Anne Dutton's
Letters on Spiritual Subjects
Dear Sir,
I sympathize with you in your trials and trust the Lord will do you good by
all, while He makes them a means to exercise your graces and to prepare you
for your crown. Oh, that glory reserved for us in heaven! That
incorruptible, undefiled, and unfadeable inheritance of which we are now
heirs and shall before long be possessors! How delightfully shall our
capacious souls drink their fill of these rivers of pleasures which are at
God's right hand for evermore. We shall be done then with all our bitter
things, sin and the effects of it, and be filled with the heavenly sweets of
that everlasting feast prepared for us in the immediate vision of God and
the Lamb to eternity.
My longing soul ofttimes stretches forth the wings of its
desires after this glory, and is greatly comforted in believing views of
that life and immortality which I shall enter into when this earthly
tabernacle is taken down, which, through diseases and weakness is often, in
my own apprehension, just ready to crumble into its original dust.
Oh, the transcendent, soul-attracting glories of
that house, that building of God, eternal in the heavens, which I know
through grace is prepared for me! I groan, being burdened in this tabernacle
by reason of the sinfulness of my soul and the weakness of my body, both
which hinder me from loving and serving my God as I would; and I long for
immortality, not merely that I would be unclothed, but clothed with the
glory prepared for me there.
The thoughts of death, as it will be to me an entering
into life, have been very pleasant to me of late; and if a distant glimpse
of that glory be so sweet, even while our views of it are so clouded with
unbelief and darkness, what a ravishing prospect shall we have when taken
home to be forever with the Lord, and shall see with the veil cast off!