part it may have in
shaping our future heavenly relations, we
wait to learn. We are each human because
we each belong to the Whole ; and the
whole of humanity, as if it were one being,
is at last to be spiritually united to God,
purified, perfected, without blemish or spot.

" It is a great mystery," this inter-
blending of life with Life, of humanity with
God. We could not comprehend it at all,
except through His coming close to us in
One who is the perfect revelation of Him-
self, " the brightness of His glory, and the
express image of His Person." Entering
into His love, the love of Christ our Lord,
we are drawn towards each other in holy
union and communion, and we begin to
learn the deep meaning of His words —
*' That they may be one, even as We are
one."

Christ and His Church are one Life.
The Bride, the Church, is humanity regen-
erate, redeemed, as she will be when she

Bridegroom and Bride ii^

has clothed herself in the white robes of
her Lord's righteousness. But now she
sees very dimly the grandeur of her des-
tiny, the glory of unutterable Love and Life
and Light that awaits her. The Bride-
groom, in awakening her to her spiritual
possibilities, draws her ever nearer to Him-
self. He is patient with her indifference
and her waywardness, for He is sure ®f
bringing her home to His Father's house
at last.

Listen ! Already, through the dreary
noises of the world's wilderness, she hears
His voice, and answers ! The Bride is
making herself ready.

" Blessed are they who are called to the
marriage-supper of the Lamb."

X.

Forever Young.

HO would not be young forever?
It is a proof of our immortality
that we dread growing old. Old
age and death are of this world only : there
is nothing of heaven in them. But they
only mean the wearing out of our earthly
garments ; the heavenly life within knows
neither destruction nor decay. Youth is
in itself an ecstasy ; the joy of conscious
life, strength, and growth. But in the
physical experience we have only a hint of
what it really is. There would be small
satisfaction in living on indefinitely, an un-
thinking, rosy, well-fed animal. Plotinus
was not far astray in thanking the gods
that his soul was not tied to an immortal
body. A spirit may well rejoice to wear out
and lay aside the clothes he has outgrown.

Forever Young iiy

whatever childish delight he may once have
taken in them.

For what is the greatest happiness of
youth ? The full possession and free use
of all our powers in elasticity and overflow.
But not this alone. Youth would be a poor
and tame experience without its "long,
long thoughts." It is richer in the future
than it is in the present. The landscape
around it is gladdest in the visionary beck-
oning of " a fair, long Paradise beyond the
mountains." Its deepest joy is in its seem-
ingly illimitable possibilities. And this is
the very essence of its spiritual meaning.
We are old, we are ready to die, — nay, we
are already dead, — when we see nothing
before us worth striving after. It is the
forward look of the soul that keeps her
forever young.

Youth is not merely a lovely phase of
the transient years ; it is a pervading qual-
ity of character ; a light in itself, and an
inspiration to all surrounding lives. It is
a perennial freshness at the roots of being ;

ii8 As it is in Heaven

and its glow of contagious life shines out
often most radiantly beneath gray hairs and
a wrinkled forehead. The tree that has
ripened its fruit through many seasons
bursts into a spring - blossoming just as
fresh and fragrant as that which unfolds
from the half-grown sapling at its side.
There are infinite beginnings bourgeoning
out continually from what seems to us the
end. While we live in the inspiration of
these, wherever and whatever else we
may be, we are young. How can mortal
age or youth disturb the thoughts of an in-
habitant of the kingdom of heaven, in the
presence of Him who is at once the Child
that is born to us, and the Ancient of
Days ; the Root and the Offspring ; the
Beginning and the End ; the Morning-Star
of every soul .-'

This lovely heart-freshness that we call
youth is the natural flowering-forth of spir-
itual being. It is born of the beauty of
holiness, and sparkles forever with the
morning-dew of immortality. Under sin-

Forever Young 119

less skies, clearer vistas will open upon the
released soul, as it starts with renewed
vigor upon its unending pilgrimage. Its
joy will spring up like a flower to drink in
the wonder of unknown, uplifted horizons,
the grandeur of a forever-opening Beyond.
It will grow younger for the very bound-
lessness of its outlook.

