Madam,—Grace, mercy, and peace be to you.—It is the least of the princely and royal generosity of Jesus Christ to pay a king’s debts, and not to have His servants at a loss. His gold is better than yours, and His hundred- fold is the income and rent of heaven, and far above your revenues. You are not the first who have added up your accounts that way. Better have Christ your foreman than any other; for He trades to the advantage of His poor servants. But if the hundred-fold in this life be so well reckoned (as Christ cannot pay you with wrong counting or deferred hope), oh, what must the rent of that land be which renders (every day and hour of the years of long eternity) the whole rent of a year, yes, of more than thousand thousands of ages, even the weighty income of a rich kingdom, not every summer once, but every moment!
That sum of glory will take you and all the angels counting. To be a tenant to such a Landlord, where every berry and grape of the large field beares no worse fruit than glory, fulness of joy, and pleasures that endure for evermore! I leave it to yourself to think what a summer, what a soil, what a garden must be there; and what must be the commodities of that highest land, where the sun and the moon are under the feet of the inhab- itants! Surely the land cannot be bought with gold, blood, banishment, loss of father and mother, husband, wife, children. We but live here because we can do no better. It is need, not virtue, to be strangers in a prison; to weep and sigh, and, alas! to sin sixty or seventy years in a land of tears. The fruits that grow here are all seasoned and salted with sin.
That sum of glory will take you and all the angels counting. To be a tenant to such a Landlord, where every berry and grape of the large field beares no worse fruit than glory, fulness of joy, and pleasures that endure for evermore! I leave it to yourself to think what a summer, what a soil, what a garden must be there; and what must be the commodities of that highest land, where the sun and the moon are under the feet of the inhab- itants! Surely the land cannot be bought with gold, blood, banishment, loss of father and mother, husband, wife, children. We but live here because we can do no better. It is need, not virtue, to be strangers in a prison; to weep and sigh, and, alas! to sin sixty or seventy years in a land of tears. The fruits that grow here are all seasoned and salted with sin.
Oh how sweet is it that the company of the first-born should be divided into two great bodies of an army, and some in their country, and some in the way to their country! If it were no more than once to see the face of the Prince of this good land, and to be feasted for eternity with the fatness, sweetness, dainties of the rays and beams of matchless glory, and incomparable fountain-love, it was a well-spent journey to creep hands and feet through seven deaths and seven hells, to enjoy Him up at the well-head. Only let us not be weary: the miles to that land are fewer and shorter than when we first believed. Strangers are not wise to quarrel with their host, and complain of their lodging. It is a foul way, but a fair home. Oh that I had but such grapes and clusters out of the land as I have sometimes seen and tasted in the place which your Ladyship mentions! But the hope of it in the end is a heartsome convoy in the way. If I see little more of the gold until the race is ended, I dare not quarrel. It is the Lord! I hope His chariot will go through these three kingdoms, after our sufferings will be accomplished.
Grace be with you.
Your Ladyship’s, in Jesus Christ, S. R.
Grace be with you.
Your Ladyship’s, in Jesus Christ, S. R.
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