e conviction that God is a rewarder of them who
diligently seek Him; and there is a moment in human progress when the
anticipated rewards and punishments must be of a Mahometan
character--the happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were
disciplined; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they were
educated by rewards and punishments to abstain from present sinful
gratification: at first, the promise of the life which now is,
afterwards the promise of that which is to come; but even then the
rewards and punishments of a future state were spoken of, by
inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary character; and some of the best
of the Israelites, in looking to the recompense of reward, seemed to
have anticipated, coarsely, recompense in exchange for duties
performed.

The last step is that which alone deserves to be called Christian
Faith--"Who is he that overcometh but he that believeth that Jesus is
the Christ?" The difference between the faith of the Christian and
that of the man of the world, or the mere ordinary religionist, is not
a difference in mental operation, but in the object of the faith--to
believe that Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian
faith.

The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from the anticipated
heaven of any other man, not in the distinctness with which its
imagery is perceived, but in the kind of objects which are hoped for.
The apostle has told us the character of heaven. "Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love
Him"--which glorious words are sometimes strangely misinterpreted, as
if the apostle merely meant rhetorically to exalt the conception of
the heavenly world, as of something beyond all power to imagine or to
paint. The apostle meant something infinitely deeper: the heaven of
God is not only that which "eye hath not seen," but that which eye can
_never_ see; its glories are not of that kind at all which can ever
stream in forms of beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the
enraptured ear--not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here
called "the heart of man") can invent or imagine: it is something
which these sensuous organs of ours never can appreciate--bliss of
another kind altogether, revealed to the spirit of man by the Spirit
of God--joys such as spirit alone can receive.

Do you ask what these a