Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/356

 Church, and at the same time cherishing a hope that "light, more light" will come.

The new things of the New Jerusalem are to be objects of intellectual sight; men are invited to "behold" them. We cannot see that the Lord makes all things new without at the same time having some perception of the things themselves. The teachings of this divine dispensation, then, are offered to the rational thought and the philosophical reflection of the mind. Its truths, though eminently spiritual, must be capable of being intellectually seen, and of satisfying the profoundest inquiry. This is not the experience of its predecessor. For many centuries all her doctrines have been put forth as mysteries, which no learning could penetrate nor any ingenuity explain. The very attempt to resolve them has been forbidden as a presumption; they are to be believed, not to be comprehended. But in the New Jerusalem it will not be so: she is to have "the glory of God; and her light is to be like unto a stone most precious, even like a Jasper stone, clear as crystal." This light will consist in the perspicuity of her doctrines, and it needs no argument to show that this will be a new thing to the Church. If those doctrines are seen to be in harmony with a wise estimate of the Divine character, and if they are perceived to be enlightened expositions of the Holy Word, adapted to satisfy the demands of our rational nature; and specially if, in their application to life, they are capable of forming the characters of men in conformity with the virtues of Christianity; then, surely, they may be embraced as being among the "new things" which God has created for those purposes. For nothing that is good and true, coming to us with such evidences and capable of such results, can have had any other Maker