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Take the text as descriptive of the feeling of too many Christians towards that in which we all profess our faith as the life everlasting or the life of the world to come. "They thought scorn of that pleasant land." Ours is a freethinking and it is an outspoken generation. It is by no means uncommon to hear men say now, Give me earth and I will give you heaven. I cannot realize, and I see no beauty in, the life of that world. You tell me that it has streets of gold and gates of pearl. It is an orientalism of exaggeration which conveys to me no meaning at all. If it did convey a meaning, it would be an unattractive one. I greatly prefer the Old Testament phraseology. I can understand a land of wheat and barley, of fountains and streams, which God cares for, and upon which His eyes are open from the beginning to the end of the year. Such a land, with the addition of a wiping away of tears from all eyes and a cessation of pain and grief and death, speaks for itself. But you have made it so figurative, so metaphorical, so grotesque, that I cannot admire and I cannot long for it. "They thought scorn of that pleasant land." I can see many things to account for this. I can suggest perhaps a few things in correction of it. Theologians and mystics have so described that land as to make it unlovely. They have painted it to the manly and the vigorous, to the large-hearted and the active-minded, as a world of absolute repose, of perpetual quiescence. They have painted it to the feeble and the invalid and the languid and the weary as a scene of perpetual devotions, of a day never clouded and a night as bright as the day — of a praise never silent, a sabbath never ending, a congregation never breaking up. The one kind of men demanded an activity which is absolutely refused them; the other a repose, spiritual as well as physical, which is resolutely shut out. All these descriptions are quite conjectural. Scripture tells of a new heaven and a new earth, and expressly adds in explanation this particular — "wherein dwelleth righteousness." How can righteousness dwell in a land of mere inertion, mere torpor, or even unintermitted praise and song? Does not the very choice of the word suggest to us, though without detailing, a multitude of relationships, old perhaps as well as new, which shall give full scope to all the energies and all the activities which have here been coerced and counteracted alike by the weakness of the flesh and by the unwillingness of the spirit? Amongst all negatives and all conjectures, expanding the vision of the great future without stint or limit, we have one certainty and one positive — and with it we conclude. "His servants shall serve Him — they shall see His face — His name shall be in their foreheads." Whose servants? whose face? whose name? Look above — you will find the answer in that great combination — "God and the Lamb." Yet not their servants but His servants — not their faces but His face — nob their names but His name. Who now shall dare to think scorn of that pleasant land? God is there — there in a sense in which He is not here. "Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty," as He can only be seen in "the land that is very far off." Who shall speak of that land in a tone half of condescension — "Yes, if I must go hence, I will consent to go thither"? Shall any one indeed find entrance there who can only say, I will not refuse — I have no objection?

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: Yea, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not his word:

WEB: Yes, they despised the pleasant land. They didn't believe his word,