O wonderful and blessed thought, that the gift which is in us shall one day have the mastery over all obstructions; that all sins, and faults, and weaknesses, and ignorance, and all decay and wandering, and all the clouds which rest upon mortality, and all the hinderances of the world and of the flesh, shall be taken away; and that we shall be ripened into a mysterious perfection of the spiritual being! Blessed thought, and full of freshness and calm to the weary and heavy-laden, one day all their oppressions shall be rolled back from them, and they shall "shine forth as the sun!" Let us beware how we judge one another. Who knows what may lie hid in the man whom we slight and cast out as of no esteem? who can say how he may outshine his fellows in the kingdom of the resurrection? "We fools accounted his life madness, and his end to be without honour: how is he numbered with the children of God, and his lot is among the saints! Therefore have we erred from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness hath not shined unto us, and the sun of righteousness rose not upon us." Wonderful and overwhelming, to behold at that day the resurrection of the righteous, each one shining forth in his own distinguishable splendour! "Then shall we know even as also we are known;" and there shall be 1 Wisdom v. 4-6. D D strange overrulings of our blind judgments. "Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first." The poor man thou despisedst an hour ago shall sit higher than thou at the marriage-supper of the Lamb. And the simple and unlearned, and the lowly and slow of speech, whom the learned, and eloquent, and lofty, and prosperous, have contemned as mean and foolish, shall be arrayed in an exceeding brightness, before which they shall be dim and naked. Let us also beware how we give much care or thought to any thing but to the perfecting of our hidden life. What else is worth living for? What else shall endure at Christ's coming? Most awful and searching day, when "the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days!" Let us therefore live ever waiting for that hour. we be poor, slighted, slandered, forgotten, moving in the shadows of the world, so that we attain unto a glorious resurrection? O most glad hour, when it shall dawn towards the first day of the everlasting week; when there shall be a making ready in the heaven above and in the earth beneath; when legions of angels shall gather around the Sun of righteousness, and all orders and hosts of heaven shall know that the time for "the manifestation of the sons of God" is come! What joy shall there be What matter though at that hour in the world unseen! and what a thrill, as of a penetrating light, shall run through the dust where the saints are sleeping! When was there ever such a day-spring since the time when "God said, Let there be light, and there was light?" He shall come, and all His shining ones; ten thousand times ten thousand, whose countenances are" like lightning," and their "raiment white as snow;" all the heavenly court,-angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim,-clad in unimaginable splendours; and the righteous shall arise from the grave, and the earth shall be lightened with their glory; they shall stretch forth their hands to meet Him, and bow themselves before the brightness of His coming. O blessed hour, after all the sorrows, and wrongs, and falsehoods, and darkness, and burdens of life, to see Him face to face; to be made sinless; to shine with an exceeding strength; to be as the light, in which there "is no darkness at all!" Be this our hope, our chiefest toil, our almost only prayer. THE END. PRINTED BY LEVEY, ROBSON, AND FRANKLYN, |