Infinite hope is eternal youth. On the
loftiest heights we shall behold summits
sublimely beckoning us higher still, and
our feet will ascend them, shod with an-
gelic strength. Entering into the most
dazzling glory that allures us onward, we
shall see dawning through it " a finer light
in light," and our sight will be deepened to
bear the intensity of the unutterable vision.
And through the tenderest warmth of celes-
tial love that enfolds us will ever throb a
pulse of dearer and more spiritual tender-
ness that will win our hearts to meet and
blend with it in a purer beating and a ho-
lier aspiring, forever and forever.

One chief delight of youth on earth is

120 As it is in Heaven

growth ; to learn the meaning of ourselves,
and to live out God's purpose in us. Jesus
Christ himself, we may say with reverence,
came to a knowledge of his own divine
secret by just such means as those by
which we come to understand life and our-
selves, by living and learning and grow-
ing. He would not truly have assumed our
nature, if he had not taken it as it is, with
its ignorances and its limitations. There
is every evidence that from childhood he
was wondering at himself and testing him-
self. He knew that his Father's life was
within his own in some mysterious way,
full of gloriously unfolding import for man-
kind. But who he himself was he learned
gradually, as any infant learns that it is a
human being, as any boy grows into a
realization of his manhood.

When his mother reproached him for
staying behind at Jerusalem, to listen to
the rabbis in the temple, and to ask them
questions, — his mother, whose love must
often have overflowed towards her wonder-

Forever Young 121

fill son, with the things she had pondered
of him in her heart, — his answer was a
gentle remonstrance : " Wist ye not that I
must be about my Father's business ? " as
if he would say : " Why, those wise men
were talking of my Father. I thought j/on
would understand that I must linger where
anything was to be learned about Him, and
about what He wishes me to do." So he
grew, increasing in wisdom and stature,
until he came to the full consciousness of
his own divine life, and to the complete ex-
pression of the divine power through his
human faculties. To his perfect develop-
ment none of us approaches, except at an
immeasurable distance behind ; that we do
not and cannot, implies an eternity in pros-
pect.

Jesus Christ went away from this mortal
life a young man, but he had borne the
flower and the fruit of his human being at
once. Men spoke of him as if they thought
he might have been almost fifty years old.
The burden he carried might well have

122 As it is in Heaven

made him seem prematurely aged. Physi-
cally, he was weary and worn. But on the
Mount of Transfiguration, his disciples saw
Him as He really was, radiant from within
with unchangeable, immortal youth.

So, when we think of the friends who
have gone from us into the unseen, having
passed through many changes in their phy-
sical lineaments from youth to old age, —
we do not see these changes ; our vision is
of themselves, in the fresh, full, unhindered
expression of all that was best and most
real in them. The soul is always young,
and the heavenly form is the true revela-
tion of the soul. Even here, we know our
friends far less by their physical peculiari-
ties than by this subtle, unconscious reve-
lation of themselves that we call "expres-
sion." As the life deepens and is purified,
it becomes transparent to loving eyes, and
its early freshness and its later ever-in-
creasing richness, its simplicity and its
wisdom are one, in the character of the
person we hold dear. This is, and is to be,
the youth of immortality.

Forever Young i2j

What are the things we most dread to
lose with youth ? Enthusiasm, eagerness
to learn what truth is, and to try our
strength upon unfolding tasks ; the free,
unhindered use of ourselves. The first of
these we need not forego ; the noblest of
our race have felt their inward stir to great
endeavor until the day of their death : and
if we have eniarged and strengthened our
spiritual powers as the physical have weak-
ened, there is no real loss of the last, but
an eternal gain. We cannot tell how much
we may yet have to do for this dear old
confused and confusing world where we
have had our schooling, after we get out-
side of it, — which may indeed be getting
within it — getting at the heart of its per-
plexing mysteries. Certainly the vigor of
an ever-fresh immortality will not let itself
be wasted in idleness.

We live by our aspirations, our hopes and
affections here ; they are the central im-
pulses of our being, and they must throb
on in us forever : —

124 ^s it is in Heaven

" All before us lies the way ;

Give the past unto the wind !
All before us is the day ;

Night and darkness are behind.

" Eden, with its angels bold.

Love and flowers and coolest sea,
Is less an ancient story told
Than a glowing prophecy."

But we must hold to whatever was true
in the story of the past, if we would under-
stand its prophecy. Our Past, our Present,
and our Future, are one uninterrupted, al-
though ever unfinished history.

