Has God, then, left us without joy? When we became idolaters, did he leave us to our idols, to tears, and woe? Nay, there is blessedness even here below; and the knowledge, the fear, the love, and favour of God, is its fountain-head. In reconciliation to Him--in His image restored--in growing holiness--in greater and yet greater love and likeness to the Saviour of the soul--the man of God, the man who is truly rational, finds the streams of his joy. God himself is the fountain; but his blessings are the rills which flow from it: and he who has not felt this joy, is still living among shadows, and phantoms, and names. His is only the comb rifled of the honey; his is the dream without the reality; his the corruption and the death of sin, without the pleasures which flow from God into the soul.--Is the land of his fathers a source of joy to the returning exile? Is the breath of spring a source of gladness to man's fevered brow? Is the face of nature a source of pleasure to him who has long been immured amid the damps of a dungeon? Far more than all these together, is a sense of God's favour to the soul which has returned from its wanderings, to seek its blessedness again on the bosom of its God. VOLTAIRE. And it is to godliness, or at least some counterfeit of it, that all, or nearly all, men flee for joy at last. Some, indeed, die like the beasts that perish, without either fear or joy. Conscience is dead before the body. It occasions no alarm; and such men pass into the presence of the Judge perhaps denying his very existence. But not so all. When conscience is aroused from its long stupor by the nearness of death, how eager do some appear for the joy which religion promises! how gladly would they now grasp at what they have practically despised, perhaps for threescore years and ten! There is one who has spent a lifetime in denying the truth as it is in Jesus. He declared that he hated the Saviour's very name, and did all that wit and powers the most diversified could accomplish to blot it from the hearts and memories of men. That man hated the truth with a perfect hatred, and gloried in his hatred; it secured for him the applause of myriads who felt that truth to be fettering, and who rejoiced in the help of one so gifted in their attempt to banish it from the earth.--But that man is dying at last, and all is changed now. Goaded by conscience, he flees to a poor superstition--he tries to soothe his soul by believing one of the most enormous impositions ever practised upon man. He eats what he reckons, or what an abject superstition teaches him to regard as "the body, the blood, and the divinity" of Him whom he had so long blasphemed and denied; and that very superstition of that dying infidel[41] tells where it is that man finds or tries to find his joy after all. It is just an infidel's method of proclaiming, "Godliness has the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come."