Now, brethren, it seems to me to be of great importance that this, the loftiest of conceptions of that future life, should be the main aspect under which we think of it.  It is well to speak of rest from toil; it is well to speak of all the negations of present unfavourable, afflictive conditions which that future presents to us.  And perhaps there is none of the aspects of it which appeals to deeper feelings in ourselves, than those which say ’there shall be no night there,’ ’there shall be no tears there, neither sorrow nor sighing’; ‘there shall be no toil there.’  But we must rise above all that, for our heaven is to live in God, and to be possessors of His glory.  Do not let us dwell upon the symbols instead of the realities.  Do not let us dwell only on the oppositions and contradictions to earth.  Let us rather rise high above symbols, high above negations, to the positive truth, and not contented with saying ’We shall be full of blessedness; we shall be full of purity; we shall be full of knowledge,’ let us rather think of that which embraces them all—­we shall be full of God.

So much, then, for the one object of Christian hope.  We have here—­

II.  The double source of that hope.

Observe that the first clause of my text comes as the last term in a sequence.  It began with ‘being justified by faith.’  The second round of the ladder was, ‘we have peace with God.’  The third, ’we have access into this grace.’  The fourth, ‘we stand,’ and then comes, ’we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.’  That is to say, to put it into general words, and, of course, presupposing the revelation in Jesus Christ as the basis of all, without which there is no assured hope of a future beyond the grave, then the facts of a Christian man’s life are for him the best brighteners of the hope beyond.  Of course, that is so.  ‘Justified by faith’—­’peace with God’—­’access into grace’; what, in the name of common-sense, can death do with these things?  How can its blunted sword cut the bond that unites a soul that has had such experiences as these with the source of them all?  Nothing can be more grotesque, nothing more incongruous, than to think that that subordinate and accidental fact, whose region is the physical, has anything whatever to do with this higher region of consciousness.

And, further than that, it is absolutely unthinkable to a man in the possession of these spiritual gifts, that they should ever come to a close; and the fact that in the precise degree in which we realise as our very own possession, here and now, these Christian emotions and blessings, we instinctively rise to the belief that they are ’not for an age, but for all time,’ and not for all time, but for eternity, is itself, if not a proof, yet a very strong presumption, if you believe in God, that a man who thus ‘feels he was not made to die’ because he has grasped the Eternal, is right in so feeling.  If, too, we look at the experiences themselves, they all have