pon earth, he certainly does not "know even as
also he is known," and he hastily concludes that so it will be beyond the
grave. It is because men imagine that eternity is only a very long space
of _time_, filled up, as time here is, with dim, indistinct
apprehensions, with a constantly shifting experience, with shallow
feelings and ever diversified emotions, in fine, with all the _variety_
of pleasure and pain, of ignorance and knowledge, that pertains to this
imperfect and probationary life,--it is because mankind thus conceive of
the final state, that it exerts no more influence over them. But such is
not its true idea. There is a marked difference between the present and
the future life, in respect to uniformity and clearness of knowledge.
"Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known." The
text and the whole teaching of the New Testament prove that the invisible
world is the unchangeable one; that there are no alterations of
character, and consequently no alternations of experience, in the future
life; that there are no transitions, as there are in this checkered scene
of earth, from happiness to unhappiness and back again. There is but one
uniform type of experience for an individual soul in eternity. That soul
is either uninterruptedly happy, or uninterruptedly miserable, because it
has either an uninterrupted sense of holiness, or an uninterrupted sense
of sin. He that is righteous is righteous still, and knows it
continually; and he that is filthy is filthy still, and knows it
incessantly. If we enter eternity as the redeemed of the Lord, we take
over the holy heart and spiritual affections of regeneration, and there
is no change but that of progression,--a change, consequently, only in
degree, but none of kind or type. The same knowledge and experience that
we have here "in part" we shall have there in completeness and
permanency. And the same will be true, if the heart be evil and the
affections inordinate and earthly. And all this, simply because the
mind's knowledge is clear, accurate, and constant. That which the
transgressor knows here of God and his own heart, but imperfectly, and
fitfully, and briefly, he shall know there perfectly, and constantly, and
everlastingly. The law of constant evolution, and the characteristic of
unvarying uniformity, will determine and fix the type of experience in
the evil as it does in the good.

Such, then, is the general nature of knowledge in the futur