I58 THE WORLD TO COME. by the Secret operation of the blessed Grid, teaching us tö un- derstand his gospel. Alas ! how ignorant were the heathen sages about any future state for the righteous ? How bewildered were the best of them in all their imaginations? How vain were all. their reasonings upon this subject, and how little satisfaction could they give to an honest enquirer, whether there was any reward provided for good men beyond this life? The light of nature was their guide ; and those in whom this feeble taper burned with the fairest lustre; were still left in great darkness about futurity. As the Gentile philosophers were left in, great uncertainties whether there was any heaven or no, so were their conceptions of heavenly things very absurd and ridiculous ; and their various fancies about the nature and enjoyments of it were all imper- tinence. And how little knowledge had the patriarchs themselves, if we may judge of their knowledge by the five books of Moses, which give no plain and express promise of future happiness in another world, neither to Abel nor Noah, to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or to Moses himself? And were it not for some expres- sion's in the New. Testament, and by that xi. chapter to the He- brews, where we are told, that these good men sought a heavenly. country, and hoped for happiness in a future and invisible state, we should sometimes he ready to doubt whether they knew al- most any thing of the future resurrection and `glory. That great and excellent man Job, had one or two lucid intervals of peculiar brightness, which shone upon him frein hea- ven, in the midst of his distresses, and raised him above and beyond the common level of the dispensation he lived in.; yet in the mai % when he describes the state of the dead, how desolate and dolesome is his language, and what heavy darkness hangs upon his hope ? See his expressions; Job x. 21, 22. Let me alone, that I ma y take comfort a little, before Igo whence I shall not return, evens to the land of darkness, and the shadow of death, a land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death without any order, and where the light'is as darkness. Mark how this good man heaps one darkness upon another, and makes so formidable a gloom, as was hardly to be dispelled by the common notices given to men in that age. And if we look into the Jewish writings, in and after the days of Moses, we find the men of righteousness, frequently entertained with promises of corn, and wine, and oil, and other blessings of sense ; and few there were amongst them who saw clearly, and firmly believed the heavenly inheritance through the types, and shadows, and figures. of Canaan, the promised land, which,flowed with milk and honey. It is granted there are some hints and discoveries of a blessedness beyond tite grave in the
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