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https://www.stphilipschurchsc.org/the-great-divorce/episode/2023-05-24/episode-21
Music link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxQIttCihZA
SUMMARY OF EPISODE 21 (Chapters 13 & 14)
KEY PASSAGES IN CHAPTERS 13 AND 14
Fellowship and the Trinity in Heaven
“The Lady was alone in that woodland place, and a brown bird went hopping past her, bending with its light feet the grasses I could not bend. Presently the Lady got up and began to walk away. The other Bright Spirits came forward to receive her, singing as they came: “The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy. She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall. Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the arm ‘d knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity…He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world’s desire.”
True Mercy and Joy v. Blackmailing the Universe
“And yet. . . and yet… said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance away into the forest, ”…Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?” “Would ye rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly life.” “Well, no. I suppose I don’t want that…What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.” “Ye see it “does not.” “I feel in a way that it ought to.” “That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it: the demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”
True Pity v. Manipulation
“Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.”
“The action of Pity will live for ever: but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.” “And what is the other kind-the action?” “It’s a weapon on the other side. It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.”
The Relative Strength of Heaven Compared to Hell
“You say it will go down to the lowest, Sir. But she didn’t go down with him to Hell. She didn’t even see him off by the bus.” “Where would ye have had her go?” “Why, where we all came from by that bus. The big gulf, beyond the edge of the cliff. Over there. You can’t see it from here,
but you must know the place I mean.” My Teacher gave a curious smile. “Look,” he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same (how it hurt my knees!) and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass. Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I had looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid. “I cannot be certain,” he said, “that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.” “But-but,” I gasped with a feeling of bewilderment not unlike terror. “I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.” “Aye. But the voyage was not mere locomotion. That bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size.” “Do you mean then that Hell-all that infinite empty town-is down in some little crack like this?” “Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” “It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.” “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.” “I see,” said I at last. “She couldn’t fit into Hell.” He nodded. “There’s not room for her,” he said. “Hell could not open its mouth w”For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.”
The Harrowing of Hell
“Then no one can ever reach them?” “Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend-a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathise with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.” “And will He ever do so again?” “It was not once long ago that He did it. Time does not work that way when once ye have left the Earth. All moments that have been or shall be were, or are, present in the moment of His descending. There is no spirit in prison to Whom He did not preach.”
Salvation, Freedom, and Time
“In your own books, Sir,” said I, “you were a Universalist. You talked as if all men would be saved. And St. Paul too.” “Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions.” “Because they are too terrible, Sir?” “No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it wbe when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it’s truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic’s vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom. Witness the doctrine of Predestination which shows (truly enough) that eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two. And wouldn’t Universalism do the same? Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time’s lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the eternal reality of her choice?”
AND SUDDENLY all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women. Then vertigo and terror seized me and, clutching at my Teacher, I said, “Is that the truth? Then is all that I have been seeing in this country false? These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts- were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?” “Or might ye not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things? But ye’d do better to say neither. Ye saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth: the lens was clearer. But it was still seen through the lens. Do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give.”
“A dream? Then–then-am I not really here, Sir?” “No, Son,” said he kindly, taking my hand in his. “It is not so good as that. The bitter drink of death is still before you. Ye are only dreaming. And if ye come to tell of what ye have seen, make it plain that it was but a dream. See ye make it very plain. Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows. I’ll have no Swedenborgs and no Vale Owens among my children.” … The vision of the chessmen had faded, and once more the quiet woods in the cool light before sunrise were about us.
The Second Coming—Sleepers Awake!
“Then, still looking at his face, I saw there something that sent a quiver through my whole body. I stood at that moment with my back to the East and the mountains, and he, facing me, looked towards them. His face flushed with a new light. A fern, thirty yards behind him, turned golden. The eastern side of every tree-trunk grew bright. Shadows deepened. All the time there had been bird noises, trillings, chatterings, and the like; but now suddenly the full chorus was poured from every branch; cocks were crowing, there was music of hounds, and horns; above all this ten thousand tongues of men and woodland angels and the wood itself sang. “It comes! It comes!” they sang. “Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.” One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed-not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher’s robe. “The morning! The morning!” I cried, “I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.” But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head.
“Next moment the folds of my Teacher’s garment were only the folds of the old ink-stained cloth on my study table which I had pulled down with me as I fell from my chair. The blocks of light were only the books which I had pulled off with it, falling about my head. I awoke in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the siren howling overhead.”
REFERENCES IN CHAPTER 13
Dame Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) Author of Revelations of Divine Love, Julian was an anchoress/nun who lived in a small cell praying and meditating. She had a series of visions, one of which involved a hazelnut and the idea of all creation being that small compared to the vastness of God. She wrote ‘You shall soon forget me,’ she writes, ‘(and do so that I shall not hinder you) and behold Jesus who is teacher of all.” In one vision, Christ speaks to her of the fact that He will ultimately put right all things, saying “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722) A Swedish theologian, he was best known for his books on the afterlife. In his book Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg says that he was allowed to experience the process of dying and being awakened in the spiritual world so that he could tell people on earth what it was like. His teachings on the afterlife and his certain knowledge of how things worked there quickly drifted into heresy.
George Vale Owen (1868-1931) was a Church of England clergyman from Liverpool who believed he was receiving communications from the spirit world and began to practice serving as a medium and participating in “automatic writing.” Removed from his parish, he fully embraced Spiritualism.
The Harrowing of Hell—when Jesus descended into Hell (as referenced in the creeds) and freed the captives there, preaching the Good News and overthrowing Satan’s power.
