But whence arises this great delusion? Simply from our total lack of knowledge of the glory of that heaven upon which we all hope to enter. 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the imagination of man to conceive' the glory of God, the splendor, the magnificence, the supernal beauty of the Celestial. We know indeed that we shall enter upon a world whose immensity, whose sublimity, whose awful beauty shall far surpass the experience of man; but not even the wildest imagination, fed by all the knowledge that astronomers have gained of world beyond world, and system beyond system, of spheres to which our world is but a speck, and of fiery meteors and whizzing comets sweeping their way with the speed of thought for thousands of years through planet-teeming space--not even such an imagination, in its farthest stretch, is able to conceive the glory of that dwelling place which shall be ours. If to-day we were permitted to peer but for a moment into that heavenly abode, then should we see how impossible, to the soul which has once entered upon that beatific state, would be a thought of return to this grovelling earth. There their aspirations are ever upward and onward toward the Great White Throne, with no thought for the things left behind, even were there not a 'great gulf fixed' between earth and heaven. And how often do we hear the opinion expressed that the souls of the just do pass, 'in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,' from the things of earth to the full burst of heavenly beauty and sublimity, shooting like the lightning's flash from its prison house of clay to the presence of its God. Reasoning from analogy, which, in this connection, where both experience and revelation are dumb, is the only basis we can rest upon, such a passage would be to the soul instant annihilation; the shock would be too great for even its enlarged susceptibilities. It must become gradually accustomed to the new sights and sounds, and so pass slowly up from one stage of perception and knowledge to another in regular gradation, to the climax of its revelation.