supposes that the views which he shall have upon religious subjects in
the eternal state, will be very much as they are in this,--vague,
indistinct, fluctuating, and therefore causing no very great anxiety. He
can pass days and weeks here in time without thinking of the claims of
God upon him, and he imagines that the same thing is possible in
eternity. While here upon earth, he certainly does not "know even as
also he is known," and he hastily concludes that so it will be beyond the
grave. It is because men imagine that eternity is only a very long space
of _time_, filled up, as time here is, with dim, indistinct
apprehensions, with a constantly shifting experience, with shallow
feelings and ever diversified emotions, in fine, with all the _variety_
of pleasure and pain, of ignorance and knowledge, that pertains to this
imperfect and probationary life,--it is because mankind thus conceive of
the final state, that it exerts no more influence over them. But such is
not its true idea. There is a marked difference between the present and
the future life, in respect to uniformity and clearness of knowledge.
"Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known." The
text and the whole teaching of the New Testament prove that the invisible
world is the unchangeable one; that there are no alterations of
character, and consequently no alternations of experience, in the future
life; that there are no transitions, as there are in this checkered scene
of earth, from happiness to unhappiness and back again. There is but one
uniform type of experience for an individual soul in eternity. That soul
is either uninterruptedly happy, or uninterruptedly miserable, because it
has either an uninterrupted sense of holiness, or an uninterrupted sense
of sin. He that is righteous is righteous still, and knows it
continually; and he that is filthy is filthy still, and knows it
incessantly. If we enter eternity as the redeemed of the Lord, we take
over the holy heart and spiritual affections of regeneration, and there
is no change but that of progression,--a change, consequently, only in