we also "shall be manifested with him in glory."
He pondered the thought of death as "gain," as transferring him to
conditions in which he would be "at home with the Lord," "with Christ,
which is far better." He looked for "the blest hope and appearing
of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ," and he
contemplated "that great day" as the "henceforth," which would reveal
to him the crown of righteousness and glory. Is any one prepared to
dissociate this contemplation from the apostle's cheery optimism? Is
not rather the thought of coming glory one of its abiding springs? Can
we safely exile it from our moral and spiritual culture? I know that
this particular contemplation is largely absent from modern religious
life, and I know the nature of the recoil in which our present
impoverishment began. "Let us hear less about the mansions of the
blest and more about the housing of the poor!" Men revolted against an
effeminate contemplation, which had run to seed, in favor of an active
philanthropy which sought the enrichment of the common life. But, my
brethren, pulling a plant up is not the only way of saving it from
running to seed. You can accomplish by a wise restriction what
is wastefully done by severe destruction. I think we have lost
immeasurably by the uprooting, in so many lives, of this plant of
heavenly contemplation. We have built on the erroneous assumption that
the contemplation of future glory inevitably unfits us for the service
of man. It is an egregious and destructive mistake. I do not think
that Richard Baxter's labors were thinned or impoverished by his
contemplation of "The Saint's Everlasting Rest." When I consider his
mental output, his abundant labors as father-confessor to a countless
host, his pains and persecutions and imprisonments, I can not but
think he received some of the powers of his optimistic endurance from
contemplations such as he counsels in his incomparable book. "Run
familiarly through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem; visit the
patriarchs and prophets, salute the apostles, and admire the armies of
martyrs; lead on the heart from street to street, bring it into
the palace of the great king; lead it, as it were, from chamber to
chamber. Say to it, 'Here must I lodge, here must I die, here must I
praise, here must I love and be loved. My tears will then be wiped
away, my groans be turned to another tune, my cottage of clay be
changed to this palace, my prison rags to the