There is not one real thing that passes
away with the years. Childhood goes, but
the child-heart lives on and reappears with
its own angelic lineaments beneath new
heavens. The bloom of youth fades, and
its strength decays, but the beautiful soul
has been growing young and strong out of
the very death of that portion of its exist-
ence which was unenduring, as the life of
the tree is fed by its own fallen leaves.
We cannot climb the hills in age as we did

Forever Young 12^

in youth, but if we have given our wings
freedom to grow, we can mount up as
eagles to the sky, and look down upon the
proud summits of earth as molehills be-
neath us. We laugh at the destructions of
time, when we live above the years.

" 'T is always morning somewhere." The
sunset is but a traveling sunrise. The
soul is swifter than the sun. Old age is a
sunset and a sunrise in one. If we follow
with unflagging feet the highest illumina-
tion of our lives, we shall have within us
and radiate around us the glory of a per-
petual dawn. The fountain of perennial
youth springs up in the heart and over-
flows through the whole being of those
who have found in Christ the secret of
eternal life.

Though we are to lay aside — though we
are already beginning to lay aside — all of
the body that can decay, we are to live on
as spirit-forms, or we shall not be our-
selves. The Resurrection must mean the
perfect unfolding of whatever shape God's

126 As it is in Heaven

Spirit within us was breathing us into here,
as separate identities. The consciousness
of our own personality, and the recogni-
tion of our fellow-beings as persons, are
among the foundation-stones of our thought
of immortality. Our whole nature cries
out against any other suggestion ; —

" No ! I have friends in Spirit-Land, —
Not shadows in a shadowy band,
Not others, but themselves are they ! "

We shall look into the same deep eyes,
and clasp the same warm hands, and walk
on beside the same beloved beings we have
known here, our transfigured bodies forever
"young with the youth of the angels."

To repeat some strong words from Dora
Greenwell's "Two Friends :"

" How much has the human heart gained
in the one revelation which enables it to
say, ' I believe in the resurrection of the
body;' that gives the flesh also leave to
' rest in hope ! '

" It is this belief which brings with it all
that is actual and personal into our future

Forever Young i2y

life ; that gives us back our friends, look-
ing and talking as they did here ; gives us
back our feelings and occupations ; in fact,
our lives. . . , When I think of death, it
is never as setting the soul free from the
body, but rather as admitting it into a state
where these two, in the marriage of the
purified soul with the glorified body, will
learn the true blessedness of their union,
all being removed that has sometimes made
it irksome and constraining. . . . Man's
heart and his flesh cry out for the living
God : they claim the resurrection : they
ask to see life — the whole of life — bloom,
as a flower, according to the fancy of the
old alchemists, might be revived from its
ashes."

The instinctive prescience of the human
heart regarding a personal resurrection is
also thus eloquently expressed in a passage
from George MacDonald's " Unspoken
Sermons."

" Ah, my friends ! What will resurrec-
tion or life be to me, how shall I continue

128 As it is in Heaven

to love God as I have learned to love Him
through you, if I find He cares so little
for this human heart of mine as to take
from me the gracious visitings of your
faces and forms ? . . . No, our God is an
unveiling, a revealing God. He will raise
you from the dead, that I may behold you ;
that that which vanished from the earth
may again stand forth, looking out of the
same eyes of eternal love and truth, hold-
ing out the same mighty hand of brother-
hood, the same delicate and gentle, yet
strong hand, of sisterhood to me, this me
that knew you and loved you in the days
gone by. ... I shall not care that the
matter of the forms I loved a thousand
years ago has returned to mingle with the
sacred goings on of God's science, upon
that far-off world wheeling its nursery of
growing loves and wisdoms through space ;
I shall not care, so long as it is you your-
selves that are before me, beloved ! so long
as through these forms I know that I look
on my own, on my loving souls of the

Forever Young i2g

ancient time ; so long as my souls have got
garments of revealing after their own old
lovely fashion, garments to reveal them-
selves to me. The new shall then be dear
as the old, and for the same reason, that it
reveals the old love.

" Lord, evermore give us this Resurrec-
tion, like thine own in the body of Thy
Transfiguration ! Let us hear, and see, and
know, and be seen, and heard, and known,
as Thou seest, hearest, and knowest !
Give us glorified bodies through which to
reveal the glorified thoughts which shall
then inhabit us, when not only shalt Thou
reveal God, but each of us shall reveal
Thee ! "

XI.

