SERMONS.

THE FUTURE STATE A SELF-CONSCIOUS STATE.

1 Cor. xiii. 12.—­“Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The apostle Paul made this remark with reference to the blessedness of the Christian in eternity.  Such assertions are frequent in the Scriptures.  This same apostle, whose soul was so constantly dilated with the expectation of the beatific vision, assures the Corinthians, in another passage in this epistle, that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”  The beloved disciple John, also, though he seems to have lived in the spiritual world while he was upon the earth, and though the glories of eternity were made to pass before him in the visions of Patmos, is compelled to say of the sons of God, “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.”  And certainly the common Christian, as he looks forward with a mixture of hope and anxiety to his final state in eternity, will confess that he knows but “in part,” and that a very small part, concerning it.  He endures as seeing that which is invisible, and cherishes the hope that through Christ’s redemption his eternity will be a condition of peace and purity, and that he shall know even as also he is known.

But it is not the Christian alone who is to enter eternity, and to whom the exchange of worlds will bring a luminous apprehension of many things that have hitherto been seen only through a glass darkly.  Every human creature may say, when he thinks of the alteration that will come over his views of religious subjects upon entering another life, “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  I am now in the midst of the vapors and smoke of this dim spot which men call earth, but then shall I stand in the dazzling light of the face of God, and labor under no doubt or delusion respecting my own character or that of my Eternal Judge.”

A moment’s reflection will convince any one, that the article and fact of death must of itself make a vast accession to the amount of a man’s knowledge, because death introduces him into an entirely new state of existence.  Foreign travel adds much to our stock of ideas, because we go into regions of the earth of which we had previously known only by the hearing of the ear.  But the great and last journey that man takes carries him over into a province of which no book, not even the Bible itself, gives him any distinct cognition, as to the style of its scenery or the texture of its objects.  In respect to any earthly scene or experience, all men stand upon substantially the same level of information, because they all have substantially the same data for forming an estimate.  Though I may never have been in Italy, I yet know that the soil of Italy is a part of the common crust of the globe, that the Apennines are like other mountains which I have seen,