To infix this important point the more deeply in your mind, consider another comparison: Suppose the ocean to be so enlarged as to include all the space between the earth and the starry heavens. Suppose a drop of water to be annihilated once in a thousand years; yet that whole space of duration, wherein this ocean would be annihilating at the rate of one drop in a thousand years, would be infinitely less in proportion to eternity than one drop of water to that whole ocean. See the spirits of the righteous that are already praising God in a happy eternity! We are ready to say, “How short will it appear to those who drink of the rivers of pleasure at God’s right hand!” We are ready to cry out:
“A day without night They dwell in his sight, And eternity seems as a day!”
But this is only speaking after the manner of men; for the measures of long and short are only applicable to time, which admits of bounds, and not to unbounded duration. This rolls on (according to our low conceptions) with unutterable, inconceivable swiftness; if one would not rather say, it does not roll or move at all, but is one still, immovable ocean. For the inhabitants of heaven “rest not day and night,” but continually cry, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord, the God, the Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come!” And when millions of ages are elapsed, their eternity is but just begun.… What then is he, how foolish, how mad, in how unutterable a degree of distraction, who, seeming to have the understanding of a man, deliberately prefers temporal things to eternal? Who (allowing that absurd, impossible supposition that wickedness is happiness—a supposition utterly contrary to all reason, as well as to matter of fact) prefers the happiness of a day, say a thousand years, to the happiness of eternity, in comparison of which, a thousand ages are infinitely less than a year, a day, a moment?—_Wesley’s Sermons._
There are some thoughts which, however old, are always new, either because they are so broad that we never learn them thoroughly, or because they are so intensely practical that their interest is always fresh.… Now, among such thoughts we may reckon that which all children know—that God loves every one of us with a special love. It is one of the commonest thoughts in religion, and yet so amazing that when we come to look steadily at it we come nigh to not believing it. God does not look at us merely in the mass and multitude. As we shall stand single and alone before his judgment seat, so do we stand, so have we always stood, single and alone before the eye of his boundless love. This is what each man has to believe of himself. From all eternity God determined to create me, not simply a fresh man, not simply the son of my parents, a new inhabitant of my native country, an additional soul to do the work of the nineteenth century. But he resolved to create me such as I am, the me by which I am myself, the me by which other people know me, a different me from any that have ever been created hitherto, and from any that will be created hereafter. Unnumbered possible creatures which God saw when he chose me, he left to remain in their nothingness. They might have worshiped him a thousand times better than I shall ever worship him. They might have been higher, holier, and more interesting. But there was some nameless thing about me which he preferred. His love fastened on something special in me. It was just me, with my individual peculiarities, the size, shape, fashion, and way of my particular, single, unmated soul, which in the calmness of his eternal predilection drew him to create me.…