This

There is another kind of vision such as Paul mentioned to Aggrippa namely, "the heavenly vision." consists of a state of mind in which earthly cares are forgotten and in which only the holy and the spiritually delightful is thought of or remembered. It is a condition of life into which says Milton "Our heavenly guidedsouls shall climb." When we are enraptured by pure thoughts and our hearts are filled with holy aspirations we have the true " Heavenly vision."

The difference between the earthly and the heavenly vision, consists largely if not entirely, in that upon which the mind or soul is focused. In the former the rays of light meet on worldly affairs, those which are temporary and fleeting; while in the latter the focus is on the things of God, those that are eternal.

We set our hearts on purity, no matter how sinful a soul may be there are occasions when it looks upward, when it beholds the blessed angel Purity, in all her glory. For the moment the sinner leaves his sin and looks toward God. The soul is focused in a new way-blessed moment! It is a heavenly vision.

The prodigal may see God's commands in a new way. He wanders in by and forbidden paths, but at length he is brought to self examination and to repentance. In analyzing his life he thinks of God and his laws. He sees himself in his sin and beholds the Divine Majesty requiring obedience. Another blessed moment! God's law is the focus for his soul, and it is therefore,, a heavenly

vision.

When we turn back to the historic vision--that of Paul-we find that it was a view of Christ. He afterward said, "and lastly, he appeared unto me, as one born out of due time." His was a heavenly vision because

Christ was its' centre and its' circumference.

So it is when we think of purity and obedience. We can find these and other virtues beside, in the man of Nazareth. And persons who would have heavenly visions should focus their spiritual gaze upon him. If we perceive him clearly, we shall behold God's life in man perfectly manifest. And the visions are, indeed, heavenly when Jesus the Christ becomes their central figure.

This all means that when the spirit in man asserts itself and rises up to its true dignity; when it takes possession of the individual and lifts him out of worldliness, discouragement and despondency; when it becomes master instead of servant in his life; when the spirit does these things temporarily or permanently, then it is that a man has a heavenly

vision.

But such views of spirit are not ours merely for their own sake. They come to us that they may make us better. We have them that a new motive may be aroused within us, and that thereby we may be led to live in harmony with what the vision discloses to us. This was true of Paul, of Stephen and of others. It should be so of us. If we are not disobedient to our heavenly visions, we shall be benefited and God will be glorified. Let us be willing servants!

REV. C. S. NICKERSON.

The following extract which we take from an article in the Uniturian Review, of 1884, by Rev. William R. Alger, is worthy of careful consideration. He says:

"The first genuine key of heaven is the normal action of our physical senses. Startling as this statement may seem, its abundant justification is easy.

It is always more satisfactory to embrace the subject-matter of a theme by a series of inclusions than to analyze it away by a series of exelusions. What is not can never be so important to us as what is; and, though most persons like better to be stimulated with familiar thoughts than to be nourished with new ones, it is obviously not so good for them. It is a far greater achievement to bring the mind into assimilative contact with divine realities than to bring into exciting contact with empty traditions and verbal abstractions. In accordance with this principle, we say, then, that the prime key of heaven is a healthy condition and action of the seven physical senses with which we are endowed. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, the muscular sense of degrees foresistance, and the thermal sense of degrees of heat, are the first vehicles of the divine to man, the initial revelatory reports of infinite being te finite being. They open to us the outermost circuit of existence, and enable us to perceive and enjoy so much of God as is there eommunicated. Tree and cloud, meadow and lake, rainbow, mountain, star, breeze, bird, beast, and our fellow-men-the senses setting us in a relation of action and reaction with these charming and wondrous realities, these shapes, colors, sounds, and motions, that appear as intelligible signals of an impenetrable Mystery behind all -all our earliest introduction into that world of fact and consciousness

which, when poised in equable health and energy, is a pure manifestation of the will of the Divinity, the first department in the universal kingdom of heaven. The material universe is the ultimation of the spiritual universe; and we must learn to regard its order, its laws, its beauty and harmony, as the extreme manifestations of its Maker, direct echoes of his thought and will appealing to our senses.

