Notes:
Sermon 54: On Eternity
An Introductory Comment
This is Wesley’s deepest plunge into speculative theology up to this point in his career. It was not written until June 28, 1786; it had been printed in Vol. IX (1786) of the Magazine (November and December) without a title, which seems to have been supplied (by Wesley?) when it appeared as the first sermon in SOSO, V (1788). There is no record of Wesley’s ever having preached from Ps. 90:2 on any other occasion.
On EternityPsalm 90:2
From everlasting to everlasting thou art God.
1. I would fain speak of that awful subject, eternity. But how can we grasp it in our thought? It is so vast that the narrow mind of man is utterly unable to comprehend it. But does it not bear some affinity to another incomprehensible thing, immensity? May not space, though an unsubstantial thing, be compared with another unsubstantial thing, duration? But what is immensity? It is boundless space. And what is eternity? It is boundless duration.
2. Eternity has generally been considered as divisible into two parts, which have been termed eternity a parte ante, and eternity a parte post
The then familiar scholastic distinction (regarding ‘boundless duration’) between aeternitas a parte ante and aeternitas a parte post. Cf. the note (No. 25) in Cowley, Pindarique Odes, ‘The Muse’, on ‘the two sorts of eternity: from the present backwards…and from the present forwards’. Wesley repeats this notion in §7, below. His two most important sources here are Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xvii.10ff.; and Clarke, Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Propositions I-III. But see also Prior’s Solomon, iii.613-18:
And cf. Addison, Evidences of the Christian Religion (London, ‘Cooke’s edition’, n.d.), p. 67: ‘We consider eternity, or infinite duration, as a line that has neither a beginning nor end…. In our speculations of eternity we consider the time which is present to us as the middle, which divides the whole line into equal parts. For this reason, many witty authors compare the present time to an isthmus, or narrow neck of land, that rises in the midst of an ocean, immeasurably diffused on either side of it…. Philosophy (and indeed common sense) naturally throws eternity under two divisions: which we may call in English, that eternity which is past and that eternity which is to come. The learned terms of aeternitas a parte ante and aeternitas a parte post…can have no other ideas affixed to them….’
3. It is God alone who (to use the exalted language of Scripture) ‘inhabiteth eternity’
Isa. 57:15.
AM, SOSO, ‘it is’, altered by Wesley in his MS annotations in AM to ‘his’.
Cf. Isa. 7:14; Matt. 1:23.
Samuel Wesley, Jun., ‘An Hymn to God the Son’, Poems (1736), p. 3. Here Wesley follows his own version from his Collection of Psalms and Hymns (Charleston, 1737), pp. 12-13; in his Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems (1744), III.180-81, he restored his brother’s orig. reading in st. 1, l. 3, ‘through one half-round’.
02:360And again,
4. ‘E’er time began to be.’—But what is time? It is not easy to say, as frequently as we have had the word in our mouth. We know not what it properly is: we cannot well tell how to define it. But is it not in some sense a fragment of eternity, broken off at both ends?
Cf. Augustine, Confessions, XI.xiv-xxvi, XII.xxix. See also No. 58, On Predestination, §5.
I.e., sidereal time, time measured by reference to the motions of the stars. Cf. OED for this usage as early as 1681.
See Rev. 20:11.
Cf. Richard Blackmore, ‘Essay on the Immortality of the Soul’, in Essays on Several Subjects (London, 1716), p. 295: ‘the boundless ocean of eternity’. See also Hervey, Theron and Aspasio, II.356: ‘a fathomless abyss, a vast eternity’. Cf. also Nos. 21, ‘Sermon on the Mount, I’, II.6; and 33, ‘Sermon on the Mount, XIII’, III.7, where Wesley has already used this phrase.
5. But by what means can a mortal man, the creature of a day,
Pindar, Pythian Odes, viii.95. Cf. Wesley’s first Preface (1746), §5.
Mark 4:30.
Jer. 23:24.
Charles Wesley, ‘An Hymn for Seriousness’, ver. 2, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749), I.34 (Poet. Wk., IV.316). Orig.,‘Twixt two unbounded seas’ and ‘A point of life’. Cf. Prior, Solomon, iii.613-18; and Cowley, Pindarique Odes, ‘Life and Fame’, st. 1. See also William Reeves, Fourteen Sermons…, p. 327:
Cf. also, George Lillo, Arden of Feversham (1739), Act III, sc. 3:
For a similar metaphor, cf. No. 146, ‘The One Thing Needful’, §3, where Wesley speaks of man ‘placed on a narrow, weak, tottering bridge, whereof either end was swallowed up in eternity’.
