hange upon every aspect of their home.
All that is near and dear to them there is passing away. It is but the
shadow of better things to come. And as the type bears some resemblance to
that which it typifies, we may understand both by considering the relation
they sustain to each other. We may gain a new view of the Christian home by
looking at it in the light of its typical relation to heaven; and we have a
transporting view of our heavenly home when we contemplate it as the
antitype of our home on earth.

The Christian home on earth is a tent-home, a tabernacle adapted to the
pilgrim-life of God's people, set up in a dreary wilderness, designed to
subserve the purposes of a few years, as a preparation for a better home.
The Christian, amid all his domestic enjoyments, does not realize that his
home is his rest, but that it is only a probationary state, the foretaste
and anticipation of the rest that remaineth for the people of God. It is
but the emblem,--the shadow of his eternal home; and it is, therefore,
unsatisfying; it does not meet all the wants of our nature; there is a
yearning after a better state; the purest happiness it affords proceeds
from the hopes and longings it begets, and the interests it is transferring
to eternity, laying up, as it were, treasures in a better home. Our home
here, develops our wants, inflames our desires, excites our expectations,
educates, and points us to the realities of which it is an emblem; but it
does not fully satisfy our desires, it only increases their intensity. The
pilgrim soul of the child of God pines and frets amid all

"Her sylvan scenes, and hill and dale
And liquid lapse of murmuring streams."

These afford him no satisfaction; they only develop in him the saving sense
of earth's insufficiency; all the scenes of this wilderness state are but
those of thorns, and desert heath, and barren sands; and he cries out in
the midst of his happy home,--"This is not your rest!" Our tent-home may
include every earthly cup, and all the riches and honors of the world, yet
it satisfies not, and the Christian turns from it all to rest and expatiate
in a life to come. Every home here is baptized with tears and scarred with
graves. Its poverty is a burden, its riches are snares, its friends are
taken from us; broken hearts agonized there; restlessness is tossed to and
fro there; and disappointment reigns in every member there. Hence in our
wilderness-home we hunger and thirst,