Beyond this sensational region, this interplay of the forms and qualities of material objects with our perceptions and feelings, the second key, admitting us yet further into the secrets of creation, that animated and revealing screen of God, is Knowledge. By knowledge is here meant a rational arrangement and interpretation of the objects and processes crudely grasped by the senses. Scientific study, by an induction of many particulars, arrives at certain generalizations, spreads out in thought the method and system of the things with which it deals. Its votary passes with intellectual joy below the shows of objects into the regulative plan and laws in which they have their meaning. The botanist, in the structural marvels of flowers and plants; the astronomer, in the transcendent truths and adjustments of the stellar universe; the mathematician, in the amazing revelations and transformations of numbers; the geologist, in the autobiographic annals of the earth; the chemist, in the proportional forces that organize and dissolve bodies; the historian, in the wondrous panorama of humanity and its past fortunes,-each, through his special acquirements, gains admission to a realm of order, a scene of intelligent design, which yields. him a mental delight unknown to the ignorant observers of the mere outward appearances.

And, then, creative imagination

and feeling, or the poetic action of the soul, is the third key opening to our wonder-struck and enraptured minds a new province of the kingdom of heaven, the realm of art.

This is a region clothed with more dazzling colors, enriched with loftier and serener joys, than are to be experienced in either of the previous domains. The profound and ardent sensibility to symmetry and rhythm which marks the temperament of genius wraps it in elysium at every perception of beauty. The gift of impassioned ideality is a power to group and associate dissevered charms and glories, remove present ugliness far away and bring absent loveliness near, impart consciousness to inanimate objects, shed supernal light on earthly pictures, and make all the ranges of visible and invisible, of real and fanciful, actual parts of our experience. This gift unlocks for its possessor an empire of inexpressible magnificence, and bestows on him the freedom of its prospects and its pleasures.

Advancing still deeper into heaven, the key that commands the next compartment of its experience is love. Love, adequately understood, is that rich personal loyalty to the true, the beautiful, and the good, which inspires its subject with overflowing confidence of bliss, and steeps everything around in its own magic hues and delicious feelings. Love is an overpowering fixed sentiment, generated by enchanting fixed ideas. When our ideas of persons and things are arrayed with authoritative charms, they create in us a complex state of admiration, trust, sympathy, and spiritual fruition, which enhances the capacities and intensifies the pitch of our being, and radiates splendor and joy over all things. Before the spell of this power, the cold, repulsive caseworks of life fly

open, and reveal the benignant mysteries of sympathy within, a unity of blessedness for all,-yea, reveal God.. Friendliness then displaces fear and hate. Hideous sacrifices become dazzling privileges.

Go among men or into nature through the door opened by the key of love, and all becomes new. You find yourself breathing and feeling in vital harmony with all. What were to the sense-bound or merely speculative intellect distant and spectral pictures, iey dreams of beauty, draw near, and begin to throb and bloom. Love, dominating the soul with the authority and joy of moral ideas, transfuses knowledge with pleasure, converts frigid contemplation into rapture, and thus introduces us into a heaven far keener and profounder than the successive forecourts of being or outer ranges of blessed experience that surround it.

The final key, the master key, at whose touch all bolts barring us from any province of heaven quickly yield, is self-renunciation. The harmonized. will which resists not, murmurs not, pines, not, but blends itself with that Divine Will whose expression is the universal order,-this is the pass-key through every labyrinth of destiny, every frowning gate of fortune, every golden chamber of experience. The subdual of selfish desire, the acceptance as divine of whatever comes, seeing the will of God in it, and therefore recognizing it as absolutely good in the universal whole of which it is a part, this is heaven complete. When this saintly perfection is reached, there is no longer any evil. What appears evil is seen to be only an illusory relation, not an entity, but a defect, an inevitable transition between being and non-being. Then, the bitterest cup God's hand presents -one glance at his face, it turns to sweetness as we drain it.

Under the potent dominion of the religious idea, harshness becomes. soft and wretchedness itself is blessed; and the martyr shrivelling in the flame may be happier than the voluptuary on his couch of musk. The religious idea is the translation of all material particulars into their equivalents in spirit, and a synthesis of these into a personal unity,-God. Enthrone that idea in the mind, and a divine quality of personality is reflected over the universe, generating in us a spirit of loyalty and love. It acts as a spiritual sun in the brain, expelling all cold and all darkness. Under the influence of this spirit, the objects of sense and science and poetry are transformed into the objects of religion. The gloomy spaces of ignorance and the frosty air of philosophy are flooded with sunshine, and grow warm and balmy with a confiding life of delight. Then, indeed, heaven is all, and all is heaven.

Swedenborg said, with the profoundest insight, "Every man comes into heaven from the Lord, into hell from himself." Individual will conflicting with the Universal Will, selfish propensity chafing against the infinite appointments, constitutes the entrance into hell, as conscious enjoyment of recognized God, a happy conformity of the action of the part with the intent of the Whole, is the integral condition of all heavenly experience. Possessing this, instead of vibrating with the notes of selfish indulgence and restlessness, we are tuned to the notes of disinterested duty and peace.

