“Now what a dreadful thing it is to be driven out of one of the first narrow dusky cells into the third sort of apartment, where the change of the room is infinitely the worst! No wonder that sinners are afraid to die. But why should a soul that has good hope, through grace, of entering into the serene apartment, be unwilling to leave the narrow smoky prison he has dwelt in so long, and under such loads of inconvenience? Death to a good man is but passing through a death entry, out of one little dusky room of his Father’s house into another that is fair and large, lightsome and glorious, and divinely entertaining. Oh may the rays and splendours of my heavenly apartment shoot far downward, and gild the dark entry with such a cheerful beam as to banish every fear, when I shall be called to pass through.” He teaches and very much elaborates, as Southey says, the doctrine of Milton: —What, if earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought? Southey somewhat naturally finds an occasion for humour in that Milton beheld in heaven a place for armies, the review of bright brigades, and illustrious cohorts with keen swords and long bright spears, and so he remarks, “The Heaven of Watts’ imagination was coloured by his earthly pursuits, and whether there were to be reviews of armies or not there were to be sermons.” “For,” says Watts, “not only is there the service of thanksgiving here and of prayer, but such entertainment as lectures and sermons also, and there all the worship that is paid is the established worship of the whole country.” But the conceptions formed by Watts of the heavenly state are majestic in the main. “For the Church,” he says, “on earth is but a training school for the church on high, and is, as it were, a tiring-room in which we are dressed in proper habit for our appearance and our places in that bright assembly.” Thus he beholds “Boyle and Ray pursuing the philosophy in which they delighted on earth, contemplating the wisdom of God in His works; and Henry More and Howe continuing their metaphysical researches with brightened and refined powers of mind.” It is singular that Watts, who speculated so keenly and clearly into the nature of metaphysical substance, should have thus somewhat embarrassed his views of the heavenly state by discriminating so much the pursuits of a pure and perfect soul, by characteristics which partake of the faulty views of an earthly understanding; but we are to remember that he wrote for useful purposes, and we may believe that some of those excursions of the fancy, while scarcely consistent even with his own metaphysics, added not a little to the pleasant horizon spread out before the view of those readers unable or indisposed to follow him into more abstract and pure regions of thought. Interestingly and curiously