we shall abide, and for evermore abide, in the rapture of heaven.'

5. And then there is the Pauline eye. An eye, however, that Job would
have shared with Paul and with the Corinthian Church had the patriarch
been privileged to live in our New Testament day. Ever since the Holy
Ghost with His anointing oil fell on us at Pentecost, says the apostle,
we have had an eye by means of which we look not at the things that are
seen, but at the things that are not seen. Now, he who has an eye like
that is above both plucking out his eyes or making a covenant with them
either. It is like what Paul says about the law also. The law is not
made for a righteous man. A righteous man is above the law and
independent of it. The law does not reach to him and he is not hampered
with it. And so it is with the man who has got Paul's splendid eyes for
the unseen. He does not need to touch so much as one of his eye-lashes
to pluck them out. For his eyes are blind, and his ears are deaf, and
his whole body is dead to the things that are temporal. His eyes are
inwardly ablaze with the things that are eternal. He whose eyes have
been opened to the truth and the love of his Bible, he will gloat no more
over your books and your papers filled with lies, and slander, and spite,
and lewdness! He who has his conversation in heaven does not need to set
a watch on his lips lest he take up an ill report about his neighbour. He
who walks every day on the streets of gold will step as swiftly as may
be, with girt loins, and with a preoccupied eye, out of the slippery and
unsavoury streets of this forsaken earth. He who has fast working out
for him an exceeding and eternal weight of glory will easily count all
his cups and all his crosses, and all the crooks in his lot but as so
many light afflictions and but for a moment. My Lord Understanding had
his palace built with high perspective towers on it, and the site of it
was near to Eye-gate, from the top of which his lordship every day looked
not at the things which are temporal, but at the things which are