An Endless Life.

UR human vocabularies are pitifully
inadequate to the utterance of any
heavenly meaning. We have
learned from them to think of eternity as
time going on and on in a continuous
groove, like a railway line, far indeed
into mysterious distances, our one idea
of it being its endlessness. But life is not
merely a lengthening, invisible thread ; it
is a power, issuing from and going forth
into the Infinite.

To live is to have a place and a share in
the boundlessness of God's creation. He
could not make us in His image without
making us immortal. " Indissoluble " is the
adjective given in one translation of the
clause " the power of an endless life ; " and
immortality is life indissoluble from God's.

An Eihiless Life i3'

We, becoming kings and priests unto
God by entering into the spirit of Christ,
are partners in His power and inhabitants
of His eternity. We can say to the Love
that at once shelters and liberates us —

" Thus doth Thy hospitable greatness lie
Around us like a boundless sea:
We cannot lose ourselves where all is home,
Nor drift away from Thee."

Power is an inseparable quality of all
great life.

" To be weak is miserable."

But out of weakness we are made strong
when we lose ourselves in the life of Him
who is our Strength. Saint John, opening
before us the windows of his celestial vi-
sion, lets us see, now "a strong angel," now
"another mighty angel ; " but their faces
reveal no more self-conscious pride than is
written upon the brow of the humblest
messenger of God on earth. His power is
their inspiration, and it is in His service
that they have grown vigorous and great.
They visit us on His errands, radiant with

1^2 As it is in Heaven

His health, white-robed with His righteous-
ness. And the message of these mighty
ones to puny mortals is this : that they also
are to arise and clothe themselves with the
power of the Infinite God.

" Then, when they receive Him, a new
inspiration is upon them ; all their powers
are exalted ; a wondrous inconceivable
energy is felt ; and having come into the
sense of God, which is the element of all
real greatness, they discover, as it were in
amazement, what it is to be in their true
capacity. . . .

"These angels that excel in strength,
these ancient princes and hierarchs that
have grown up in God's eternity and un-
folded their mighty powers in whole ages
of good, recognize in us compeers that are
finally to be advanced, as they are."

We hear men to-day asking themselves
and each other whether they believe in
immortality, while the power of an endless
life is pressing all around and into them, .a
spiritual atmosphere. A man may be liv-

An Endless Life i }^

ing immortally without knowing it ; which
is far better than for him to assert his im-
mortality without living it. Few of us can
abide contentedly in our own littleness.
The soul feels keenly her mortal limita-
tions of outward circumstance and inward
defect : she longs to escape from herself
into God.

"Although we live petty and foolish
lives, the knowledge that there is greatness
and wisdom, the knowledge that there is
God, is a far greater and more constant '
consolation to us than we know," It is a
consolation, because it is an ever-present
hope of release. It is impossible that one
who loves God, — wholly impossible that
one who loves Him in Christ, should be
habitually narrow and petty and mean
in his relations to others. To love Him is
to share His life, to enter into the infinite-
ness of His love and power. When we
are filled with all the fullness of God, we
cannot help overflowing with it towards
our fellow-beings. In giving ourselves, we
give Him ; for v/e have no life but His.

I ^4 -^^ '^ '^ ''' Heaven

How can we stay shut up to our own
little planning and scheming, when the
ocean-currents of God's being are pressing
in to flood us with His eternity? How can
we be so little, when we were meant to be
so great ? How can we help calling to our
neighbors who are stifling in their airless
pinfolds, "Come out and float upon the
seas of eternity ! come, feel how great you
are, how great the world is, how great and
glorious is the God to whom you belong!
Come and let us breathe together the full
freedom of the infinite Life, — the life of
Love, of truth, and of holiness, — and so
be immortal together ! "

And escaping out of ourselves, we leave
our doors wide open to God. He enters
into us, and makes a heaven of our souls.
Every thought, every emotion glows and
expands in His Presence. Now, for the
first time, we learn what we are, and what
we may become. We feel

" The rapture mighty, measureless,
In each eternal thing ; —

An Endless Life /J5

The mingling with Almightiness ;
The dwelling by Life's spring."

It is too true that circumstances are some-
times our unpitying jailors. We feel our-
selves dwindling in our cells, with scarcely
strength left to aspire towards freedom. —
Room ! room to breathe in, room to rest
our cramped powers by putting them to
noble uses ! — is the piteous cry of many an
unwilling prisoner, — a cry more appealing
than even the wail of poverty.

