concealed them in heaven, and recognising one another for the first time amidst the light on Tabor’s hill, did they then return into darkness again?  Oh, what is there in the whole Word of God,—­what argument derived from, our experience of the blessings of Christian fellowship,—­what in the character of God or His dealings with man,—­what in His promises of things to come laid up for those who love Him, that could have suggested such strange, unworthy, false, and dreary thoughts of the union, or rather disunion, of friends in their Father’s home!  Tell me not that special affection to Christian brethren, from whatever causes it may arise, is inconsistent with unfeigned love to all, and with absorbing love to Jesus.  It is not so here, and never can be so from the nature of holy love, and was not so in Christ’s own case when He the Perfect One lived amongst us.  With supreme love to God, “He loved His church and gave Himself for it;” with love to His church He yet loved the disciples as “His own;” while again within this circle one of these was specially the loved one; and beyond it “He loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus!” Tell me not that it is enough to know that our friends are in glory.  I know this now in regard to some of them, as surely as I know anything beyond the grave; yet my heart yearns to meet them “with the Lord,” and I bless Him that He permits me to comfort myself with the hope of doing so.  Nor let it be alleged as an insuperable objection to all this anticipated happiness, that knowledge of the saved would imply knowledge of the lost, and that this would balance the pleasure we hope for, by the great pain by which we, it is assumed, must thus be compelled to endure.  For even admitting that such knowledge would be possessed at all, which is very doubtful; yet surely, at the worst, this is a strange way of escaping pain from the knowledge that some are lost, by taking refuge in the ignorance of any being saved!  I shall not prove this further, but express my joy in heartily believing that we shall resume our intercourse with every Christian friend; that remembering all the past, and reading it for the first time aright, because reading in the full light of revealed truth, we shall know and love as we never knew and loved here; and shall sit down at that glorious intellectual, moral, and social feast, not with ideal persons and strangers, but with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Peter, Paul, and John, and with every saint of God!

But I have not as yet spoken of one friend there who will be the centre of that bright society—­“Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant!” “I will take you to Myself,” is the blessed promise.  “We shall see Him as He is,” is the longed-for-vision.  “We shall be like Him,” is the hoped-for perfection.  To know, to love, to be in all things like Jesus, and to hold communion with Him for ever—­what “an exceeding weight of glory!” Jesus will never be separated personally from His people; nor can they