1 J. G. Greenliough, The Doctrine of the Last Things, 234.
2 S. Harris, The Self-Bevelatim of God.
REVELATION xxi. i 295
earth, thus changed, will be the final home of the righteous is no new idea, but one which has been taught from the beginning by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Theodoret, Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, Luther, Adams, Wesley, Chalmers, and a host of others.^
4. God not only makes the new world, but gives the power to see and appreciate its beauty. God creates the paradise and catches up a St. Paul to hear unspeakable words — unspeakable for grandeur and infinite sweetness. We can soar into paradises of beauty only as we rise by means of the upbearing wings of infinite power and love. When a man enters the spirit sphere, he sees a new heaven and a new earth. When the earth child is born, the natural eye is dim, and the mind is sleeping. When the heaven child is born, the spiritual eye is quickened to see, the mind is awake to appreciate loveliness. A man like St. John, who had a clear eye for the great new conception that God is love, was the man to see a new heaven of love and a new earth of sweetness. He that dwelleth in love will see new worlds of love. Greatness is seen and appreciated by the great. New worlds of love must be seen and appreciated by the loving. There must be not only the beautiful, but also an eye and a mind for the beautiful. The apostle of love must see the vision of love. Pearls are trampled by swine. A new heaven and a new earth are not seen by eyes which are earthbound.
^ It was of the essence of Blake's sanity that he could always touch the sky with his finger. " To justify the soul's frequent joy in what cannot be defined to the intellectual part, or to calcula- tion " : that, which is Walt Whitman's definition of his own aim, defines Blake's. Where others doubted he knew; and he saw where others Igioked vaguely into the darkness. He saw so much further than others into what we call reality, that others doubted his report, not being able to check it for themselves ; and when he saw truth naked he did not turn aside his eyes. Nor had he the common notion of what truth is, or why it is to be regarded. He said : " When I tell a truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do." And his criterion of truth was the inward certainty of instinct or intuition, not the outward certainty of fact. "God forbid," he said, " that Truth should be confined to mathematical
* J. E. Watts-Ditchfield, Here and Hereafter^ 238.
296 A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH
demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is unworthy of her notice." ^
5. St. John saw a beautiful world ; but he looked beyond, and saw a new heaven and a new earth. What a difference in the exiles of time! Napoleon on St. Helena, fretting and fuming with disappointment, sees no bright visions. No heavens of beauty, no earths of glory pass before his enraptured gaze. St. John in Patmos makes the island glow with celestial colours. He dwells no longer in a lonely and forbidding island; he lives in a new earth adjacent to a new heaven. Columbus, after a long voyage, rejoiced to see the land birds of beautiful plumage that told of a new world near at hand. St. John, without moving from his island, saw not only the birds of beautiful plumage which sing of a new world, but also the new world itself ; he rejoiced to see a sight which men had never before witnessed. St. John's vision is resplendent with material and moral beauty. The bright vision is not darkened by the sad shades of sin, pain, sorrow, death. He saw a new world of marvellous creation, of inexhaust- ible loveliness. The new world was to be one in which there would be day without night, land without sea, summer without winter, pleasure without pain, smiles without tears, health without sickness, joy without sorrow, life without death, love without any alloy, without any tendency to decay.
^ The real question everywhere is whether the world, dis- tracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be, or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already. ... It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever be repaired and stand just as they stood before. The time has come when something more than mere repair and restoration of the old is necessary. The old must die and a new must come forth out of its tomb.^
6. But if the earth as it left the hands of its Maker was " very good," what need is there for a new earth ? There are some who tell us that the creation of the earth was a bad piece of bungling ; that a wise Creator would not have made " nature red in tooth