Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone.  A thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to others and to the world about him, beset him here.  There he shall know even as he is known by perfect intelligence.

Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable.  But the wails of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel.  Husbands and fathers are ever crying: 

  Immortal?  I feel it and know it. 
    Who doubts of such as she? 
  But that’s the pang’s very essence,
    Immortal away from me.

But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships up to be sundered no more forever.

Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God.  Job, in his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, “O that I knew where I might find him.”  David cries out while his tears are flowing day and night, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.  My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God:  when shall I come and appear before God?” Moses, in the broadest of visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, “Show me thy glory.”  And common men have always turned the high places of earth to altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their sacrifices.  But the means of knowing God are to be increased.  The very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.  Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better results, shall be taken there.  Every reader of the Apocalypse notices with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open, nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them—­we observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the sound of these many waters in a storm.  Above all these superior manifestations in finer realms the pure in heart shall see God.

III.  But there is in space what there was before the world began.  Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the First Great Cause by creation, not by development.  This conception is full of difficulties to thought.  We cannot even agree whether creation was in time or eternity.  But all agree in this, that the invisible is rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied.  Indeed,