Once more, religion should cost you much in the direct service of GOD; in providing amply for His wide and becoming worship. I pass by now, as duties which there are other opportunities of enforcing, the maintenance of missions, at home and abroad; the building and endowing of schools and churches, and many like things, that I may dwell for a few moments upon the costliness of the materials of our churches, and their furniture, and, let me add, their ornaments; for all which, if I understand the Bible, we Christians are bound to provide. In the descriptions given us in the Bible, of heaven and heavenly things, there is frequent mention and great display, as it were, of gold, and precious stones, and musical instruments, and beautiful robes, and the like. There are some who understand these descriptions literally, and who suppose that, being raised in material, though glorified bodies, the redeemed will inhabit a material heaven—either this earth transformed, or some other planet—and will be surrounded with glorious material objects, the most beautiful and precious of nature’s productions, fashioned like to art’s best accomplishments. If this is to be so, then it is urged, earth’s tabernacles, as the type of heaven, should be as nearly assimilated to heaven as possible; we should improve and furnish our plainer and barer churches as much as we can; we should build our new churches in the best, the handsomest style of art; and decorate and furnish them in the most substantially costly manner. Without subscribing to this view (though there is really much to be said for it), I would humbly suggest that, since GOD, when He designed an earthly tabernacle, prescribed that it, and all in it, should be costly and ornamental; and that when He speaks of heaven He does so under the image of all that is accounted splendid and costly on earth, He either must have meant to require that we should erect and adorn our churches after this description, or He must have taken for granted that we should best understand spiritual beauties and excellencies by their comparison with what we account earthly beauties and excellencies, and that we should naturally honour and worship Him with the best of these within our reach. It seems, then, to be our duty, nay, to be natural to us, if we are in earnest, whichever view we take, to make our churches and their contents beauteous and costly, either as images of the future church in heaven, or as the nearest representations to it which we can furnish, and the best copies of GOD’S own pattern.