REVELATION xxi. i 301
am weary of these sweating-dens in old London; I am siek to death of looking for work day after day and finding none. I shall find a * new earth ' beyond the seas. I see pictures of men like myself who went out years ago, and they are new men to-day. I will go to the granary of the world, and I shall surely find bread ; I will go to the wide prairie, and I shall find space to breathe ; I will leave this old land where men tread on one another's heels, and I will find this new earth which covers one-third of the British Empire, and has only as yet seven million people, and I shall surely find there ' room to live.' " And with the new earth some- thing tells him that he may find a new heaven. It is hard to believe in God when the children cry for bread in London ; but when the earth becomes new the heaven becomes new. I have known many a man in East London give his soul a fresh chance on going even to a new district outside London. In breaking loose from the old associations and the bad habits of the past, many a man looks to Canada for a " new heaven." " Old things are passed away, all things are to become new " — he gives his soul another chance. The very sound of church bells has an attraction connected with home which they did not have in the old homeland, and, un- consciously to himself, he looks for a fresh glimpse of God and a new view of eternal truth more glorious than the first sight of the Kocky Mountains.^
10. It is objected that the new heaven and earth is only an idea. The vision is still only a vision. The heaven looms in the distance. "All things continue as they were" (2 Pet. iii. 4). Well, the ideal has been powerful. Many a Patmos has been cheered. Many an exile has been filled with gladness. We cannot afford to lose our ideals, though they may be only ideals. But they are something more. "Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness " (2 Pet. iii. 13). Our faith is not shaken by seeming delays. The vision still cheers in cheerless times, and strengthens in days of weakness, so that out of weakness men have been made sublimely strong. The cheerful notes of St. John's song have rung through the world with gladness to many hearts. The earth without a heaven would be as the Arctic winter. Let the sun shine, and it will- fertilize and gladden. Perpetual summer will reign, and all beauties and glories flourish.
1 Bishop Winnington-Ingram, in TJie Guardian, Sept. 23, 1910.
302 A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH
^ Well might St. John who " saw," look up and lift up his head; for however remote, his redemption, the general redemp- tion, was drawing nigh. Meanwhile the first heaven and the first earth make up our own present lot. Of those others God giveth us not as yet so much as to set our foot on, although He promises them to us for a possession. The temporary heaven and earth above, around, beneath us, import us now, supply now things convenient for us. These we are bound to use, and by no means to misuse or neglect. And though the things which are seen be but temporal, yet a work of the Great Creator is and cannot but be so great, that I suppose neither the profoundest and most illuminated saint, nor all saints summed up together, will have exhausted the teaching of things visible, even when the hour comes for them to give place to things invisible.^
T[ We heard the other day of a Baptist working man, esteemed by all who knew him for the purity and elevation of his character, who died of a painful disease. In his last moments his face became suddenly irradiated. "What is it you see," asked his wife. " It must be heaven," he replied, " I see angels, the most glorious, beautiful things." And with that light on his face he passed away. " Purely subjective, of course," says the critic ; " an affair of his theological prepossessions, an exhibition of his pre- existing mental furniture." Take it even at that lowest level, does it not suggest something ? That a soul, in a body dying of torturing pains, finds its last earthly moment a triumph scene of gladness, its vision fed with a sense of glorious beauty; is there not here an unspoken argument for the life of faith deeper than all our philosophy, more eloquent than all our eloquence ? ^
^ William Hazlitt said : " In the days of Jacob there was a ladder between heaven and earth ; but now the heavens are gone farther off and are become astronomical." That may be our first feeling; but no, in spite of our thought of the heavens having become astronomical, even in spite of disenchanting errors, the sensitive heart, bred in Christ's school, has its own skies and mystic influences.
And still the soul a far-off glory sees,
Strange music hears. A something, not of earth, still haunts the breeze.