General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1876 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green Subjects: Sermons, English Religion / Sermons / General Religion / Sermons / Christian Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. NO MORE SEA.
And there was no more sea. – Rev. xxi. I. FOR some days past I have felt a wish to preach to you from this text. The sea is so much with us here, it meets our eyes so continually, that such a text must sometimes suggest itself to every one of us. And every preacher knows the capricious way in which texts push themselves on one, and will not be put off. Whoever really thinks upon the text, will find it very difficult to resolve how it is to be understood: and I cannot say that at the first glance it looks like one from which to preach an eminently practical sermon. We shall see about that. But we have here thought of several negative statements in revelation as to that better world, so often named, so little realised. No night there, – no more pain, – no temple there: and it may interest, if we add to these one more. They tell us a great deal, each of them: they are quite easily understood; and without the least fancifulness (which is quite abhorrent in speaking of such serious and awful things), they maybe carried out into very far-reaching consequences. It is different, very different in some respects, with the unexplained, short, strong statement, that when this world is reconstructed, – when things here are so changed that there will be a new heaven and a new earth, the first heaven and the first earth having passed by (for that is the more accurate rendering), – then in that blessed, holy and happy world,
the sea is no longer so, literally…