115. Love and immortality
Back to SOLITUDE SWEETENED
Welcome change, that waits to begin my happiness, and put a termination to my troubles and pain. When this languor and lukewarmness shall be turned into immortality and love, I shall be all life and vigor—and this vigor shall be all love and praise. Now my corruption is a counterbalance to my love; and mortality a clog to my devotion. But then every power shall be life, every faculty active, every thought winged, and every motion heavenly.
I shall praise with transport, and sing with rapture! I shall adore with ecstacy, and love with delight! And all this, day and night, without ever ceasing, or being exhausted, being then perfect in every grace, and immortal in every power! Receiving my fullness from the divine plenitude, as a pipe supplied by the vast ocean—I shall pour out perpetual streams of praise, and torrents of love; and be more and more capacitated, enlarged, and replenished—by this eternal employment!
Such is the happy state my hope claims, and to which, soon I shall attain. Then shall my love be wholly a vigorous immortality, and my immortality exercised in nothing but love. On the Sun of Righteousness, divinely bright, tremendously glorious—I shall fix my eyes, which shall be strengthened as they gaze, and never cease to behold and admire the divine object!
I shall emulate the seraphim, and strive, not out of self-conceit—but from the glowings of sacred gratitude, the prevalence of divine love in my bosom—to sing as loud, and love as intensely as they—the exalted One, whom I can call my Brother, my Husband, and my God! I shall go out, in all the faculties of my soul, to Him, without one moment's intermission; and yet my eyes shall never be so satisfied with seeing, as to shut them on the glories above; nor my ear fatigued with hearing the hallelujahs on high.
Sleep shall be as foreign to my immortal perfection then, as it is impossible for my immortal frame to subsist without it now. There is no comma in the hosannas above. There is no night in the years of the right hand of the Most High God. There is no interruption in the warbles of eternal splendor. No distractions shall disturb the adorers before the throne, where perfect love casts out fear, where bliss is as boundless as their wish—and measures with eternity itself!
Back to SOLITUDE SWEETENED