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few, considering the instrumentality employed. The children are come to the birth, but there is not strength to bring forth. We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind! we have not wrought deliverance in the earth, neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen. 1 We have not the Spirit, because we ask not, or at least, ask not, as we ought to ask. We are not straitened in GOD, but in our own bowels. We have not sufficiently high thoughts of the Spirit, and thus we do not sufficiently desire him. Great desires would produce great supplications and prayers; which have uniformly been the harbingers of religious revivals. This was particularly evinced in the recent awakenings on the Western Continent.? It has been observed,' says Dr. M'Crie, that when God intends any deliverance to his church, or revival of the interests of religion, he excites his saints to pray for it.'

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Let all then, who love their fellow-men; who regard their obligations to their Redeemer, who value their own consistency and their own peace conscience; who desire to see God glorified, and man emancipated from the worst, the most terrific, and the most extensive of all despotisms, unite in prayer and never cease, until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high. Ye that make mention of the LORD, or, that are the LORD's remembrancers, to remind him of his promises, keep not silence, and

1 Isaiah xxvi. 18. 2 See Dr. SPRAGUE'S Work, and Note XXIV.

give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Plead with him in the impassioned invocation of the prophet, "Oh! that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence. For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what thou hast prepared for him that waiteth for thee." 1

'Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O prince of the kings of the earth; put on the visible robes of thine imperial majesty; take up that unlimited sceptre which thy Almighty Father hath bequeathed thee; for now the voice of thy bride calls thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed.'2

1 Isaiah lxiv. 1-4.

2 Milton.-This is to be your prayer and mine to the day of death; we are to give him no rest, he desires none. Here is our encouragement to prayer. He and he only is pleased with ceaseless importunity.'-Rev. Wm. HowEls.

LECTURE VIII.

HEAVEN.

"There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.-HEB. iv. 9.

THIS series of papers would be exceedingly imperfect, were all mention omitted in them, among other topics of comfort, of the last and most felicitous of all-HEAVEN. However glorious and delightful the millennial state may be, still it will not be the highest reach of the church's glory; 1 as indeed is proved by its limited duration. It is to be succeeded by the loosing of Satan, the general judgment, and the celestial state." shall as much transcend the millennium, as that will any sublunary order of things since the fall. For God never takes from his church one degree of blessedness, but to replace it by a greater. She goes from glory to glory: her light shineth more and more unto the perfect day. All the people of God shall not be on earth during the blessed thousand years: therefore, the church, without

1 Note XXV.

2 Rev. xx. 7-15. xxi. 1.

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these, shall not be perfect. Her members, and consequently her happiness, will be incomplete until all shall be "gathered together in CHRIST," and united with the angels in one exulting and harmonious family, in the kingdom of their father.1 The Christian even now, has an incipient heaven in grace; for grace is the germ of glory. ‹ We, which have believed, do enter into rest."2 The believer hath passed from death unto life is delivered from the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son. But the greatest enjoyment he experiences here, is but a sprinkling, but a drop compared with that boundless and bottomless ocean of joy, which awaits him hereafter. God hath reserved some better things for him. There is a glory to be revealed: there remaineth a rest for the people of God.

The happiness of heaven will be of two kindsnegative and positive: the former including freedom from all evil; the latter the possession of all good. Let us consider, first, its negative happiness. It has been well remarked, that we know more of heaven by what it is not, than by what it is. There will then be,

1. A total and eternal exemption from all corporeal suffering. How frequently is the Christian afflicted here with weariness of body and exhaustion of spirits. As an old divine quaintly observes the soul pays now a dear rent for the

1 Ephes. i. 10.

2 Heb. iv. 3.

tabernacle in which it dwells.'1 "The spirit is ready, but the flesh is weak." His present body is one of humiliation: a vile body, subject to a thousand pains, maladies, and infirmities. But we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." At death, the disembodied soul shall drop as a clog this covering of corruption, and ascend into a region, where they who are saved are made equal to the angels. Moreover, the believer's tody shall one day likewise be glorified, and contribute to complete his blessedness. "If Christ be in you, the body is dead, because of sin; but the Spirit is life, because of righteousness," (the righteousness of the Redeemer.) But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead, shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you."

"3

Even as the bulbous plant, revived by genial suns and rains, -the body of the believer, when the fleeting season of his sublunary existence is concluded, declines to its original dust, there to await that eternal spring, when, resuscitated in a new and nobler form, and brightened with imperishable beauty, it shall bloom in the Paradise of God. The word shall be issued-" Awake

1 FLAVEL.

2

σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως. Phil. iii. 21.

3 Rom: viii. 11.

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