eyond the
blue waters is another community, of which we are really members, and
sometimes in calm weather we can see, if we climb to a height above the
smoke of the valley where we dwell, the faint outline of the mountains
of that other land, lying bathed in sunlight and dreamlike on the opal
waves.

Therefore it is a great part of Christian discipline to keep a vivid
consciousness that there is such an unseen order of things at present in
existence. We speak popularly of 'the future life,' and are apt to
forget that it is also the _present_ life to an innumerable company. In
fact, this film of an earthly life floats in that greater sphere which
is all around it, above, beneath, touching it at every point.

It is, as Peter says, 'ready to be unveiled.' Yes, behind the thin
curtain, through which stray beams of the brightness sometimes shoot,
that other order stands, close to us, parted from us by a most slender
division, only a woven veil, no great gulf or iron barrier. And before
long His hand will draw it back, rattling with its rings as it is put
aside, and _there_ will blaze out what has always been, though we saw it
not. It is so close, so real, so bright, so solemn, that it is worth
while to try to feel its nearness; and we are so purblind, and such
foolish slaves of mere sense, shaping our lives on the legal maxim that
things which are non-apparent must be treated as non-existent, that it
needs a constant effort not to lose the feeling altogether.

There is a present connection between all Christian men and that
heavenly City. It not merely exists, but we belong to it in the measure
in which we are Christians. All these figurative expressions about our
citizenship being in heaven and the like, rest on the simple fact that
the life of Christian men on earth and in heaven is fundamentally the
same. The principles which guide, the motives which sway, the tastes and
desires, affections and impulses, the objects and aims, are
substantially one. A Christian man's true affinities are with the things
not seen, and with the persons there, however his surface relationship
knit him to the earth. In the degree in which he is a Christian, he is a
stranger here and a native of the heavens. That great City is, like some
of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the
metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As
the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth t