A REVELATION ON ETERNITY
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
--Longfellow.
While Edwin was still laboring among the stones in the field of grass, this
thought came suddenly to his mind:
"If I should be so unfortunate as to die before I receive the assurance
that I am going to heaven and I should happen to find myself in hell, how
long would I have to be there? And how hot would be that fire that I have
heard so much about from profane tongues? Would there be any ending or
wearing away of eternity? and would the suffering after a while be less
severe? or would it go right on just the same forever and ever?"
As his desire to know these things increased, he was willing to lay aside
his thoughts concerning how he was to get the assurance that he was going
to heaven, and as he passed from one heap of stones to another, he became
sorely troubled. He longed for a friend to whom he could go for help, but
no one was suggested to his mind. Even his friend Frank Kauffman, he was
sure, could not enlighten him; for to none of the questions he already
asked upon these subjects had he received satisfactory answers.
Then suddenly, as though he had passed into the great beyond, everything
about him appeared to be changed. He seemed to have died and passed into
hell, and the flames, as they rose in imagination about him, were
penetrating every fiber of his being, and he cried out in his distress. But
as though the vision had been only to teach him of the reality of that
place of torment, Edwin felt himself caught up, as it were, and he was
seemingly suspended in an endless space with the eternal realities of life
opened up for him to view. For miles and miles nothing but space appeared
to stretch before, above, and around him, with the glaring flames that he
had just left but a short distance behind him.
Then the scene was changed, and he saw before him a great and high mountain
of sand, and the thought of the impossibility of counting the grains was
suggested to his mind. Again the scene changed, and each grain in the
mountain seemed to be a year, and the grains as years began to form
themselves into one continuous straight line, so long that the distance
could not be measured by the human eye, for there was no end. Once more
there was a change. The line of years took the form of a great
measuring-rod, and strength was given Edwin to grasp the rod and to try to
measure the duration of hell-fire; and he tried to see if in eternity there
could be any possible way of forgetting the past. Twice with the immense
rod he measured into the sea of Forgetfulness, but before the third
measurement was taken, he saw from a backward glance that hell was no
farther away from him than it had been at the first. In great distress
Edwin dropped the rod, and the vision passed away.
When he realized that he was still in the field of grass and was on time's
side of eternity, he was very glad indeed. Through the vision he was
convinced of two things--that hell and its torments were certain, and that
eternity was without end--and he was filled with a new determination and
zeal to do everything in his power to obtain an assurance within himself
that he was really on the road to the better world.
How sad that Edwin could not have gone directly to Jesus as some did in
olden time and have heard him explain that to enter heaven one must be born
again.
"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but
canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that
is born of the Spirit." "Except a man be born again, he can not see the
kingdom of God." (John 3:8,3).