" All tortured states
Suppose a straitened place. Jehovah, Lord,
Make room for rest around me ! out of sight
Now float me, of the vexing land abherred,
Till in deep calms of space my soul may right
Her nature, shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
And rush exultant on the Infinite."

But the circumscribed lot is not necessa-
rily ignoble, nor the trivial duty mean.
The only really small life is that which
shuts God out ; and there is no life so nar-
row or so low that its doors may not open
to the inflowing grandeur of His Being,
Yet sometimes we must wholly break down

1^6 As it is in Heaven

the walls of our imprisoning self-content,
and go forth, unsheltered wanderers, to
seek Him in the wilderness. And truly
seeking Him, there or anywhere, we shall
find Him. Our dissatisfaction with our-
selves is a proof that we belong to Him.
Says an old writer : " In this is the excel-
lency of man, that he is made capable of a
communion with his Maker, and, because
capable of it, is unsatisfied without it ; the
soul, being cut out to that largeness, can-
not be satisfied with less."

Without a sense of the Infinite, we never
come to a just knowledge of our own pow-
ers. The reason why our lives are so frag-
mentary and meaningless is that we live
them as if they were our own lives only,
and do not centre them in God. We must
unite ourselves to the Greatest, if we would
live in any great or glorious way. In
union with the Strongest is our strength.
By ourselves we are but units. In God we
come into unity, into oneness with the.
Whole. The deepest prayer a human

An Endless Life i ^j

being can breathe was uttered by the
Psahiiist centuries ago : " O knit my
heart unto Thee ! " The life that is knit
to the Perfect, the Divine Life, however lit-
tle it may be, is coherent and strong, and
immortal. We can only know what eter-
nity is, — what heaven is, — through the
power of a life indissoluble from God's : —

" God's glory passing into thee, —
All heaven becoming thine ! "

The endless life implies for us the inim-
itably unaccomplished. More and greater
attainments will always be awaiting us, for
beyond us He will be forever. " Let us
climb to the height of our Alpine desires ;
let us leave them behind us and ascend the
spear-pointed Himalayas of our aspirations ;
still shall we find the depth of God's sap-
phire above us ; still shall we find the
heavens higher than the earth, and His
thoughts and His ways higher than our
thoughts and our ways."

Vistas and labyrinths of knowledge reach
on before us. We cannot endure our io:no-

1^8 As it is in Heaven

ranee, and are impatient to penetrate the
hidden mysteries of the universe. But it
is from the alphabet we learn here that we
are to spell out lessons of eternal truth un-
der heavenly teachers. We shall drop off
our silly pedantries as we catch the charm
of their holy simplicity, and shall become
wiser as we become more childlike. " Know-
ledge is power," we have been taught to
say ; but as we go on, we shall change the
proverb to *' Wisdom is power ; " for wis-
dom is knowledge illumined by love —
knowledge that has found her soul.

Earth is a school-room ; and heaven will
be a school-room also for us who, through
all eternity, must aspire to know more of
God, and to penetrate truth which is ever
deepening into the impenetrable. When
we learn as they do in heaven, we shall
learn not merely "for knowing's sake," not
from curiosity or pride of acquisition, but
for love ; for the sake of giving what we
have received. We can never comprehend
the Infinite Love except through loving

An Endless Life i ^g

infinitely. We arc only then aware of our
own greatness, when we feel the Divine
Life flowing through ours,

" Human greatness," it has been said,
"must be ultimately reducible to this: a
quality in any man by which he is capable
first of taking into himself, and then of dis-
tributing through himself to others, some
part of the life of God."

This, then, is the grandeur of living, the
power of our immortality, " the power of
an endless life," to receive and radiate the
life of God. Translated into the one great
human Word, Christ, God revealed and
given to man in His Son, it means sacrifice,
the utter sacrifice of self for humanity's
need. To know Him, through sharing in
the spirit of His sacrifice, is to have en-
tered into eternal life. We count our lives
no longer by minutes and seconds, by days
and years and asons, but by His infinite
heart-throbs, pulsating through every fibre
of our being, and so keeping the world
warm for its desolate and wanderinc: chil-

140 As it is in Heaven

dren, our Father's family, for whom He
lived and died. In Christ we are alive
from the dead forevermore. In Him there
is no death. The one true satisfaction of
our souls, on earth or in heaven, is the
awaking ever more and more perfectly into
His likeness.

