Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/91

 Mark x. 14.) We have, then, the plain testimony of Scripture, that heaven or the kingdom of heaven is not without but within the soul. It cannot, therefore, be located. It cannot he said to be in any particular place, for it is in all heavenly-minded people wherever they may be. Therefore it must he a state of life. But does the Scripture tell us what is the nature of that state? And if so, how does its teaching tally with Swedenborg's?

And here the primitive meaning of the original Greek and Hebrew word for heaven, should first receive attention. The I Hebrew word for it is shâma-yim, which means the firmament, or the region of space above the earth. It comes from an obsolete root shâmâ, the meaning of which in the cognate Arabic language is, to be high or lifted up. And to this Arabic radical lexicographers refer the Hebrew term as denoting a high locality. The Greek ouranos which answers to the Hebrew shâma-yim, and is also translated by our English heaven, means the same as the Hebrew—the region above or the vast concave surrounding the earth. (See Schleusner's Greek and Latin Lexicon.) And most philologists derive it from the Greek orao, to see—as referring to the space above or around the earth, that is pervaded by the light of the sun.

Heaven, then, according to the literal meaning of the term in both the Hebrew and Greek, denotes an elevated place. And in the Bible it is said to be high, and to be located on high. Accordingly, it is common for little children to think and speak of heaven as a place up in the sky; for it is not to be expected that they should think otherwise than according to the sense of the let-