APPENDIX.

In order to prove that there is nothing new in the main lines of thought in this volume, I append the following extracts from the writings of the most eminent divines of the past and the present time.

DR. CHALMERS writes:

"But while we attempt not to be wise above that which is written,' we should attempt, and that most studiously, to be wise up to that which is written. The disclosures are very few and very partial, which are given to us of that bright and beautiful economy which is to survive the ruins of our present one. But still there are such disclosures-and on the principle of the things that are revealed belonging to us, we have a right to walk up and down, for the purpose of observation, over the whole actual extent of them.

"We know historically that earth, that a solid, material, earth may form the dwelling of sinless creatures, in full converse and friendship with the Being who made them; that instead of a place of exile for outcasts, it may have a broad avenue of communication with the spiritual world, for the descent of ethereal beings from on high; that, like the members of an extended family, it may share in the regard and attention of the other members, and along with them be gladdened by the presence of him who is the Father of them all.

"To inquire how this can be were to attempt a wisdom beyond Scripture; but to assert that this has been, and therefore may be, is to keep most strictly and modestly within the limits of the record. For we there read, that God framed an apparatus of materialism, which, on his own surveying, he pronounced to be all very good, and the leading features of which may still be recognized, among the things and the substances that are around us and that he created man with the bodily organs and senses which we now wear-and placed him under the very canopy that is over our heads, and spread around him a scenery, perhaps lovelier in its tints, and more smiling and serene in the whole aspect of it, but certainly made up in the main of the same objects that still compose the prospects of our visible con

templations, and there working with his hands in a garden, and with trees on every side of him, and even with animals sporting at his feet, was this inhabitant of earth, in the midst of all those earthly and familiar accompaniments, in full possession of the best immunities of a citizen of heaven-sharing in the delight of angels, and while he gazed on the very beauties which we ourselves gaze upon, rejoicing in them most as the tokens of a present and presiding Deity. It were venturing on the region of conjecture to affirm, whether if Adam had not fallen, the earth that we now tread upon would have been the everlasting abode of him and his posterity. But certain it is, that man, at the first, had for his place this world, and, at the same time for his privilege, an unclouded friendship with God, and, for his prospect, an immortality which death was neither to intercept nor put an end to. He was terrestrial in respect of condition, and yet celestial in respect both of character and enjoyment.

"His eye looked outwardly on a landscape of earth, while his heart breathed upwardly in the love of heaven. And though he trod the solid platform of our world, and was compassed about with its horizon, still was he within the circle of God's favoured creation, and took his place among the freemen and the denizens of the great spiritual commonwealth.

"This may serve to rectify an imagination of which we think that all must be conscious, as if the grossness of materialism was only for those who had degenerated into the grossness of sin; and that, when a spiritualizing process had purged away all our corruption, then, by the stepping-stones of a death and a resurrection, we should be borne away to some ethereal region, where sense, and body, and all in the shape either of audible sound or of tangible substance, were unknown. And hence that strangeness of impression which is felt by you, should the supposition be offered, that in the place of eternal blessedness there will be ground to walk upon; or scenes of luxuriance to delight the corporeal senses; or the kindly intercourse of friends talking familiarly, and by articulate converse together; or, in short, anything that has the least resemblance to a local territory, filled with various accommodations, and peopled over its whole extent by creatures formed like ourselves, having bodies such as we now wear, and faculties of perception, and thought, and mutual communication, such as we now exercise. The common imagination that we have of Paradise on the other side of death is, that of a lofty aerial region, where the inmates float in ether, or are mysteriously suspended upon nothing; where all the warm and sensible accompaniments which give such an expression of strength, and life, and colouring to our present habitation, are attenuated into a sort of spiritual element that is meagre, and imperceptible, and utterly uninviting to the eye of mortals here below; where every vestige of materialism is done away, and nothing left but certain unearthly scenes that have

no power of allurement, and certain unearthly ecstacies with which it is felt impossible to sympathise. The holders of this imagination forget, all the while, that really there is no essential connection between materialism and sin; that, the world which we now inhabit had all the amplitude and solidity of its present materialism before sin entered into it; that God, so far, on that account, from looking slightly upon it, after it had received the last touch of his creating hand, reviewed the earth, and the waters, and the firmament, and all the green herbage, with the living creatures, and the man whom he had raised in dominion over them, and he saw everything that he had made, and behold it was all very good.

66

They forget that on the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that then the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.' They forget the appeals that are made everywhere in the Bible to this material workmanship; and how from the face of these visible heavens, and the garniture of this earth that we tread upon, the greatness and the goodness of God are reflected on the view of his worshippers. No, my brethren, the object of the administration we sit under is, to extirpate sin, but it is not to sweep away materialism. By the convulsions of the last day it may be shaken, and broken down from its present arrangements, and thrown into such fitful agitations as that the whole of its existing frame-work shall fall to pieces, and by a heat so fervent as to melt its most solid elements may be utterly dissolved. And thus may the earth again become without form and void, but without one particle of its substance going into annihilation. Out of the ruins of this second chaos, may another heaven and another earth be made to arise; and a new materialism, and other aspects of magnificence and beauty, emerge from the wreck of this mighty transformation; and the world be peopled as before with the varieties of material loveliness, and space be again lighted up into a firmament of material splendour.