A good man has bidden us not to think
of death- as a sleep, but as a waking from
sleep. "And," he says, "I do not know
that death will be our last waking. I do
not know but we may have deeper senses
yet, which death may not touch and open.
Perhaps we may have ranges of faculties,
one within another, each with its own
world and modes of being, so that we may
keep waking up, stage after stage, to
brighter realms, for ever and ever away to-
wards God, the central life and glory of all.
Who shall say that we may not to all eter-
nity, at some of its stages, die to a more
outward life and wake up to a more inward
and real one ? that after we have lived out
the life of one world faithfully, a new one

An Endless Life 141

will open more brightly and objectively,
where there is a higher order of existence,
and God reveals Himself in diviner splen-
dor— all coming from the successive
waking up into intenser life of faculties
that sleep already within us ? "

A glorious conjecture, perhaps a pro-
phecy. " It doth not yet appear what we
shall be." But this is a certainty : that

" There is no death to those who know of Life," —

the endless, limitless life of love and power
wherein man is indissolubly one with God.

XII.

The Joy of our Lord.

N the parable of the talents, the
reward of the faithful servant was
not a gift for himself, but the
opportunity to do something for his Lord,
something more and better than he had
ever done before. And the best reward
for any faithful work is the privilege of
going on and proving our faithfulness with
more difficult tasks. The servant likes to
feel that he can trust himself even as he is
trusted. And he becomes a stronger man
for his loyalty to his master and to himself.
" The faculty of doing good," it has been
said, " by an eternal law, is multiplied and
magnified according to the use Avhich is
made of it." Here, again, the grandeur of
our destiny is suggested by our possibili-
ties of development in noble personal
character.

The Jjy of our Lord 143

The happiest thuig that can befall us is
to have work given us that requires us to
be true to ourselves, and that will count in
large benefits to others. There is little
pleasure in a daily routine of toil which
could be performed just as well by anybody
else ; but there is abundant happiness in
taking up tasks for which we have pre-
pared ourselves, and which perhaps would
never be as well done by another. In other
words, it is a great privilege to find our
own work, and to get leave to do it. It
may be that this will be one of the satis-
factions of the future life. We all have to
do so many things that fret and irritate us
here, it sometimes seems to us as if con-
genial work would be heaven.

And we cannot think that heaven means
anything less than service. The sky above
us might show us this ; that which is
" heaved up " over the clods we tread upon,
with its wonderful mediations of cloud and
sunshine, of rainbow and lightning and
storm and dew. The air around us is

144 ^^ ^i ^^ ^'" J^eaven

never at rest, but is constantly astir with
the preparation of some new blessing for
us. And earth takes the thought of the
heavens into her bosom, and reproduces it
in living plants and flowing streams, and
tender green grass. All things God has
made beautiful He has made for service
also.

Our Lord has told us that His Father's
life and His are, from the beginning, one
unintermitting, infinite work. He came to
us, " not to be ministered unto, but to min-
ister." Did that ministry end when He
cried out on the cross, " It is finished " }
Have apostles and martyrs and all holy
men and women down to our own time
been doing merely a work of their own,
or is it He himself. His Spirit in them,
who has accomplished all good that is done
in the world until now .-* If we believe in
a living Christ, " the Son of Man who is
in heaven," we must believe that He is still
giving His loving service to the beings
for whom He lived and died on earth ; a

The Joy of our Lord 14^

service inconceivably more glorious because
it is now wholly a spiritual work.

His work was begun at the beginning of
creation. He is " the Lamb that was slain
from the foundation of the world." His
life and death with us and for us were only
such a glimpse of His eternal being and
divine activity as could be made visible to
our human eyes ; only a segment of the in-
finite circle of His God-life. That work
cannot be ended until heaven and earth
shall pass away, until man no longer
needs God : nay, we may say reverently,
until God and man no longer need each
other.

The life beyond the grave would be a
blank to us, except for the hope of enter-
ing into ministries of love like His, with
Him. We who have been of so little use
to others here, we who have felt our-
selves so hampered and hindered in our
sincerest efforts by circumstances and by
our own imperfections and mistakes, we
should almost feel as if the future life were

7^6 As it is in Heaven

going to be a failure, if we could not help
our fellow-beings there more than we have
helped them here. If the lesson of life is
love, love like Christ's, we know that we
have hardly begun to learn it yet.