KEY PASSAGES IN CHAPTERS 13 AND 14
Fellowship and the Trinity in Heaven
“The other Bright Spirits came forward to receive her, singing as they came: “The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy. She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall. Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the arm ‘d knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity…He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world’s desire.” “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”(John 14:16-17) “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”(John 14:26)
True Mercy and Pity and Joy v. Manipulation
“And yet. . . and yet… said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance away into the forest, ”…Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?” “Would ye rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly life.” “Well, no. I suppose I don’t want that…What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.” “Ye see it “does not.” “I feel in a way that it ought to.” “That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it: the demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they shouldbe allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.” “Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe
“The action of Pity will live for ever: It’s a weapon on the other side. It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.” “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Mt. 7:21-23) You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Ps. 16:11) He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away (Rev. 21)
The Relative Strength of Heaven Compared to Hell
“You say it will go down to the lowest, Sir. But she didn’t go down with him to Hell. She didn’t even see him off by the bus.” “Where would ye have had her go?” “Why, where we all came from by that bus. The big gulf, beyond the edge of the cliff…He made me see … a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid. “I cannot be certain,” he said, “that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.” “But-but,” I gasped with a feeling of bewilderment not unlike terror. “I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.” “Aye… That bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size.” “Do you mean then that Hell-all that infinite empty town-is down in some little crack like this?” “Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” “It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.” “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.” “I see,” said I at last. “She couldn’t fit into Hell.” He nodded. “There’s not room for her,” he said. “Hell could not open its mouth wide enough.”
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14) And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Mt. 16:18-19)
“For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.” Furthermore, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, He gave them up to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. (Rom. 1:28)
The Harrowing of Hell
Then no one can ever reach them?” “Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend-a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathise with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.” “And will He ever do so again?” “It was not once long ago that He did it. Time does not work that way when once ye have left the Earth. All moments that have been or shall be were, or are, present in the moment of His descending. There is no spirit in prison to Whom He did not preach.”
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah (I Peter 3:18-19)
Salvation, Freedom, and Time
“In your own books, Sir,” said I, “you were a Universalist. You talked as if all men would be saved. And St. Paul too.” “Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions.” “Because they are too terrible, Sir?” “No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it’s truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic’s vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom. Witness the doctrine of Predestination which shows (truly enough) that eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two–wouldn’t Universalism do the same? Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time’s lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the eternal reality of her choice?”
For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”(Rom. 10:13) This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.(I Tim. 2:3) Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Mt. 7:13-14)
Those Who Will Not Come—An Example from The Last Battle
“Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you – will you – do something for these poor Dwarfs?” “Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, “Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!”
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.” But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said: “Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken
Reflection on Time and Choice
AND SUDDENLY all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women. Then vertigo and terror seized me and, clutching at my Teacher, I said, “Is that the truth? Then is all that I have been seeing in this country false? These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts- were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?” “Or might ye not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things? But ye’d do better to say neither. Ye saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth: the lens was clearer. But it was still seen through the lens. Do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give.”
“A dream? Then–then-am I not really here, Sir?” “No, Son,” said he kindly, taking my hand in his. “It is not so good as that. The bitter drink of death is still before you. Ye are only dreaming. And if ye come to tell of what ye have seen, make it plain that it was but a dream. See ye make it very plain. Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows. I’ll have no Swedenborgs and no Vale Owens among my children.” … The vision of the chessmen had faded, and once more the quiet woods in the cool light before sunrise were about us.
The Second Coming—Sleepers Awake!
“Then, still looking at his face, I saw there something that sent a quiver through my whole body. I stood at that moment with my back to the East and the mountains, and he, facing me, looked towards them. His face flushed with a new light. A fern, thirty yards behind him, turned golden. The eastern side of every tree-trunk grew bright. Shadows deepened. All the time there had been bird noises, trillings, chatterings, and the like; but now suddenly the full chorus was poured from every branch; cocks were crowing, there was music of hounds, and horns; above all this ten thousand tongues of men and woodland angels and the wood itself sang. “It comes! It comes!” they sang. “Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.” One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed-not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher’s robe. “The morning! The morning!” I cried, “I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.” But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head. Next moment the folds of my Teacher’s garment were only the folds of the old ink-stained cloth on my study table which I had pulled down with me as I fell from my chair. The blocks of light were only the books which I had pulled off with it, falling about my head. I awoke in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the siren howling overhead.”
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Be very careful, then, how you live — not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. (Eph. 5:10-111) Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” (Mt. 24:42) Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’ (Rev. 1:7-8)
SLEEPERS WAKE!
Wake, awake, for night is flying; the watchmen on the heights are crying,
Awake, Jerusalem, arise!
Midnight’s solemn hour is tolling, His chariot wheels are nearer rolling,
He comes; prepare ye virgins wise. Rise up, with willing feet
Go forth, the Bridegroom meet: Alleluia!
Bear through the night your well-trimmed light, speed forth to join the marriage rite.
Sion hears the watchmen singing, her heart with deep delight is springing,
She wakes, she rises from her gloom:
Forth her Bridegroom comes, all glorious, In grace arrayed, by truth victorious;
Her star is risen, her light is come!
All hail, Incarnate Lord, our crown, and our reward! Alleluia!
We haste along, in pomp of song, and gladsome join the marriage throng.
Lamb of God, the heavens adore Thee, and men and angels sing before Thee,
with harp and cymbal’s clearest tone.
By the pearly gates in wonder we stand, and swell the voice of thunder
that echoes round Thy dazzling throne.
No vision ever brought, no ear hath ever caught such rejoicing:
We raise the song, we swell the throng, to praise Thee ages all along!
Past Classes
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