nothing will be wanting to your happiness. But oh! you

say, how would the thought affect me now! There is the babe that was torn from my bosom; how lovely then, but a cherub now! There is the friend, who was as mine own soul, with whom I took sweet counsel, and went to the house of God in company. There is the minister-whose preaching turned my feet into the path of peace-whose words were to me a well of life. There is the beloved mother, on whose knees I first laid my little hands to pray, and whose lips first taught my tongue to pronounce the name of Jesus! And are these removed from us for ever? Shall we recognize them no more?—Cease your anxieties. Can memory be annihilated? Did not Peter, James, and John, know Moses and Elias? Does not the Saviour inform us that the friends, benefactors have made of the mammon of unrighteousness, shall receive them into everlasting habitations? Does not Paul tell the Thessalonians that they are his hope, and joy, and crown, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ?

11. REV. J. W. NEVIN, D.D.,

Professor of Theology in the Seminary of the German Reformed Church.

That the saints in glory shall continue to know those whom they have known and loved on earth, seems to me to flow necessarily from the idea of their immortality itself; for this cannot be real, except as it includes personal identity or a continuation of the same consciousness. It is moreover a strictly catholic idea, the sense of which has been actively present to the mind of the Church, through all ages, in her doctrine of the "Communion of Saints." This regards not merely Christians on earth, but also the

sainted dead; according to the true word of the hymn: “The saints on earth and all the dead, but one communion make." But communion implies a continuity of reciprocal knowledge and affection. If death sundered absolutely the new consciousness of the believer from the old, there could be no real spiritual conjunction of this sort between the living and the departed members of Christ's body. There is a dangerous tendency in the religious world at the present time towards a false view of this relation, by which in fact the dead are taken to be so dissociated from the living, as to have no part farther in the onward movement of Christ's kingdom. But this is an error full as bad, to say the least, as the old superstition of invoking the saints and of praying for the dead. The communion of saints now noticed has regard of course to the order of things between death and the resurrection. But if we are required to believe that disembodied spirits in the middle state still retain their interest in those they have left behind them in the mortal state, how shall we question their power of recognition afterwards in the more perfect resurrection state, when those who are now in two different states (and still in communion,) shall be all gloriously brought together again in one?

SECTION II.

ALLUSIONS IN WHICH THIS DOCTRINE IS TAKEN FOR GRANTED.

1. JOHN CALVIN.

When Calvin was near his end, Farel, his early and faithful friend, and now a venerable sage of eighty years,

desired once more to see him in the flesh. Calvin dissuaded him-though he did nevertheless afterwards come from Neufchatel to Genoa, on foot, to see his friend once more, and for the last time. In his letter to Farel, in which he takes his final leave from him, as he then supposed, he says: God bless you, best and noblest brother; and if God permits you still longer to live, forget not the tie that binds us, which will be just as agreeable to us in heaven as it has been useful to the church on earth."

66

2. REV. DR. JOHN TILLOTSON.

Archbishop of Canterbury.

When we come to heaven we shall meet with all those excellent persons, those brave minds, those innocent and charitable souls, whom we have seen, and heard, and read of in the world. There we shall meet many of our dear relations and intimate friends, and perhaps with many of our enemies, to whom we shall then be perfectly reconciled, notwithstanding all the warm contests and peevish differences which we had with them in this world, even about matters of religion. For heaven is a state of perfect love and friendship.

3. REV. RICHARD BAXTER.

I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them on earth. If I thought that I should never know them, and consequently never love them after this life is ended, I should in reason number them with temporal things, and love them as such. But I now delight to converse with my pious friends, in a firm

persuasion that I shall converse with them for ever; and I take comfort in those of them that are dead or absent, as believing I shall shortly meet them in heaven, and love them with a heavenly love that shall there be perfected.

4. BISHOP HALL.

Thou hast lost thy friend:-say, rather, thou hast parted with him. That is properly lost which is past all recovery, which we are out of hope to see any more. It is not so with this friend thou mournest for; he is but gone home a little before thee; thou art following him; you two shall meet in your Father's house, and enjoy each other more happily than you could have done here below.

5. DR. DODDRIDGE.

Let me be thankful for the pleasing hope that though God loves my child too well to permit it to return to me, he will ere long bring me to it. And then that endeared paternal affection, which would have been a cord to tie me to earth, and have added new pangs to my removal from it, will be as a golden chain to draw me upwards, and add one farther charm and joy even to paradise itself. Was this my desolation? this my sorrow? to part with thee for a few days, that I might receive thee for ever (Philem., ver. 15,) and find thee what thou art? It is for no language but that of heaven, to describe the sacred joy which such a meeting must occasion.

6. MELVILL.

It is yet but a little while, and we shall be delivered from the burden and the conflict, and, with all those who

have preceded us in the righteous struggle, enjoy the deep raptures of a Mediator's presence. Then re-united to the

friends with whom we took sweet counsel upon earth, we shall recount our toil only to heighten our ecstacy; and call to mind the tug and the din of war, only that, with a more bounding throb, and a richer song, we may feel and celebrate the wonders of redemption.

7. REV. J. F. BERG, D.D.

Go where we will, we find the sentiment that friendship is perpetuated beyond the grave. It is enshrined in the heart of our common Christianity. The pure unsophisticated belief of the vast majority of the followers of Christ is in union with the yearnings of natural affection, which follows its object through the portals of the grave into the eternal world. What but this causes the Christian parent, in the dying hour, to charge his beloved children to prepare for a reunion before the throne of the Lamb? He desires to meet them there, and to rejoice with them in the victory over sin and death. The widow, bending in bitter bereavement over the grave of him whom God has taken, meekly puts the cup of sorrow to her lips, with the assured confidence that the separation wrought by death is transient, and that they who sleep in Jesus shall together inherit the rest that remaineth for the people of God. Thus the wormwood and the gall are tempered by the sweet balm of hope, and heaven wins the attraction which earth has lost. Tell me, you who have seen the open tomb receive into its bosom the sacred trust committed to its keeping in hope of the first resurrection-you who have heard the sullen rumbling of the death-clods as they dropped upon