We are not left in doubt. " His servants
shall serve Him," is foretold concerning
the glorified inhabitants of the Holy City.
And how can they serve Him so well as by
helping their brethren and His .-' " His
name shall be in their foreheads." His
name is " The Saviour ; " and they who
bear His name are to be saviours and help-
ers also.

Though we may hereafter come to re-
gions in the spiritual world where there is
no more sin, there will always be different
grades of being, different degrees of devel-
opment, the need of the lower to learn
from the higher, and the higher from the
lower as well. Can any of us imagine our-
selves in a possible future condition or sit-
uation where we shall no longer need the
suggestions of friendship, the guidance of

The J)y of our Lord 147

greater natures than ours, the aid of loving
human souls like our own ? No : even in
heaven we shall have our mutual needs.
There, as here, we shall reach out for the
strong hand of brotherly help in ascending
to spiritual heights.

In shutting none out of our sympathy,
in the willingness to help all and to be
helped by all, we are here beginning, like
children, to climb the foothills that lead us
upward to immortality ; we already breathe
joyfully the air of the unseen kingdom. It
is folly for us to think that we shall be at
home in heaven, if we find its air too pure
for our breathing here. The self-absorbed,
the unsympathetic, the unloving, have lost
their way, and are on the downward path.
No light of the eternal life is reflected from
their faces. But when, at last, we shall
have cast aside the worn-out rags of our
selfishness, and, turning our eyes and our
feet upward, are clothed upon and winged
with love, on the heavenly heights, who
shall guess to what new meanings sympa-

148 As it is in Heaven

thy and comradeship and helpfulness may
grow ? These are the things which it hath
not entered into the heart of man to con-
ceive.

Yes, service is the law of the heavenly
life, and heartily entering into it, we enter
into joy, — the joy of our Lord.

To enter into His joy ! It means free-
dom and shelter, and communion. It in-
cludes all the hospitalities of earth and of
heaven. To be welcomed into every room
in our Father's house, — to blend our life as
music with the harmonies of His universe,
— to be at peace forever, forever at one
with the onward movement of His holy
and glorious Will ! To feel ourselves each a
part of the vast unity of things visible and
invisible, — to be permitted to do some-
thing towards drawing all things together
in Him, — to help Him in shaping the
new heaven and the new earth, — to know
that nothing exists that is not an element
of His joy and ours ! This it is to be at
home in the New Jerusalem — "built as a
city that is at unity in itself."

The Joy of our Lord 149

It is the joy of oiu' Lord,

Not man only, but the whole created uni-
verse, through every nerve and tissue of
its life, will blend itself in the chorus of
the new song. Nature will be at one with
us, as we are at one with God. Blind and
dumb as she seems now, she will share with
us in the clear vision and the overflowing
praise. Like the beasts in the Apocalypse,
"full of eyes within," she will join with
worshiping saints and elders and angels
round about the Throne, in gratitude to
Him who has found nothing that his Fa-
ther created too mean for Him to redeem.

" And every creature which is in heaven
and on the earth, and under the earth, and
such as are in the sea, and all that are in
them, heard I saying. Blessing, and honor,
and glory, and power, be unto him that sit-
teth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb
forever and ever."

In saying "our Lord," "our brethren,"
"our world," we take in nothing less than
the whole. Imperfect, incoherent, dis-

1^0 As it is ill Heaven

jointed without Him, the whole body is
"complete in Him."

A child of God who is not glad in simply-
being alive, and in doing the work He has
appointed, is an anomaly. It is as if a sun-
beam should frown back upon the sun for
sending it forth to illumine the world ; or
as if a color in the rainbow should darken
and grow dim because it must take its
place in building the heavenly arch. Joy
is the smile of Being; the natural expres-
sion of the soul's delight in receiving and
giving. Pleasure, delight, happiness, these
are all shallow experiences, in comparison
with joy. They stir us at the surface :
this is an elemental quality, welling up
from the abysses of the soul.

" Your joy no man taketh from you,"
Christ said to his disciples ; and He was
speaking of the greatest sorrow of their
lives, which was yet to reveal itself to
them as a joy. " These things I speak,
that they might have my joy fulfilled in
themselves." His joy was the sacrifice He

The Joy of our Lord i^i

was making of himself ; and theirs was to
come through entering in to the spirit of
His sacrifice when He should have gone
out of their sight.

