VI.
VERDICT OF REASON AND EXPERIENCE.
NOW is this doctrine respecting heaven, as thus far opened, true? Let us see,—and we will first examine it in the light of reason, common observation and human experience.
However people's ideas of heaven may differ in other respects, they all agree in this: that whoever goes there, will find great and enduring happiness. The Bible clearly warrants this belief. But in what does human happiness consist? What do reason, observation and experience teach on this point? Certainly that it does not consist in any outward appliances of which time and space are predicable. It is not those who are most comfortably lodged and luxuriously fed and royally apparelled, who are the happiest. By no means. True and enduring happiness is something which the wealth of the Indies cannot purchase. For it does not depend on the character or condition of things without, but on the character and condition of the world within us on the state of the soul. Locate people as you may, place them in the midst of the loveliest surroundings, supply them with all the elegances, comforts and luxuries that wealth can furnish—houses, furniture, equipage, books, friends, companions, all that the natural man craves—and you will not thereby make them happy. They may appear and even esteem themselves happy for a time; but it is only an external delight, a merely natural gratification which they experience, and which from
