Life is Love, 186 Nemesis of Nations, 185 New Hymn-Book, 490 New Year's Message, 7 560 Principles and Objects of Human Love Mr. Joshua Smith, 605 and Duty, 361 Sins of England, 592 Sonnet, 544 Births. Mrs. A. Humbolt Sexton, 145 Marriages. Mr. James Bell to Miss Elizabeth Mr. Edgar William Brinsmead to Miss Mr. James Louis Nowlan to Miss Brisbane (Australia), 505 Broad Church, The, 189 Chalklen's Sermons on the Apocalypse, 94 Christianity in Business, 350 Church of England Clergy and "Par- Church of Rome, Claim on behalf of, London New Church Sunday-School London-Palace Gardens Church, 46 Mr. Mallock's Claim on behalf of the Manchester Printing and Tract Society, Manchester and Salford Missionary Meetings in Lancashire on Augmenta- Ministers' Conference (United States), Convocation of the Province of Canter- Missionary Operations in Scotland, 42 bury, 188 New Church (Paris), 90 Union Opinions, 187, 399 Pope, The, 138 Italy, 284 Prayer of Faith, 192 Kearsley, 356, 402 Preston, 507 Rao Bahadur Dadoba Pandurung, 504 Reception of the Doctrines from the Gratuitous Circulation of the Writ- Recreations, 549 London-Buttesland Street, 92, 196, 239 Resurrection of Christ, 37, 190 IN heaven, where there is no time, the angels live in the present, eternity being to them an image of what it is to the Eternal Himself, a perpetual now. How blessed the state in which there are no regrets for the past and no anxieties about the future! Yet this is the state which our Lord taught His disciples on earth to aspire and strive after, and which He Himself so perfectly exemplified in His holy life, as a pattern for them to imitate. They are not to turn or even look back desiringly, nor to look forward distrustingly. They are to remember Lot's wife, who perished by looking behind her, and are to consider the lilies of the field, and the fowls of the air, which neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet their heavenly Father clothes and feeds them. "Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (for after all these things do the Gentiles seek): for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow will take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." But although the angels live in the present, they have a perfect recollection of the past, and are not without anticipations of the A future. But what past and future can there be to those who know nothing of days and weeks and months and years? Although they know nothing of time, they know what corresponds to time, with its changes and successions: they know state, in which time on earth originated, and which produces even in heaven the appearance of time. There, time is the measure of state; here, state is, to a great extent, the measure of time. Life here has its beginning and its end. And while the allotted period of our sojourn in this world is given for the general purpose of preparing for another, the several stages of our natural life are each designed and adapted for making some particular acquisitions and forming some particular state, the combined virtue and power of which make up the entire, that is to say, the perfect man. The several successive stages of life,-infancy, childhood, youth, adolescence, manhood, old age,-have each their special use to perform, not only in the business of the present, but in that of the future life. The mind should grow with the body; the human child, like the child Jesus, should increase at once in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man. Every succeeding period of life should be a stage in spiritual as well as in natural progress; and each of these periods can best fulfil its conditions when the preceding periods have been rightly improved. Although, therefore, there is no time in heaven but that which is the measure of state, there is time on earth which has a fixed existence independent of the states of those who live in it and pass through it. It measures out the span of their existence, whether it be good or whether it be evil, and leaves them on the shore of eternity to reap as they have sown. Time, with its changes and progressions, although it neither creates nor measures our spiritual states, constantly reminds us of what our state should be, and gives us the opportunity of forming and improving it. "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge." "The changes of the day in the natural world,—morning, mid-day, evening, night, and the return of morning again,-represent the vicissitudes in the spiritual world, with this only difference, that the vicissitudes of the spiritual world flow in to the understanding and will, and present those things which belong to life; but the vicissitudes of the natural world flow into the things of the body and support them. The reason why such phenomena exist in the natural world is because the natural world exists from the spiritual world, and thence also subsists; hence it is that universal nature is a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom" (A. C. 6110). |