Page:The World Beyond.djvu/15

 look around upon creation, and observe that never yet has God implanted an instinct, for the gratification of which He has failed to provide the means; and of all our human instincts, not one is stronger than the hope of immortality.

We do not, therefore, argue the immortality of the soul here. We speak to all, indeed, but more especially at this time to those whose nature so feels its need as to realize it as a fact.

Revelation is replete with the idea of a heaven. From Genesis to the glowing record of the visions of John, it crops out here and there even in the most literal sense of holy Writ, brightening in beauty, growing in grandeur, developing in power, until in the Apocalypse it bursts forth in a mysterious glory which it bates the breath to listen to. We who have wept amid this world's woes until we have grown weary; we who have looked upon its crimes, its wars, its violence and disorders until the eyes have sickened with the sight; we who greet its misery and wretchedness at every corner, and have, in our own persons, known its disappointments, its sorrows and its vices; even we are called upon, in the glowing words of inspiration and the wonderful visions of men filled with the spirit of God, to lift our eyes from the kingdoms of earth to the kingdom of heaven.

The conditions of the Holy City New Jerusalem are the revealed conditions of heaven itself. For what descends from God out of heaven must reveal the absolute nature of that which exists in heaven. No tears are there, no sorrow, no crying, no night,