PICTURES OF PARADISE

mortal in their scope.  He is not to be blamed for this, for it is God’s will to let him grope in darkness a few short years.  But man’s imagination in all earthly things conjures up that which is far beyond the earthly reality, leaving him a prey to dissatisfaction.  How good to believe that our imagination finds in heaven a field where all our most beautiful ideas, collated, joined and woven together into a whole, fail to approach the true glories of the home in the far skies which our kind Father, taking us in His arms, will open before us.  “How should we rejoice,” says Sir Robert Hall, “in the prospect,

THE CERTAINTY, RATHER,

of spending a blissful eternity with those whom we loved on earth; of seeing them emerge from the ruins of the tomb and the deeper ruins of the fall, not only uninjured, but refined and perfected, ’with every tear wiped from their eyes,’ standing before the throne of God and the Lamb, ’in white robes and palms in their hands, crying with a loud voice, Salvation to God that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb, for ever and ever!’

WHAT DELIGHT WILL IT AFFORD

to renew the sweet counsel we have taken together, to recount the toils of combat and the labor of the way, and to approach, not the house, but the throne of God in company, in order to join in the symphonies of heavenly voices, and lose ourselves amid the splendor and fruition of the beatific vision!” Dr. Dick supposes that the soul may find endless employment in beholding “those magnificent displays which will be exhibited of the extent, the magnitude, the motions, the mechanism, the scenery, the inhabitants, and the general constitution of other systems, and the general arrangement and order of the universal system comprehended under the government of the Almighty.”

THIS IS ENTIRELY IN REASON.

So far as we are able to judge, there is absolutely no limit to the universe of stars.  We are as sure of the law of gravity as we are of the existence of heaven.  We build larger telescopes each year only to behold additional millions of stars, each star, possibly, the larger on account of our being able to see it at all.  We absolutely know that one star is larger than our sun by 324 times.  The moon is about nine times around the earth away from us.  The sun is larger than the track of the moon around the earth by 167,000 miles in every direction.  If you had a ball which would just fit in the track of the moon, and stuck it all full of pins 167,000 miles long, you would have the size of the sun.

SIRIUS, THE STAR,