If we ask what is the positive nature of the Christian hope and what the final character of the life of heaven, the answer is that we cannot fully say, that we know only in part, "we see obscurely, as in a mirror." In hymn and ecstasy and vision men have sought to find expression for the substance of things hoped for, and they have failed. "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, the things that GOD hath prepared for them that love Him." The Book of the Revelation essays to paint a picture of the heavenly state, and for the most part succeeds in setting before our minds a noble imagery; but in the end its language is most convincing when it tells us what heaven is _not_. "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. And GOD shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Negatives and contrasts--the picture of a state of things contrasted with all that in the world as we know it is amiss; we cannot _positively_ envisage heaven. Only we believe that "there remaineth a rest for the people of GOD," where nevertheless they rest not day or night from His perfect service. "Beloved, now are we sons of GOD, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him: for we shall see Him as He is." Here this chapter might end: but with regard to the nature of the Christian conception of the life of the world to come there is something more to be said: for the Church's creed contains the assertion of a belief in the Resurrection of the Body, or even, in the Latin form of the Apostles' Creed, and in the translation which appears in the Prayer-book Service for Baptism, in the Resurrection of the Flesh. The plain man may be tempted, brushing aside such a doctrine in its plain and literal acceptation as a manifest impossibility, either to hold aloof from a Church which retains such an affirmation in her creed, or else to conclude hastily that the words are meant only as a picturesque way of expressing a belief in the immortality of the soul. Either attitude would be a mistake. It is true that a literal resuscitation of Christian corpses on some future Day of Resurrection would be neither possible nor desirable. Nevertheless the Christian doctrine of the life to come involves more than a bare assertion of the immortality of the soul.