(Preached before Harrow School, September 30, 1866.)

REV. xxii. 4.

-"And they shall see His face, and His name shall be in their foreheads."

THIS verse is taken from the last chapter of the Bible, a chapter in some respects the most moving and beautiful of all. About it, as about the gates of Paradise, lingers a reflection from the hues of heaven, and a mysterious echo from angel songs. Its warnings fall with the solemnity of death and of judgment; its promises are unearthly in their images of peace. How unlike are all the promises of this book to anything which our own poor wishes could have framed. What should we have wished for, had we foreshadowed a heaven for ourselves? should we not have transplanted into it the passions and the selfishness of earth? Would not one have

striven to realise his sensual vision of pleasure, and another his base ideal of comfort, and another his wild tumult of ambition, and well nigh all some deification of their own vanities,-till heaven were no heaven at all, but only, like earth, a struggle of selfish atoms, a tangle of ravelled hopes? Not such is the heaven of which we catch faint glimpses in the Apocalypse of St John. The vows and wishes of the world, the aims and hopes of common souls, are absent there. No shadow stains the crystal waters of that river of life: no step that defileth can pass upon that glassy floor. Man in all the base attributes of his individuality has disappeared; God alone remaineth. The crown of life, the leaves that heal the nations, the hidden manna, the new name, the song that endeth not day or night about the rainbow-circled throne,-these blessings, and these not in differing degrees, not selfishly monopolised, not divided into lower or upper grades,—these are the blessings which the heart must recognise, which is calm enough and pure enough to enter upon that rest.

And of all the promises none is lovelier than this ;"There shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. And they

shall see His face, and His name shall be in their foreheads." Is it possible that such worms as we shall see the face of God? Even to imagine it, is to imagine ourselves lifted to infinite heights above our present degradation. For to see the face of God is to be in light. "Dark deeds are done in secret; drag them into the light, and they cannot stand it. A debased soul, brought into open daylight, and not rushing from it, is naturally purified; that which was darkness in the dark, becomes light in the daylight." Therefore to see God's face, is to be pure from every shame. And it is to be elevated above all earthliness.

A Russian em

press once built a palace of ice, and her guests danced and banqueted within its glimmering walls. But, when the sun shone, it vanished and melted into cold and dripping mud. Even so it is with the aims men toil for most. Death comes, and all they have longed for looks no better than a palace of icicles, which shone with opal colours under the moonbeam, but melts into hideous ruin before the light of God. Therefore to see God's face is to distinguish the real from the illusory, the true from the false. And it is to be at peace. For as the chaos became order and beauty under the wings of

the Spirit of God, and as the troubled waves of Galilee sank into calm beneath the Saviour's feet, so there can be no disquietude in His presence, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. And it is to live in love; for it is to have our tears wiped away by His hand who made the soul, and who alone can understand it, and who gives to it—even laden with its infirmities, but washed, and cleansed, and forgiven for its Saviour's sake-that which man is too poor and too proud to give, a divine tenderness, a ceaseless love. To attain to these blessings is a height of which we might well despair. Yet never let the present "solicit us with its easy indulgence to despair of that sweetest and noblest hope." By aiming at it we shall at last attain. So have I stood deep in an Alpine valley, and still wrapped in the cold and darkness far below, have seen the first sunbeam smite with its fierce splendour the highest mountain-top, and thought that it must be impossible by any toil to reach, from our dim, low region, that encrimsoned height;—and yet, as the sunrise leapt from peak to peak, and flowed and broadened in its golden streams down the mountain side, have climbed on and on with long toil, and under the full daylight have

mounted to that topmost crest of eternal snow, heaved high into the regions of blue air. So is it in the moral world. He who ever toils uphillward with his eye upon the summit,

"Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled,
Are close upon the shining table-lands

To which our God himself is moon and sun."

But is this a promise for the future only? Is it only the peaceful, the happy, the victorious dead, whose work is over while we toil on;— who have gained the shore while we are heaved up and down upon the labouring sea;-is it they alone who see God's face? is it not suffered us to see it even through the vapours of mortal life? Not fully, my brethren; only in part; only as through the dim reflection of a silver mirror-δι ̓ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι; only as Moses saw some gleaming of His robe, hid under the hollow of His hand in a cleft of the burning hill. And yet even thus to see God is our only chance, our only hope of happiness here. In thinking of any man's present or future, I ask not, is he rich? is he noble? is he strong? is he wise? do men praise him? do his plans succeed? is he unharassed by mean cares?' Many of whom all this is true, are the miserablest of men, and all the more miserable because they