children to prepare for a reunion before the throne of the Lamb? He desires to meet them there, and to rejoice with them in the victory over sin and death. The widow bending in bitter bereavement over the grave of him whom God has taken, meekly puts the cup of sorrow to her lips with the assured confidence that the separation wrought by death is transient, and that they who sleep in Jesus shall together inherit the rest that remaineth for the people of God. Thus the wormwood and the gall are tempered by the sweet balm of hope, and heaven wins the attractions earth has lost. Tell me, ye who have seen the open tomb receive into its bosom the sacred trust committed to its keeping, in hope of the first resurrection-ye who have heard the sullen. rumbling of the death-clods as they dropped upon the coffinlid, and told you that earth had gone back to earth—when the separation from the object of your love was realized in all the desolation of your bereavement, next to the thought that you should erelong see Christ as he is and be like him, was not that consolation the strongest which assured you that the departed one, whom God has put from you into darkness, will run to meet you when you cross the threshold of immortality, and, with the holy rapture to which the redeemed alone can give utterance, lead you to the exalted Savior, and with you bow at his feet and cast the conqueror's crown before him?" And is this hope vain? Shall we not even know those dear ones in the spirit-world? Was this light of hope that gilded so beautifully the sad, dark hour of human woe, only a mocking ignis fatuus, so soon to go out in everlasting darkness? Is this affection— so deep, so holy-yearning over its object with undying love to be nipped in the very bud of its being? Nay, it can not be. There must have been some higher purpose; God could not delight in the bestowal of affections that were to be blighted in their very beginning, and of hopes that were to end only in the mockery of eternal disappoint ment. "If fate unite the faithful but to part, Why is their memory sacred to the heart?" II. TEACHINGS OF REVELATION IN REGARD TO FUTURE RECOGNITION. In affirming that the Bible fully warrants the natural and reasonable hope of a recognition of friends in heaven, we do not mean that it is any where put into the precise formula of a proposition. Some of the most elementary truths of religion are passed by without any such formal statement; but they are constantly recognized in its general teachings, and, by obvious implication at least taught in many of its most striking recorded transactions. So it is with the doctrine of spiritual recognition. It is interwoven in the very texture of revelation and runs through the whole scope of its teachings. 1. The mental basis of recognition, namely, personal identity, consciousness, perception, and memory, are recognized as being retained in the future state. All this is implied in the song heard by St. John sung in heaven, "Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation." (Rev. v, 9.) No one could sing this song for himself without a remembrance of the redeeming love of the Savior, as it found him a lost and ruined sinner upon the earth, and made him a king and a priest unto God; and all this too from among a certain nation, people, tongue, and kindred. Nor could any one join with others in saying, "Thou hast redeemed us," without some recognition of each one of the great company as having been once, like themselves, possessed of definite place, and language, and kindred upon the earth. Then, again, in the narration of his sublime vision St. John tells us, "I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the Word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge. and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" (Rev. vi, 9, 10.) Here certainly were identity, and consciousness, and memory in strong and earnest exercise. There was not only a memory of blood that had been shed upon the earth, but a recognition of themselves as the identical persons whose blood had been shed, and superadded to all was a consciousness of unavenged wrong which they had suffered upon the earth. The same is also implied in that declaration of our Lord, "That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof at the day of judgment." (Matt. xii, 36.) For unless these deeds be remembered, and remembered too in their connection with our personal identity, how shall we render the account? Or, take, again, the language of St. Paul, "Every one of us shall give account of himself to God." (Rom. xiv, 12.) Here, too, it is implied that there is a memory, or at least a knowledge of the items of this account as being connected with our past history. But still more emphatic and impressive is that picture of the rich man and Lazarus. “The rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and SEETH ABRAHAM afar off, AND LAZARUS in his bosom." (Luke xvi, 22, 23.) Here, by some means, he perceived two individuals, and one he recognizes as the old patriarch-"the father of the faithful"-and the other the poor beggar who was once "laid at his gate." And then when he would fain importune for one drop of water, Abraham replies, "Son, remember." What a world of meaning in that word REMEMBER! It is not necessary to argue this question further. These points are not only conclusive as an argument, but they are also impressive for the moral lessons they teach. pa 2. Passages almost without number imply the personal recognition of friends in the future life. Among the passages of this kind may be reckoned that which describes the triarchs, and Moses and Aaron, and others, as being, in death, gathered unto their people. These expressions do not relate to their burial but to their dying; for the people of Abraham were buried in Ur of the Chaldees, while he was interred in a new burying-place. The union, then, was one of souls and not of bodies. So of Isaac; his burial by Esau and Jacob is described as taking place after he had been "gathered unto his people." And Jacob "was gathered unto his people" in Egypt, but afterward his body was carried up to Canaan and laid in the burying-ground of his fathers. Aaron was gathered unto his people "in Mount Hor, by the coast of the land of Edom," though it was far away from the place where any of his ancestors had been buried. And Moses upon Mount Nebo, after beholding the promised land, was gathered unto his people, though his body was buried amid the solitude of an unknown valley, and "no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day." (Deut. xxxiv, 6.) Nothing further can be needed to show that this being "gathered" does not refer to the place of burial, nor yet to the general fact of burial, but to being gathered among their people in the spirit-land. It finds its counterpart in that prayer of the Psalmist, "Gather not my soul with sinners; nor my life with bloody men." (Psa. xxvi, 9.) That is, according to Adam Clarke, "let not my eternal. lot be cast with them! may I never be doomed to spend an eternity with them!" Deliver me from their companionship and from their doom. David, when his child was dead, but the body, unburied, was still with him, said, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me." (2 Sam. xii, 23.) That is, our separation will be brief; though he may not come back from the spirit-land to me, I shall soon rejoin him there-rejoin him, too, as my son who went before! This is a common feeling and sentiment of Christian faith. It is evidently based upon the expectation of a recognition of the departed, as well as of a union with them. In one of his discourses (Matt. xii) our Savior rebukes the unbelief and wickedness of the generation to whom he preached, declaring that the men of Nineveh who repented at the preaching of Jonah, and the Queen of the South who came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, should rise up in the judgment and condemn it. Here it is clearly implied that the inhabitants of ancient Nineveh who were alive and heard the preaching of Jonah, and the Queen of the South who came to Solomon, and also the Jews who listened to the preaching of Christ yet repented not, will all be recognized in their individual characters, and their connection with the events brought in review be fully known. The case of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke xvi) is also to the point. And the fact that it is possibly a parable, does not militate against the force of its testimony, for even a parable can not teach any lesson or doctrine contrary to truth. Here is an unvailing of the future world, and at the same moment we catch a glimpse of heaven and of hell; but in both personal recognition is discovered and distinctly announced. Nor is it a personal recognition that is confined to those in its own sphere. Dives, looking |