A further excellence is that this is a suitable rest.  Gold and earthly glory, temporal crowns and kingdoms could not make rest for saints.  Such as their nature and desire such will be their rest.

It will, too, be absolutely perfect and complete—­as there is no mixture of our corruption with our graces, so there will be no mixture of our sufferings with our solace.  We shall know which was the right side and which the wrong.  Then shall our understandings receive their light from the face of God, as the full moon from the open sun when there is no earth to interpose betwixt them.  It is a perfect rest from perplexing doubts and fear, from all sense of God’s displeasure, from all the temptations of Satan, the world, and the flesh.  And it is an eternal rest.  This is the crown of our crown.  Mortality is the disgrace of all sublunary delights.  But, O blessed eternity, where our lives are perplexed by no such thoughts, nor our joys interrupted by any such fears!  Our first paradise in Eden had a way out, but none in again; but this eternal paradise hath a way in, but no way out again.  The Lord heal our carnal hearts lest we enter not into His eternal rest because of our unbelief.

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BOOK OF THE DEAD

This is probably the oldest religious book in the world.  Properly speaking, indeed, it is no book at all, but rather a collection of hymns and litanies which have no more connection with each other than the Psalms.  Like the Psalter, too, this so-called book has grown by degrees to the magnitude which it now usually assumes in European and other libraries—­175 chapters of varying sizes.  Its Egyptian name is “The Book of the Coming Forth by Day” (Renouf), or “The Coming Out of the Day” (Naville); the latter being probably more correct, “day” in this connection denoting man’s life with its morning and evening.  The hymns in this collection are supposed to be recited by the deceased person with whose body they were commonly buried, and by the recital of these and other sacred texts the departed was believed to be protected against injury in his journey to the underworld, and also to have secured for him a safe return in the form of a resurrection.  It was Lepsius, the great German Egyptologist, who gave this compilation the name “Book of the Dead.”  Even this name, however, though more correct than any other, gives by no means an adequate account of that for which it stands.  This, and other summaries of the sacred books of the East appearing in the world’s greatest books present in quite original ways the systems and philosophies of the great non-Christian religions.

INTRODUCTORY

The Book of the Dead may be described as the soul’s vade mecum in the journey from this world.  It prescribes the forms the soul must have at command in order to ward off the dangers on the way to the underworld, during residence in the world, and on the journey back.