and claims. Heaven calls to him from above, and earth from beneath and around. On the earthly side are things seen and temporal, which address themselves to the senses of the body, and which urge their importance by promises of present and immediate reward. From the spiritual and eternal side appear God, Christ, the Spirit, angels, and sainted human spirits, together with all the earnest realities of an endless life. In which direction, under these circumstances, ought man most earnestly to look? From which side has he most to hope or to fear? Both reason and revelation at once decide,-" We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." Want of that solemn sense of unseen things which inspires humble reverence, and want of that sweet sense of unseen things which inspires joyful love, we believe to be also among the prominent faults of the religion of this age. We have been receding, unconsciously, perhaps, but surely, from the silent world of spirits! We do not, as we might do, feel the animating beat of unseen life; nor hear, as faith may do, whispers from the eternal side. As geography has set farther out the ends of the earth, and as astronomy has shown us the heavenly regions at a greater distance, so theology, both theoretical and practical, has repelled to a cold distance the warm sympathies of the future life; or, rather, has withdrawn from it. A certain philosophy, which has a phase for every theological latitude, and which is therefore to be met, in one or other of its forms, in every branch of the Church, has assumed to itself the heartless mission of severing the kingdom of Christ from its connections with the mysteries on which it rests on one side. In this way superstition has been destroyed, it is true, but at what an expense! Reason has become ashamed of faith; and though it has not in every case determined to dissociate itself entirely from faith, it has, nevertheless, presumed to change its position in relation to it. It now proposes to go before, and to lead, faith; and in so far as the claims which reason arrogates to itself of leading faith, have been acknowledged, has faith given way to intellect, notion, and opinion, which hide the solemn mysteries of the spirit-world from view. The loss which piety has sustained from this tendency is immense. The more reason, outside of faith and revelation, has sought to think clearly, the more has it thought coldly. Vague and floating ideas of heaven, are, on the other hand also, sure to weaken faith, and are ever followed by an unsteady religious life. It is like sailing with no port in view. Cross-tides will be constantly bearing us out of the course, and mist will enshroud us. If we would go steadily forward, we must lay definite and firm "hold upon the hope set before us: which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus." The prominence which a false philosophy has given to reason, and to the merely outward in our nature, has done much to crowd out of view those deep mysteries with which faith and our inner nature commune. The sense of the infinite in the spirit has become dull. The world has become so noisy that the soft undertones from the realms of spirits are no more heard as they should be. Worldliness, both in its refined and vulgar forms, has banished that lovely piety which only blooms where heaven is ever felt to be near, and where there is constant communion with the solemn silent un seen. In addition to this we would suggest, whether another reason why there is so little of the silent but powerful life of heaven in our present piety, may not be found in a certain sort of sermons and practical writings. The heaven which is often delineated with spiritualistic zeal, is not the heaven of the Bible. It is represented as being such a sublimated-we will not say place, for amid the fashion of the times it is almost heresy to speak of it as a place it is described as such a sublimated and ethereal state, so purely spiritual, so abstracted and removed from all the sympathies of the present life, that it must seem, to conscientious hearts, almost profane to claim a present fellowship with it! Practically, Christians are taught that the heavenly life is so entirely unlike this, and that it is to be entered by such a violent transition, that the proper position of an expectant is, publicanlike, to stand afar off, and not even so much as turn his eyes towards the place, for fear of polluting it with his glance. There seems to be an effort made to cast an air of strangeness around it, which cuts off all those warm attenuations by which it reaches over so lovingly into this life, and makes us feel that there is our home that there is our Father's house, with its familiar home-like scenes, and not the cold ivory hall of a strange king, which we dread to enter. Instead of these cold abstractions, and things purely spiritual, for which an embodied being can have no other feelings but those of terror, we need a reviving of those Fatherland feelings, which will enable us to approach our heavenly inheritance like children long absent going home; and not like aliens that are seeking protection, and suing for a reward of services at a foreign court. verse. The scriptures do not in the least favor that sublimated spiritualism which, in its zeal for spirit, forgets the body and its sympathies, and makes the home that we hope for as unfamiliar, and as far removed from our present sympathies, as possible. It is just the reIn the Scripture it is not a strange land to which we go; it is going home. It is a return to our Father's house. It is an entering upon the inheritance to which we are heirs. Sabbath and sanctuary scenery, the most familiar of all that is mirrored in our associations, is spread out over the land of our hopes, to make it home-like. To be in heaven, is to sit down at table with patriarchs and ancient saints—it is to come to the general assembly and church of the first-born-it is to walk forth in company with the Lamb-it is to repose, as children, upon the bosom of God; and, with his own hands, to have all tears wiped from our eyes. How far is all this removed from those abstract disquisitions, which labor, in learned pain, to show how much that fatherland will be foreign to all our present conceptions and feelings of it! We venture the assertion, that those Christians who are deepest and most child-like in their piety, have the most home-like ideas of heaven; and that those who associate with it most of that scenery which belongs to the holiest associations of earth, are nearest the truth. Before the hopes of such, it lies in the most familiar attractiveness; and journeying towards it seems to them like returning, after long absence, to the home of their childhood. These conceptions of heaven, which, as we have seen, are favored by the general habit of scripture, are those also which best harmonize with the deep undertones of the spirit. We find them, accordingly, prevailing everywhere in that portion of the history of the human spirit lying anterior to that pride of reason which spurns the child-like and traditionary as the mere images of superstition and ignorance. The heaven of pagan longings, however false their views in other respects may have been, as compared with revelation, was a place like this world, only all was perfect. The Jewish heaven was a Paradise, and a land of inheritance, only infinitely lovelier than Eden or Canaan. Even the heaven of which the Saviour and his disciples speak-for they never speak as philosophers—is a place where he, and all his, shall be together as they were on earth; and the spirituality of the place consists in complete holiness of soul and body, not in a suspension of the present laws of holy activity in the one, or in the abrogation of all materiality in the other. The same ideas of heaven are found to breathe in the yearnings of childhood, and amid the simple faith of those humble souls who receive the kingdom of heaven as little children. Reason, in all its pride, can find no heaven so lovely, |