union, or rather disunion,
of friends in their Father's home! Tell me not that special affection
to Christian brethren, from whatever causes it may arise, is
inconsistent with unfeigned love to all, and with absorbing love to
Jesus. It is not so here, and never can be so from the nature of holy
love, and was not so in Christ's own case when He the Perfect One
lived amongst us. With supreme love to God, "He loved His church
and gave Himself for it;" with love to His church He yet loved the
disciples as "His own;" while again within this circle one of these
was specially _the_ loved one; and beyond it "He loved Martha and Mary
and Lazarus!" Tell me not that it is enough to know that our friends
are in glory. I know this now in regard to some of them, as surely as
I know anything beyond the grave; yet my heart yearns to meet them
"with the Lord," and I bless Him that He permits me to comfort myself
with the hope of doing so. Nor let it be alleged as an insuperable
objection to all this anticipated happiness, that knowledge of the
saved would imply knowledge of the lost, and that this would balance
the pleasure we hope for, by the great pain by which we, it is
assumed, must thus be compelled to endure. For even admitting that
such knowledge would be possessed at all, which is very doubtful; yet
surely, at the worst, this is a strange way of escaping pain from the
knowledge that some are lost, by taking refuge in the ignorance of any
being saved! I shall not prove this further, but express my joy in
heartily believing that we shall resume our intercourse with every
Christian friend; that remembering all the past, and reading it for
the first time aright, because reading in the full light of revealed
truth, we shall know and love as we never knew and loved here; and
shall sit down at that glorious intellectual, moral, and social feast,
not with ideal persons and strangers, but with Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, with Peter, Paul, and John, and with every saint of God!

But I have not as yet spoken of one friend there who will be the
centre of that bright society--"Jesus the Mediator of the new
covenant!" "I will take you to _Myself_," is the blessed promise. "We
shall see Him as He is," is the longed-for-vision. "We shall be like
Him," is the hoped-for perfection. To know, to love, to be in all
things like Jesus, and to hold communion with Him for ever--what "an
exceeding weight of glory!" Jesus will never be separated personally