state in
eternity, will confess that he knows but "in part," and that a very small
part, concerning it. He endures as seeing that which is invisible, and
cherishes the hope that through Christ's redemption his eternity will
be a condition of peace and purity, and that he shall know even as also
he is known.

But it is not the Christian alone who is to enter eternity, and to whom
the exchange of worlds will bring a luminous apprehension of many things
that have hitherto been seen only through a glass darkly. Every human
creature may say, when he thinks of the alteration that will come over
his views of religious subjects upon entering another life, "Now
I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. I am now
in the midst of the vapors and smoke of this dim spot which men call
earth, but then shall I stand in the dazzling light of the face of God,
and labor under no doubt or delusion respecting my own character or that
of my Eternal Judge."

A moment's reflection will convince any one, that the article and fact of
death must of itself make a vast accession to the amount of a man's
knowledge, because death introduces him into an entirely new state of
existence. Foreign travel adds much to our stock of ideas, because we go
into regions of the earth of which we had previously known only by the
hearing of the ear. But the great and last journey that man takes carries
him over into a province of which no book, not even the Bible itself,
gives him any distinct cognition, as to the style of its scenery or the
texture of its objects. In respect to any earthly scene or experience,
all men stand upon substantially the same level of information, because
they all have substantially the same data for forming an estimate. Though
I may never have been in Italy, I yet know that the soil of Italy is a
part of the common crust of the globe, that the Apennines are like other
mountains which I have seen, that the Italian sunlight pours through the
pupil like any other sunlight, and that the Italian breezes fan the brow
like those of the sunny south the world over. I understand that the
general forms of human consciousness in Europe and Asia, are like those
in America. The operations of the five senses are the same in the Old
World that they are in the New. But what do I know of the surroundings
and experience of a man who has travelled from time into eternity? Am I
not completely baffled, the moment I attempt to construct t