It looks as if they feared their
people would desert them for heaven. But I presume it arises
generally from the fact that they know of such an ascent themselves,
only by hearsay. The knowledge of God is good, but the church is
better!'
'Could it be,' I ventured to suggest, 'that, in order to ascend,
they must put off the priests' garments?'
'Good, my boy!' he answered. 'All are priests up there, and must be
clothed in fine linen, clean and white--the righteousness of
saints--not the imputed righteousness of another,--that is a lying
doctrine--but their own righteousness which God has wrought in them
by Christ.' I never knew a man in whom the inward was so constantly
clothed upon by the outward, whose ordinary habits were so symbolic
of his spiritual tastes, or whose enjoyment of the sight of his eyes
and the hearing of his ears was so much informed by his highest
feelings. He regarded all human affairs from the heights of
religion, as from their church-spires he looked down on the red
roofs of Antwerp, on the black roofs of Cologne, on the gray roofs
of Strasburg, or on the brown roofs of Basel--uplifted for the time
above them, not in dissociation from them.
On the base of the missing twin-spire at Strasburg, high over the
roof of the church, stands a little cottage--how strange its white
muslin window-curtains look up there! To the day of his death he
cherished the fancy of writing a book in that cottage, with the
grand city to which London looks a modern mushroom, its thousand
roofs with row upon row of windows in them--often five garret
stories, one above the other, and its thickets of multiform
chimneys, the thrones and procreant cradles of the storks,
marvellous in history, habit, and dignity--all below him.
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