The scope of the whole, then, is to contrast the transient with the permanent, in Christian experience.  If we firmly grasped the truth involved, our estimates would be rectified and our practice revolutionised.

I. I ask this question—­What will drop away?

Paul answers, ‘prophecies, tongues, knowledge.’  Now these three were all extraordinary gifts belonging to the present phase of the Christian life.  But inasmuch as these gifts were the heightening of natural capacities and faculties, it is perfectly legitimate to enlarge the declaration and to use these three words in their widest signification.  So understood, they come to this, that all our present modes of apprehension and of utterance are transient, and will be left behind.

‘Knowledge, it shall cease,’ and as the Apostle goes on to explain, in the verses which I have passed over for my present purpose, it shall cease because the perfect will absorb into itself the imperfect, as the inrushing tide will obliterate the little pools in the rocks on the seashore.  For another reason, the knowledge, the mode of apprehension belonging to the present, will pass—­because here it is indirect, and there it will be immediate.  ’We shall know face to face,’ which is what philosophers mean by intuition.  Here our knowledge ‘creeps from point to point,’ painfully amassing facts, and thence, with many hesitations and errors, groping its way towards principles and laws.  Here it is imperfect, with many a gap in the circumference; or like the thin red line on a map which shows the traveller’s route across a prairie, or like the spider’s thread in the telescope, stretched athwart the blazing disc of the sun—­’but then face to face.’  Incomplete knowledge shall be done away; and many of its objects will drop, and much of what makes the science of earth will be antiquated and effete.  What would the hand-loom weaver’s knowledge of how to throw his shuttle be worth in a weaving-shed with a thousand looms?  Just so much will the knowledges of earth be when we get yonder.

Modes of utterance will cease.  With new experiences will come new methods of communication.  As a man can speak, and a beast can only growl or bark, so a man in heaven, with new experiences, will have new methods of communication.  The comparison between that mode of utterance which we now have, and that which we shall then possess, will be like the difference between the old-fashioned semaphore, that used to wave about clumsy wooden arms in order to convey intelligence, and the telegraph.

Think, then, of a man going into that future life, and saying ’I knew more about Sanscrit than anybody that ever lived in Europe’; ’I sang sweet songs’; ’I was a past master in philology, grammars, and lexicons’; ‘I was a great orator.’  ‘Tongues shall cease’; and the modes of utterance that belonged to earth, and all that holds of them, will drop away, and be of no more use.

If these things are true, brethren, with regard even to the highest form of these high and noble things, how much more and more solemnly true are they with regard to the aims and objects which most of us have in view?  They will all drop away, and we shall be left, stripped of what, for most of us, has made the whole interest and activity of our lives.