6. But leaving one of these unbounded seas to the Father of eternity, to whom alone duration without beginning belongs, let us turn our thoughts on duration without end. This is not an incommunicable attribute of the great Creator; but he has been graciously pleased to make innumerable multitudes of his creatures partakers of it. He has imparted this not only to angels, and archangels, and all the companies of heaven,
See BCP, Communion, Pref. to the Sanctus.
Job 4:19. Cf. No. 28, ‘Sermon on the Mount, VIII’, §21 and n.
Ibid.
>Cf. Wisd. 2:23. See No. 120, ‘The Unity of the Divine Being’, §8.
7. Perhaps we may go a step farther still. Is not matter itself, as well as spirit, in one sense eternal? Not indeed a parte ante, as some senseless philosophers, both ancient and modern, have dreamed. Not that anything had existed from eternity; seeing if so it must be God. Yea, it must be the one God; for it is impossible 02:362there should be two Gods, or two Eternals.
Cf. Clarke, Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Proposition VII; see also, Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), p. 119: ‘…all the ancient atheists…did at once deny both eternities to the world: past and future.’
>Cf. above, §2 and n. Both AM and SOSO read ‘remain in one and the same’, surely an uncorrected error.
The notion of the conservation of matter had become a scientific commonplace by Wesley’s time; cf. Cudworth, op. cit., pp. 119-20. Wesley extended the principle to include organic life in his Survey, II.147. See also No. 15, The Great Assize, III.3 and n.
>Num. 23:19.
Cf. No. 15, The Great Assize, III.4 and n.
A switch from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xv. 234, where it is said that time is ‘the devourer of all things’. Here ‘ethereal fire’ is identified as edax rerum.
Johnson, Dictionary, defines ‘menstruum’ as a ‘dissolvent’, especially ‘of metals’; in Wesley’s Dictionary it is defined as ‘any dissolving liquor’.
I.e., ‘disintegrating power’. Is this a typographical error for ‘discoherence’, or is it a neologism? Cf. OED for an adjectival use (from the Lat. verb discohaere) but none for the noun.
See Bacon’s analysis of ‘Heat’ under three ‘Tables’ (of ‘Essence’, ‘Deviations’, and ‘Degrees’) in Works, ed. by Spedding et al. (1869), I.354-84. But cf. Wesley’s comment on linum asbestum in No. 73, ‘Of Hell’, II.6.
>Cf. 2 Pet. 3:12.
8. But still we would inquire, ‘What is this eternity?’ How shall we pour any light upon this abstruse subject? It cannot be the object of our understanding. And with what comparison shall we compare it?
Mark 4:30.
The votive column in the centre of the largest of the imperial fora in Rome, close by the present day Piazza Venezia; it still is very nearly intact. The column itself is ninety-seven feet high, dates from A.D. 113, and in a spiral frieze a yard wide and six hundred fifty feet long commemorates Trajan’s conquest of Dacia.
>An imperial theatre dating from 52 B.C. The contour of its stage is traced now by the Via di Chiavari as it leads into the eighteenth-century Teatro Argentina. The Piazza de Teatro di Pompeo covers what was the seating space. Pompey’s colossal statue is preserved in the Palazza Spada in the Campo di Fiori.
>I.e., Etruscan, the largest surviving collection of which is in the Villa Giulia in Rome; another is in the Etruscan Museum in Orvieto.
>Egypt was often included in ‘the grand tour’ by English travellers and scholars in the eighteenth century; there is a large literature on the then remaining monuments of ancient Egypt (espec. ‘Grand Cairo’, the Pyramids, and the Sphinx); cf., e g., Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743), Vol. I; and Samuel Clarke, A Mirrour or Looking-Glasse (1654), pp. 608-11. See also, Charles Rollin, Ancient History (1738), I.43-48. For other references to the pyramids, cf. Nos. 78, ‘Spiritual Idolatry’, I.7; 102, ‘Of Former Times’, §4. See also, Survey, I.108, V.142.
>Gen. 49:26.
Orig., AM, ‘add a million, a million of millions’, altered in Wesley’s MS annotations.
>See Ps. 90:2.
9. Are we able to form a more adequate conception of eternity to come? In order to this let us compare it with the several degrees of duration which we are acquainted with. An ephemeron fly lives six hours, from six in the evening to twelve.
This reference extends Chambers’s Cyclopaedia estimate by an hour: ‘[The ephemeron fly] is born about six a clock in the evening and dies about eleven…. It never eats from the time of its change to death.’ Cf. Oliver Goldsmith, History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), VII.361-62, and Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (1724), p. 2, which cites William Derham’s Physico-Theology (1716), Bk. VIII, for a discussion of the ‘ichneumon fly-kind’. See also, Wesley’s Survey, II.17.