The simple gladnesses of life Christ also
shared as naturally as we may share them.
The fields of His native land bloomed for
none so sweetly as for Him whose creative
vision discerned all that there was

" Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower."

He loved little children ; watched them
at their innocent sports, took them in His
arms and blessed them, and was happy in
their happiness. The peace of home-life
sank into His heart ; and He welcomed
the sweetness of love from stranger or from
friend, with gracious and sympathetic glad-
ness. His Father's world was all a delight
to Him : but His joy of joys was that He
could save its ungrateful souls from the
sorrow of their sins by the gift of Himself.
To enter into this deepest joy of His is to
enter heaven.

1^2 As it is in Heaven

The souls that walk white-robed there,
are the souls of those who, with Him, have
laid down their lives for the saving of other
lives. So are their garments washed white
in the blood of the Lamb. And in the
spirit of that sacrifice they go on, from
glory to glory. They cannot cease from
giving themselves ; it has become the habit
of their entire being. They are full of the
light of their Lord's love, and they must
forever radiate His blessedness. Wher-
ever they are needed in His universe, they
go forth, swifter than sunbeams, on His
errands. To be with Him in His heaven,
is not only to have lost all selfishness,
but to know no joy in life except in giving
that life forth continually to others.

" I looked, and behold, a door was
opened in heaven." A door, — swinging
back on musical hinges before the dis-
couraged wanderers of earth, inviting them
to hospitalities glimpsed beyond, inconceiv-
able to the heart of man. A door 1 Those
are not unfolding portals, they are out-

The Joy of our Lord 753

spread arms, and above them is the glory
of a Face, and from within there floats the
tenderness of a Voice, —

" I am the Door \ "

It is He, the Lord of Life Himself : and
we, who were so weary of our vain efforts
to conquer the evil, the pettiness and un-
lovingness of our natures, are uplifted, up-
borne to His heart, and its mighty throb-
bings become the inspiration of our own.
He does for us what we could not do for
ourselves, and we are saved. Henceforth
there is no life for us but His.

" I have set before thee an open door,
and no man can shut it." To every soul
of man this message comes, and the soul
that turns at the call of the angel who
brings it, will bear witness that the message
is true. Only we ourselves can shut our-
selves out of heaven. The door of a
Heart as human in its sympathy as it is
divine in its love and power, stands always
open and waiting with welcome for the re-
pentant child who would fain return to his
Father's house.

1^4 ^^ it i^ ill Heaven

" By me if any man enter in, he shall be
saved, and shall go in and out, and find
pasture."

" He shall go in and out." The children
of the kingdom have the freedom of the
universe. No narrow enclosure shuts them
away from their brethren of distant ages
and different faiths and races. To them
none are strangers and foreigners. They
are at home with all the inhabitants of
earth and of heaven. They do not know
each other as Greek or Barbarian, as Jew
or Gentile, as mortal or angel, but as the
children of God.

They may rest beside the still waters of
human affection, and they may climb the
loftiest heights of knowledge and specula-
tion. They may laugh with the child and
think with the philosopher. Theirs are the
poet's songs ; and theirs the discoveries of
the man of science. They sing with the
woman at her wheel, or whistle with the
farmer at his plow, and they catch from that
healthy mirth a note of reverent praise that

The Joy of our Lord i^^y

they carry up to heaven and blend with
the chant of the seraphim. Unlike the
dwellers in the elder Paradise, they have
right to all fruits that grow on the tree of
knowledge or the tree of life. Nothing is
forbidden to them, for they want nothing
that God does not desire them to possess.
They have entered into life by the one only
Way, through the heart and mind and soul
of Christ. Overcoming their sins in His
strength, and becoming one with Him in
love and purity and righteousness, they
" inherit all things," both in this world
and in the world to come.

We have as yet only partially come into
possession of our earthly inheritance. Our
own bodies and souls are still a mystery
to us. Nature sometimes seems to inveigle
us into inextricable entanglements. Our
fellow-beings often appear strange, distant,
and unrelated ; and our future is hidden
from us by an impenetrable veil. Yet all
these things belong to us, and to all these
we belong. As we enter into life, we shall

1 1012 01004 4701

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