4.  If you look into Homer, that is, the most ancient of the Greek writers, you see the Supreme power seated in the heavens, and encompassed with inferior deities, among whom the muses are represented as singing incessantly about his throne.  Who does not here see the main strokes and outlines of this great truth we are speaking of?

5.  The same doctrine is shadowed out in many other heathen authors, though at the same time, like several other revealed truths, dashed and adulterated with a mixture of fables and human inventions.  But to pass over the notions of the Greeks and Romans, those more enlightened parts of the pagan world, we find there is scarce a people among the late discovered nations who are not trained up in an opinion that heaven is the habitation of the divinity whom they worship.

6.  As in Solomon’s temple there was the Sanctum Sanctorum, in which a visible glory appeared among the figures of the cherubims, and into which none but the high-priest himself was permitted to enter, after having made an atonement for the sins of the people; so, if we consider this whole creation as one great temple, there is in it the Holy of Holies, into which the high-priest of our salvation entered, and took his place among angels and archangels, after having made a propitiation for the sins of mankind.

7.  With how much skill must the throne of God be erected?  With what glorious designs is that habitation beautified, which is contrived and built by him who inspired Hiram with wisdom?  How great must be the majesty of that place, where the whole art of creation has been employed, and where God has chosen to shew himself in the most magnificent manner?  What must be the architecture of infinite power under the direction of divine wisdom?  A spirit cannot but be transported after an ineffable manner with the sight of those objects, which were made to affect him by that being who knows the inward frame of a soul, and how to please and ravish it in all its most secret powers and faculties.

8.  It is to this majestic presence of God we may apply those beautiful expressions in holy writ:  Behold even to the moon, and it shineth not; yea, the stars are not pure in his sight.  The light of the sun, and all the glories of the world in which we live, are but as weak and sickly glimmerings, or rather darkness itself, in comparison of those splendors which encompass the throne of God.

9.  As the glory of this place is transcendent beyond imagination, so probably is the extent of it.  There is light behind light, and glory within glory.  How far that space may reach, in which God thus appears in perfect majesty, we cannot possibly conceive.  Though it is not infinite, it may be indefinite; and though not immeasurable in itself, it may be so with regard to any created eye or imagination.  If he has made these lower regions of matter so inconceivably wide and magnificent for the habitation of mortal and perishable beings, how great may we suppose the courts of his house to be, where he makes his residence in a more especial manner, and displays himself in the fulness of his glory, among an innumerable company of angels, and spirits of just men made perfect!