"Were our place of everlasting blessedness so purely spiritual as it is commonly imagined, then the soul of man, after, at death, having quitted his body, would quit it conclusively.

"But a great step is gained simply by dissolving the alliance that exists in the minds of many between the two ideas of sin and materialism; or proving that, when once sin is done away, it consists with all we know of God's administration that materialism shall be perpetuated in the full bloom and vigour of immortality. It altogether holds out a warmer and more alluring picture of the elysium that awaits us, when told, that there will be beauty to delight the eye; and music to regale the ear; and the comfort that springs from all the charities of intercourse between man and man, holding converse as they do on earth, and gladdening each other with the benignant smiles that play on

the human countenance, or the accents of kindness that fall in soft and soothing melody from the human voice.

new

"There is much of the innocent and much of the inspiring, and much to affect and elevate the heart, in the scenes and the contemplations of materialism; and we do hail the information of our text, that, after the dissolution of its present frame-work, it will again be varied and decked out anew in all the graces of its unfading verdure and of its unbounded variety-that in addition to our direct and personal view of the Deity, when he comes down to tabernacle with men, we shall also have the reflection of him in a lovely mirror of his own workmanship; and that, instead of being transported to some abode of dimness and of mystery, so remote from human experience as to be beyond all comprehension, we shall walk for ever in a land replenished with those sensible delights, and those sensible glories, which, we doubt not, will lie most profusely scattered over the heavens, and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.' "But though a paradise of sense, it will not be a paradise of sensuality. Though not so unlike the present world as many apprehend it, there will be one point of total dissimilarity betwixt them. It is not the entire substitution of spirit for matter that will distinguish the future economy from the present. But it will be the entire substitution of righteousness for sin. It is this which signalizes the Christian from the Mahometan paradise; not that sense and substance, and splendid imagery, and the glories of a visible creation seen with bodily eyes, are excluded from it, but that all which is vile in principle, or voluptuous in impurity, will be utterly excluded from it. There will be a firm earth, as we have at present, and a heaven stretched over it, as we have at present; and it is not by the absence of these, but by the absence of sin, that the abodes of immortality will be characterized. There will both be heavens and earth, it would appear, in the next great administration, and with this speciality to mark it from the present one, that it will be a heavens and earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.""

JOHN WESLEY writes:

"Let us next take a view of those changes which we may reasonably suppose will then take place in the earth. It will no more be bound up with intense cold, nor parched up with extreme heat; but will have such a temperature as will be most conducive to its fruitfulness. If, in order to punish its inhabitants, God did of old

'Bid his angels turn askance
This oblique globe '-

thereby occasioning violent cold on one part and violent heat on the other; he will, undoubtedly, then order them to restore it to its original position; so that there will be a final end, on the

one hand, of the burning heat, which makes some parts of it scarce habitable, and on the other, of

'The rago of Arctos and eternal frost.'

And it will then contain no jarring or destructive principles within its own bosom. It will no more have any of those violent convulsions in its own bowels. It will no more be shaken or torn asunder by the impetuous force of earthquakes; and will, therefore, need neither Vesuvius nor Etna, nor any burning mountain to prevent them. There will be no more horrid rocks, or frightful precipices; no wild deserts, or burning sands; no impassable morasses, or unfruitful bogs, to swallow up the unwary traveller. There will, doubtless, be inequalities on the surface of the earth; which are not blemishes, but beauties. And though I will not affirm that

Earth has this variety from heaven,

Of pleasure situate in hill and dale;'

yet I cannot think gently-rising hills will be any defect, but an ornament of the new made earth. And doubtless we shall then likewise have occasion to say

Lo! there his wondrous skill arrays

The fields in cheerful green;
A thousand herbs his hand displays,
A thousand flowers between!'

And what will the general produce of the earth be? Not thorns, briars, or thistles; nor any useless or fetid weed; nor any poisonous, hurtful, or unpleasant plant; but every one that can be conducive, in anywise, either to our use or pleasure. How far beyond all that the most lively imagination is now able to conceive! We shall no more regret the loss of the terrestrial paradise, or sigh at that well-devised description of our great poet:

Then shall this mount

Of paradise, by might of waves be moved
Out of his place, push'd by the horned flood,
With all its verdure spoil'd and trees adrift,
Down the great river to the opening gulf,
And there take root, an island salt and bare!'

For all the earth shall be a more beautiful paradise than Adam

ever saw.

"Such will be the state of the new earth with regard to the meaner, the inanimate parts of it. But, great as this change will be, it is nothing in comparison of that which will then take place throughout all animated nature.

"In the living part of the creation were seen the most deplorable effects of Adam's apostacy. The whole animated creation,