But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,
That to decline, And thrust a Testament into thy hand:
Let that be scann'd. There thou shalt finde my faults are thine.*
1 Church Pulpit Year Book, 1913, p. 245. * George Herbert, The Temxjle.
A New Heaven and a New Earth.
REV. — 19
Literature.
Banks (L. A.), Hidden Wells of Gomforty 249. Bonar (H.), Light and Truth : The Revelation, 323. Cairns (D. S.), Christianity in the Modern Worlds 220. Cuckson (J.), Faith and Fellowship, 45. Gibson (E. C. S.), The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 237. Hanson (H. H.), Notes of My Ministry, 4*7. Hiley (R. W.), A Year's Sermons, i. 85. Hort (F. J. A.), Cambridge and Other Sermons, 39. Hughes (H. P.), Ethical Christianity, 73. Jeffs (H.), The Art of Exposition, 127. Lockyer (T. F.), The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 244. Milligan (W.), The Booh of Revelation (Expositor's Bible), 361. Molyneux (C), The World to Come, 86. Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 159. Swing (D.), Sermons, 181.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), x. (1873), No. 820. Watkinson (W. L.), The Blind Spot, 182. Watts-Ditchfield (J. E.), Here and Hereafter, 236. Cambridge Review, iii.. Supplement No. 57 (J. Foxley). Christian World Pulpit, xxxii. 73 (P. W. Darnton) ; xliv, 401 (A. H. Bradford) ; liii. 393 (W. L. Watkinson) ; Ixi. 409 (A. M. Fairbairn) ; Ixxii. 292 (B. S. Lloyd) ; Ixxvi. 405 (H. Jeflfs) ; Ixxvii. 104 (H. S. Holland) ; Ixxxi. 211 (W. R. Yates).
Church of England Pulpit, Ixii. 120 (B. L. Jackson) ; Ixiii. 14 (B. S. Lloyd).
Church of Ireland Gazette, Feb. 11, 1910 (T. A. Beckett).
Church Times, Feb. 4, 1910 (H. S. Holland).
Clergyman^s Magazine, 3rd Ser., xiii. 11 (W. Burrows).
Expositor and Current Anecdotes, xv. (1914) 407 (M. Alexander),
Guardian, Ixv. (1910) 1277 (A. F. W. Ingram).
Sunday Magazine, 1892, p. 588 (J. M. Gibson).
A New Heaven and a New Earth.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth ; for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away.— Rev. xxi. x.
The Book of Kevelation is the " Divina Commedia " of Scripture, alive with moral passion, alight with noble imagination, a fitting climax to the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, and doubly in- teresting to our own time from the fact that it is the expression of a revolt against a worn-out world-order, a civilization of custom, armament, and law alien to the genius of the new Faith, and of aspiration after a Divine Environment, which shall be great enough to contain the " nations of them that are saved," and noble enough to be in harmony with " the life hid with Christ in God."
In this chapter the writer is drawing to the close of his task. He has described fully the unseen enemies which threatened the life of the Church in his own days, and which threaten it still, and he has traced to their true source the evils which beset her. He has further shown how in the end Christ vindicates His cause, and triumphs over the powers of evil, whose downfall and final doom have been disclosed. But though he has thus set forth the victory of the Church, he has said but little of her future, or of the character of her life. He has briefly alluded to these things, but that is all. He now therefore goes back, and closes the series of visions with a description of the bliss which is laid up for the faithful.
1. The belief in a happier age, a peaceful earth, a gracious and bountiful heaven, and a strong race of immortals, is as old and as common as man. The ancient Greeks knew it. Hesiod describes how the gods who dwelt on Olympus made a golden race of speaking men. They lived in careless felicity, free from the labours, sorrows, tribulations of men, fed by a bountiful earth
292 A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH
which of its own sweet will blossomed into plenty, ever delighting in festivals ; and when death came it came to them as it comes to those overtaken with sleep. But that golden age was in the past ; the present, and, so far as they saw, the future, was an iron age. The men who lived in it knew no joy, but had the " sorrow's crown of sorrow," which is " remembering happier things." They toiled, fretted ; corrosive care claimed them for its own ; and they anticipated a miserable old age and a painful death. Neighbour robbed neighbour; city sacked city; parents grew old and lost their honour ; men who were evil were more respected than men who were good; malice, envy, with its millionfold tongue of poison, exulted in ills, and turned on all pitiful mortals its pitiless and baleful glance. The golden age was past ; the iron age had come ; the men who lived in it lived far from those happinesses which speak of toil rewarded, hope realized, and joy attained. That is the language of Nature, not of grace. Nature looks back, sees there the happiness, a thing lost and irrecoverable. Grace looks before, sees there the joy, and anticipates by labour the moment of its coming.
^ Every religious enthusiast and reformer from St. Paul to John Wesley has been fired with a devout imagination. They were each and all filled with some vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and were happy only so far as they were permitted to pursue it unmolested. And if there is one lesson more than another which history has to teach, it is this, that without the vision there is no progress, and without fidelity to unrealized ideals there can be no solid advancement in any department of life. . . . And so, looking for a new heaven and a new earth simply means that we are for ever exchanging the rule of the sensuous for the rule of the spiritual, and that we are seeking our motives for conduct and character in the absolute gospel of Jesus Christ, and not in any of the commonplace maxims of self- indulgence or earthly expediency.^