The Brussels lace is superior to all other lace, so beautiful, so multiform, so expensive—­four hundred francs a pound.  All the world seeks it.  Do you know how it is made?  The spinning is done in a dark room, the only light admitted through a small aperture, and that light falling directly on the pattern.  And the finest specimens of Christian character I have ever seen or ever expect to see are those to be found in lives all of whose windows have been darkened by bereavement and misfortune save one, but under that one window of prayer the interlacing of divine workmanship went on until it was fit to deck a throne, a celestial embroidery which angels admired and God approved.

But it is another Jerusalem toward which we now need to open our windows.  The exiled evangelist of Ephesus saw it one day as the surf of the Icarian sea foamed and splashed over the bowlders at his feet, and his vision reminded me of a wedding-day when the bride by sister and maid was having garlands twisted for her hair and jewels strung for her neck just before she puts her betrothed hand into the hand of her affianced:  “I, John, saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  Toward that bridal Jerusalem are our windows opened?

We would do well to think more of heaven.  It is not a mere annex of earth.  It is not a desolate outpost.  As Jerusalem was the capital of Judae, and Babylon the capital of the Babylonian monarchy, and London is the capital of Great Britain, and Washington is the capital of our own republic, the New Jerusalem is the capital of the universe.  The king lives there, and the royal family of the redeemed have their palaces there, and there is a congress of many nations and the parliament of all the worlds.  Yea, as Daniel had kindred in Jerusalem of whom he often thought, though he had left home when a very young man, perhaps father and mother and brothers and sisters still living, and was homesick to see them, and they belonged to the high circles of royalty, Daniel himself having royal blood in his veins, so we have in the New Jerusalem a great many kindred, and we are sometimes homesick to see them, and they are all princes and princesses, in them the blood imperial, and we do well to keep our windows open toward their eternal residence.

It is a joy for us to believe that while we are interested in them they are interested in us.  Much thought of heaven makes one heavenly.  The airs that blow through that open window are charged with life, and sweep up to us aromas from gardens that never wither, under skies that never cloud, in a spring-tide that never terminates.  Compared with it all other heavens are dead failures.