n is held is 'Be it unto thee even as thou wilt,' and in both the
law holds 'To him that hath shall be given.'

II. The Fatherly preparation for the Inheritance.

It is obvious from all which we have been saying that without holiness
no man shall see the Lord. The inheritance being what it is, the
possession, the enjoyment of communion with a Holy God, it is absolutely
incapable of being entered upon by any who are unholy. That is true
about both the partial possession of the earnest of it here and of its
fulness hereafter. In the present life all tolerated sin bars us out
from enjoying God, and in the future nothing can enter that defileth nor
whatsoever worketh or maketh a lie. There are many people who think that
they would like 'to go to heaven,' but who would find it difficult to
answer such questions as these: Do you like to think of God? Do you find
any joy in holy thoughts? What do you feel about prayer? Does the name
of Christ make your heart leap? Is righteousness your passion? If you
have to answer these questions with a silence which is the saddest
negative, what do you think you would do in heaven? I remember that the
Greenlanders told the Moravian missionaries who were trying to move them
by conventional pictures of its delights, that the heaven which these
pious souls had painted would not do for them, for there were no seals
there. There are thousands of us who, if we spoke the truth, would say
the same thing, with the necessary variations arising from our
environment. There is not a spinning-mill in it all. How would some of
us like that? There is not a ledger, nor a theatre, no novels, no
amusements. Would it not be intolerable ennui to be put down in such an
order of things? You would be like the Israelites, loathing 'this light
bread' and hungering for the strong-smelling and savoury-tasting leeks
and garlic, even if in order to taste them you had to be slaves again.

Heaven would be no heaven to you if you could go there and be thus
minded. But you could not. God Himself cannot carry men thither but by
fitting them for it. It is not a place so much as a state, and the
mighty hand that works on one side of the thick curtain preparing the
inheritance in light for the saints, is equally busy on this side making
the saints meet for the inheritance.

I do not wish to enter here on grammatical niceties, but I must point
out that the form of the word which the Apostle employs to express it
points to an