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 Beautiful thought! We need not leave this earth to enter heaven. Heaven is within us. God's kingdom is right here. When we are heavenly minded, we carry it about with us. Wherever we go, wherever we stay, we are in heaven. It is part of us; it is inwoven into the very tissues of our being. Just as the summer blue is inwoven into the make-up of the sky, as the lovely light into the brilliancy of the morning, as beauty into the very existence of the flower, so heaven becomes the constituent organization of the soul. It is its life and beauty; it is its happiness and joy; it is its work and reward. It is ours wherever we are. It descends into the offices of the hands; it thrills the thoughts with nobler life; it loves through all our affections; it makes of us men, not beasts; and it glows with the living spirit of God.

Our Lord never spoke of heaven as something remote from us. But He often alluded to it as something that could be preached, something that could come nigh unto us, something within us. The idea of the external heavens has, in the grossly natural minds of men, taken the place of the thought evolved in the Word of God. That the ancients, in the belief that the sky was a solid brazen firmament, should have placed the abode of the immortals upon its upper surface, and have confounded the starry heavens of nature with the kingdom of heaven preached by Christ, is not to be wondered at. But that any at this day should make a mistake akin to that, is, indeed, surprising.

Let us reiterate it; let us repeat it again and