When our friends have gone to heaven, it is not apt to be heaven, so much as earthly sorrow, which fills our minds. Happily, we have been taught to believe, and we do generally believe, that the souls of the righteous enter immediately into glory; that their happiness is perfect, though not completed; they are as happy as disembodied spirits can be; unspeakably happier than they were here, but still not in full possession of those sources of pleasure which they will receive when their bodies are raised, and their whole natures are made complete. But "to die is gain;" it is "to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better;" it is entering "into the joy of their Lord." That dreary thought of sleeping after death till the day of judgment; the idea that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, became insensible at death, and that the last thing which Jacob, for example, knew, was Joseph's kiss, and the next thing which he will know will be the archangel's trump, the interval of many thousands of years being a perfect blank in his existence, is so unlike the benevolent order of God's providence in nature and grace, that it cannot gain much credence with believers in the simple representations of the Bible. What a mockery Elijah's translation seems, upon that theory! Whither was he translated? Did the chariots of fire, and the horses of fire, convey him to a dreamless sleep of thousands of years? Was that pomp, that emblazonry, all that fiery pageant, a deception signifying nothing but that the greatest of prophets was to begin a stupid slumber, which, this day, under a heaven with not one redeemed soul in it, and in a world where there is every thing to be done for God and men, holds him, and every other dead saint, in a useless suspension of his consciousness, and, indeed, for so many ages, annihilation? Poor economy in the dispensation of overflowing love to intelligent beings,--we say it with submission,--does this seem to be; nor can we think that, in the case of Elijah, it was this which was heralded by horses and chariots of fire. Chariots and horses are emblems of flight; but if sleep were descending upon the hero of the prophetic age, twilight would more appropriately have drawn her soft veil over nature, birds would have begun their vespers, clouds would have put on their changing, pensive colors, while cadences of music, breathed by the winds, would have shed lethargic influences into the scene. Inspiration does not trifle with us by really meaning such a preparation for a sleep of ages, and yet informing us, in so many words, that "the Lord would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind." No; going to heaven is not going to sleep, and going to sleep is not going to heaven. Sleep and death are used figuratively for each other, according to the laws of language, which describes appearances without regard to scientific truth, as in speaking of the sun's rising, for example, and the going