very Sabbath-school child begins gradually to
understand, is not up among the stars; till, as he grows older, he takes
in the whole of the New Testament truth that the kingdom of heaven is
wholly within him. You all understand, my brethren, that were we swept
in a moment up to the furthest star, by all that infinite flight we would
not be one hair's-breadth nearer the heavenly city. That is not the
right direction to that city. The city whose builder and maker is God
lies in quite a different direction from that altogether; not by
ascending up beyond sun and moon and stars to all eternity would we ever
get one hand's-breadth nearer God. But if you deny yourself sleep to-
night till you have read His book and bowed your knees in His closet; if,
for His sake, you deny yourself to-morrow when you are eating and
drinking; as often as you say, "Not my will, but Thine be done"; as often
as you humble yourself when others exalt themselves; as often as you
refuse praise and despise blame for His sake; as often as you forgive
before God your enemy, and rejoice with your friend,--Behold! the kingdom
of heaven, with its King and all His shining court of angels and saints
is around you;--is, indeed, within you. No; there is no such place.
Heaven is not in any place: heaven is in a person where it is at all; and
you are that person as often as you put off an earthly and put on a
heavenly mind. That mocking reprobate, with his secret heart all through
those twenty years hungering after the lusts of his youth,--he was wholly
right in what he so unintentionally said; there is no such place in all
this world. And, even if there were, it would spue him and all who are
like him out of its mouth.

2. And, then, in all that universe of things that fills that bottomless
pit and shoreless sea the human heart, there is nothing deeper down in it
than just its deep and unsearchable atheism. The very deepest thing, and
the most absolutely inexpugnable thing, in every human heart is its
theism; its original and inextinguishable convictions about itself and
about God. But, all but as deep as that--for all around that, and all
over that, and soaking all through that--there lies a superincumbent mass
of sullen, brutish, malignant atheism. Nay, so deep down is the atheism
of all our hearts, that it is only one here and another there of the
holiest and the ripest of God's saints who ever get down to it, or even
get at their deepest within sig