ions of the one
ray of white light, in the blessed word 'ours.' Contemplation makes us
possessors of God. Assimilation to His character makes us own and have
Him. They who love and gaze, and are being changed by still degrees into
His likeness, possess Him. This is the central idea of man's future
destiny and highest blessedness, a union with God closer and more
intimate in degree, but yet essentially the same in kind, as is here
possible amidst the shows and vanities and wearinesses of this mortal
life. 'His servants shall serve Him, and see His face, and His name
shall be on their foreheads.' Obedience, contemplation, transformation,
these are the hands by which we here lay hold on God; and they in the
heavens grasp Him just as we here on earth may do. The 'inheritance' is
God Himself.

Surely that is in accordance with the whole teaching of Scripture, and
is but the expansion of plain words which tell us that we 'are heirs of
God.' If that be so, then all the other subsidiary blessings which have
been, to the sore detriment of Christian anticipation and of Christian
life in a hundred ways, elevated into disproportionate importance, fall
into their right places, and are more when they are looked upon as
secondary than when they are looked upon as primary.

Ah, brethren! neither the sensuous metaphors which, in accommodation to
our weakness, Scripture has used to paint that future so that we may, in
some measure, comprehend it, nor the translation of these, in so far as
they refer to circumstances and externals, are enough for us. It is
blessed to know that 'there shall be no night there'--blessed to grasp
all those sweet negatives which contradict the miseries of the world,
and to think of no sin, no curse, no tears, no sighing nor sorrow,
neither any more pain, 'because the former things have passed away.' It
is sweet and ennobling to think that, when we are discharged of the load
of this cumbrous flesh, we shall be much more ourselves, and able to see
where now is but darkness, and to feel where now is but vacancy. It is
blessed to think of the recognising of lost and loved ones. But all
these blessednesses, heaped together, as it seems to me, would become
sickeningly the same if prolonged through eternity, unless we had God
for our very own. _Eternal_ is an awful word, even when the noun that
goes with it is _blessedness_. And I know not how even the redeemed
could be saved, as the long ages rolled on, from the op