world, or the mere ordinary religionist, is not a difference in mental operation, but in the object of the faith—­to believe that Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian faith.

The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from the anticipated heaven of any other man, not in the distinctness with which its imagery is perceived, but in the kind of objects which are hoped for.  The apostle has told us the character of heaven.  “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him”—­which glorious words are sometimes strangely misinterpreted, as if the apostle merely meant rhetorically to exalt the conception of the heavenly world, as of something beyond all power to imagine or to paint.  The apostle meant something infinitely deeper:  the heaven of God is not only that which “eye hath not seen,” but that which eye can never see; its glories are not of that kind at all which can ever stream in forms of beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the enraptured ear—­not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here called “the heart of man”) can invent or imagine:  it is something which these sensuous organs of ours never can appreciate—­bliss of another kind altogether, revealed to the spirit of man by the Spirit of God—­joys such as spirit alone can receive.

Do you ask what these are?  “The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.”  That is heaven, and therefore the Apostle tells us that he alone who “believeth that Jesus is the Christ,” and only he, feels that.  What is it to believe that Jesus is the Christ?—­That He is the Anointed One, that His life is the anointed life, the only blessed life, the blessed life divine for thirty years?—­Yes, but if so, the blessed Life still, continued throughout all eternity:  unless you believe that, you do not believe that Jesus is the Christ.

What is the blessedness that you expect?—­to have the joys of earth with the addition of the element of eternity?  Men think that heaven is to be a compensation for earthly loss:  the saints are earthly-wretched here, the children of this world are earthly-happy; but that, they think, shall be all reversed—­Lazarus, beyond the grave, shall have the purple and the fine linen, and the splendour, and the houses, and the lands which Dives had on earth:  the one had them for time, the other shall have them for eternity.  That is the heaven that men expect—­this earth sacrificed now, in order that it may be re-granted for ever.

Nor will this expectation be reversed except by a reversal of the nature.  None can anticipate such a heaven as God has revealed, except they that are born of the Spirit; therefore to believe that Jesus is the Christ, a man must be born of God.  You