or are mysteriously suspended upon nothing; where all the warm and sensible accompaniments, which give such an expression of strength and life and coloring to our present habitation, are attenuated into a sort of spiritual element, that is meagre and imperceptible and uninviting to the eye of mortals here below—where every vestige of materialism is done away."
Such is a picture of the Christian heaven drawn by a most learned and devout Christian minister! Contrast it with the true idea of heaven which even children, untutored by catechisms, glean intuitively from the express declarations of Scripture, the appearance of angels, and the recorded visions of prophets and apostles. Do not the simple-minded laity, also, unblinded by metaphysical sophistries, think of heaven as the children do, as a world of superlative grandeur and beauty, full of visible and audible and tangible realities, and inhabited by glorious beings in the human form, living in splendid mansions and clad in radiant garments, displaying, also, the tender sympathies of human love and all the noble activities of the human intellect?
"The holders of this imagination," continues Dr. Chalmers, in a deprecating manner, "forget all the
