ETERNITY by Hervey

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 27, 1868

ETERNITY

By Hervey

O ETERNITY! eternity! How are our noblest, our strongest thoughts lost and overwhelmed in thee! Who can set landmarks to limit thy dimensions, or find plummets to fathom thy depths! Mathematicians have figures to compute all the progressions of time; astronomers have instruments to calculate the distances of the planets; but what numbers can state, what lines can gauge the length and breadth of eternity! “It is higher than heaven, what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, broader than the sea.” Mysterious, mighty existence! A sum not to be lessened by the largest deductions; an extent not to be contracted by all possible diminutions. None can truly say, after the most prodigious waste of ages, “So much of eternity is gone.” For when millions of centuries are passed it

is but just commencing, and when millions more have run their ample round it will be no nearer ending. Yes, when ages, numerous as the bloom of spring increased by the herbage of summer, both augmented by the leaves of autumn, and all multiplied by the drops of rain which drown the winter—when these and ten thousand times ten thousand more, more than can be represented by any similitude, or imagined by any conception, when all these are revolved and finished, eternity, vast, boundless eternity, will only be commencing.—Hervey.