And so we conclude that the essence of heaven, for time or for eternity, here or anywhere, is harmonized emotion, or the joy of a being in unison with the conditions of his

destiny. Whatever is a productive condition of harmonized emotion, therefore, is a key of heaven. There

are five grades of this emotion, or five spheres of heaven,-sensational, intellectual, æsthetic, moral, and religious. The respective keys to them are healthy sense, sound knowledge, artistic genius, loyal affection, and self-forgetting adjustment with that entirety of things and laws. which composes the realm of divine order. How poor and cumbrous are the rusty old counterfeit keys of tradition, dogmatism, conventionality, sacramentalism, and will-worship, which have so long monopolized the place really belonging to these! Let us name them over again, they are so real and so precious. The reports of sense, the perceptions of knowledge, the expansions of imagination, the fusions of the loving heart, and the atonements of the self-renounced will, these, experienced in their due degrees and co-ordination, are the true keys of heaven. They unlock door beyond door, and let our souls into region within region of the divine empire, into apartment after apartment of the sacred palace of being. They will conduct him who is gifted and brave and pure enough to follow even to the centremost sanctuary, the holy of holies, where God hides the ultimate secrets of his nature and his bliss, to share them with such alone as succeed in penetrating to the final, ineffable Mystery where the Christ says-speaking as example and not as foil" I and my Father are one.

Does he not well who becomes acquainted with these keys, and gains a thorough mastery of them? Does he not better still who keeps them. brightly polished by use, diligently employing them to get at ever more and more of the treasures they command? It is not the complexity or costliness of any instruments, nor what other people think of them, that constitutes their value, but the

use we make of them. Better a simple wooden key that will unfasten the gate we wish to enter than an abstruse golden one that will not. And be it remembered, too, that in all heavenly adventures it is not the maker of the loudest racket at the door, but the applier of the fit key, who gains admission.

When the sublime gift of the keys of perfection was made to the Church, she ought to have grasped the genuine prerogatives intrusted to her, and have taught men how to use them to wander, as free and happy children of the Infinite, through all the provinces of his works and ways, in nature, science, poetry, philosophy, and religion, looking on everything good and fair as a divine manifestation, so finding and enjoying God everywhere, making every moment heavenly, a type and prophecy of the perfect heaven to be reached at last.

AN EXPERIENCE.

It would be strange for a Universalist to feel no inspiration at all from the splendid truth that he believes in: but it would be stranger still could he keep its heavenly influence forever pent up within his own bosom. However humble his ability to give utterance to his feelings, he must speak sometimes. The sacred flame of his religion would be smothered, by his neglecting to communicate it.

We are expected in our remarks at these Conference Meetings, to be practical, rather than doctrinal; but I wish to say that doctrines, whether true or false, have ever had a tremendous practical bearing upon my whole life and character, almost from my very cradle! My memory is fresh as yesterday with vivid recollections-how I was impelled forward into youthful transgression, by

the orthodox sentiment of "inborn sinfulness." "'Tis natural to sin," said I, and "here goes to follow nature's plan!" Most distinctly, too, does my mind revert back to its first lessons on that great subject, which now divides the whole Christian world into two sects only-that theme compared with which all other controversies dwindle into insignificance -the question of man's eternal destiny!

But I could not advert to my early impressions, without making some allusion to a mother, who is now a spirit in heaven. She was a Universalist at heart for the last fifteen years of her life-and she evinced the sanctifying power of her belief: and her peaceful death evinced the fitness. of that belief for the last trying hour. But that pure calm sunshine of the soul, the conscious light of God's reconciled countenance, had not always illumined her pathway. I was witness, during the greater part of my boyhood, to the keen distress wrought in her soul, from season to season, by the prevailing dogma of endless misery. Never shall I forget my mother's tears, nor how it puzzled my young mind to learn the cause of so much sorrow, in a heart so good as hers. It was not, as I afterwards learned, the dread of "God's eternal wrath" upon herself; it was the perplexity of doubt; it was the grinding anguish of a spirit troubled with its own darkness and with the darkness that surround it, in prospect of the endless misery of others. From every quarter constantly fell upon her ear the dismal tollings of infinite and eternal evil! and if she admitted that into her heart as a lesson of truth, it was to be the funeral knell of her confidence in infinite and eternal good!

One bright Saturday afternoon, in my eleventh year, (a day to which