FullReads

Every one must have trembled when reading that passage in Isaiah, in which Hell is described as moved to meet Lucifer at his coming: there is not in human language anything more sublime in conception, more exquisite in expression; it has on it the light of the terrible crystal. But may we not reverse the scene? May we not imagine, when a great and good man–a son of the morning–enters on his rest, that Heaven would move itself to meet him at his coming? That it would stir up its dead, even all the chief ones of the earth, and that the kings of the nations would arise each one from his throne to welcome their brother? that those who saw him would “narrowly consider him,” and say, “is this he who moved nations, enlightened and bettered his fellows, and whom the great Taskmaster welcomes with ‘Well done!'”

We cannot help following him, whose loss we now mourn, into that region, and figuring to ourselves his great, childlike spirit, when that unspeakable scene bursts upon his view, when, as by some inward, instant sense, he is conscious of God–of the immediate presence of the All-seeing Unseen; when he beholds “His honorable, true, and only Son,” face to face, enshrined in “that glorious form, that light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze of majesty,” that brightness of His glory, that express image of His person; when he is admitted into the goodly fellowship of the apostles–the glorious company of the prophets–the noble army of martyrs–the general assembly of just men–and beholds with his loving eyes the myriads of “little ones,” outnumbering their elders as the dust of stars with which the galaxy is filled exceeds in multitude the hosts of heaven.

What a change! death the gate of life–a second birth, in the twinkling of an eye: this moment, weak, fearful, in the amazement of death; the next, strong, joyful,–at rest,–all things new! To adopt his own words: all his life, up to the last, “knocking at a door not yet opened, with an earnest indefinite longing,–his very soul breaking for the longing,–drinking of water, and thirsting again”–and then–suddenly and at once-a door opened into heaven, and the Master heard saying, “Come in, and come up hither!” drinking of the river of life, clear as crystal, of which if a man drink he will never thirst,–being filled with all the fulness of God!

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Dr. Chalmers was a ruler among men: this we know historically; this every man who came within his range felt at once. He was like Agamemnon, a native {anax andron}, and with all his homeliness of feature and deportment, and his perfect simplicity of expression, there was about him “that divinity that doth hedge a king.” You felt a power, in him, and going from him, drawing you to him in spite of yourself. He was in this respect a solar man, he drew after him his own firmament of planets. They, like all free agents, had their centrifugal forces acting ever towards an independent, solitary course, but the centripetal also was there, and they moved with and around their imperial sun,–gracefully or not, willingly or not, as the case might be, but there was no breaking loose: they again, in their own spheres of power, might have their attendant moons, but all were bound to the great massive luminary in the midst.

There is to us a continual mystery in this power of one man over another. We find it acting everywhere, with the simplicity, the ceaselessness, the energy of gravitation; and we may be permitted to speak of this influence as obeying similar conditions; it is proportioned to bulk–for we hold to the notion of a bigness in souls as well as bodies–one soul differing from another in quantity and momentum as well as in quality and force, and its intensity increases by nearness. There is much in what Jonathan Edwards says of one spiritual essence having more being than another, and in Dr. Chalmers’s question, “Is he a man of wecht?“