Cf. Gen. 5:27.
10. In order to illustrate this a late author has repeated that striking thought of St. Cyprian. Suppose there were a ball of sand as large as the globe of earth; suppose a grain of this sand were to be annihilated, reduced to nothing, in a thousand years; yet that whole space of duration wherein this ball would be annihilating, at the rate of one grain in a thousand years, would bear infinitely less proportion to eternity—duration without end—than a single grain of sand would bear to all that mass.
This reference has not been located in the writings of St. Cyprian. The ‘late author’ here was almost certainly Addison, in The Spectator, No. 575 (Mon., Aug. 2, 1714), who cites as his source, not St. Cyprian, but ‘one of the schoolmen’. Addison goes on: ‘Supposing the whole body of the earth were a great ball or mass of the finest sand and that a single grain or particle of this sand should be annihilated every thousand years? Etc.’ The same simile had been used earlier by John Flavell in Navigation Spiritualized (1682; see Works, 1740, II.318), where the cited sources are ‘both Gerhard and Drexelius’, not Cyprian. Again, it appears in Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (1720; Edinburgh, 1812), State IV, Head, vi, p. 443, still with no attribution to Cyprian. More recently, as evidence of its belonging to a larger lore, one may find the simile in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, J. Cape, 1956), pp. 131-32, with no attribution at all. Wesley would use it more than once again, as in Nos. 84, The Important Question, III.13; 103, ‘What is Man? Ps. 8:3-4’, II.3; and 118, ‘On the Omnipresence of God’, I.3.
11. 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 this 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.
Look then at those immortal spirits, whether they are in this or the other world. When they shall have lived thousands of thousands of years, yea, millions of millions of ages, their duration will be but just begun: they will be only upon the threshold of eternity.
12. But besides this division of eternity into that which is past and that which is to come, there is another division of eternity which is of unspeakable importance. That which is to come, as it relates to immortal spirits, is either a happy or a miserable eternity.
13. 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
See Ps. 36:8 (AV).
Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749), II.314 (Poet. Wks., V.458). Orig., ‘We feast in his sight.’
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 02:366of heaven ‘cease not day or night’, but ‘continually cry, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord, the God, the Almighty; who was, and who is, and who is to come!’
Cf. Rev. 4:8.
14. On the other hand, in what a condition are those immortal spirits who have made choice of a miserable eternity! I say, made choice; for it is impossible this should be the lot of any creature but by his own act and deed. The day is coming when every soul will be constrained to acknowledge in the sight of men and angels,
John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), p. 133 (Poet Wks., III.33). Orig.:
See No. 84, The Important Question, III (proem) and n. Another hymn by this title appears at the end of No. 110, Free Grace.
In what condition will such a spirit be after the sentence is executed: ‘Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels!’
Matt. 25:41.
Rev. 19:20.
Rev. 14:11.
15. 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 02:367reason, as well as to matter of fact)
>Cf. Eccles. 12:7.
How often would he who had made the wretched choice wish for the death both of his soul and body! It is not impossible he might pray in some such manner as Dr. Young supposes—
16. Yet this unspeakable folly, this unutterable madness, of preferring present things to eternal is the disease of every man born into the world, while in his natural state.
17. This remedy is faith. I do not mean that which is the faith of a heathen, who believes that there is a God, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him;
Cf. Heb. 11:6. For ‘the faith of a heathen’, cf. No. 1, Salvation by Faith, I.2 and n.
>Heb. 11:1.
>Cf. Eph. 1:18; 1 Cor. 2:10-12.
Another favourite quotation from a stage play; cf. John Hughes, The Siege of Damascus (first produced on the day of the author’s death, Feb. 17, 1720), III.i.205-11 [speaking of death]:
Note Hughes’s use of ‘verge’ as a noun; Wesley changed the syntax to use ‘hangs’ as a verb. Wesley’s version appears, in quotation marks, in No. 119, ‘Walking by Sight and Walking by Faith’, §6; and also in Serious Thoughts on the Earthquake in Lisbon. It also appears in No. 117, ‘On the Discoveries of Faith’, §8, without quotation marks.
02:369When
Accordingly a believer (in the scriptural sense) lives in eternity, and walks in eternity. His prospect is enlarged. His view is not any longer bounded by present things;
Cf. Addison, Cato >, Act V, sc. 1; see also, No. 117, ‘On the Discoveries of Faith’, §8 and n.
Milton, Paradise Lost, vi.78. Cf. also Nos. 71, ‘Of Good Angels’, I.2; 115, ‘Dives and Lazarus’, I.6; and 132, ‘On Faith, Heb. 11:1’, §7.
these are not his aim, the object of his pursuit, his desire, or happiness—‘but at the things that are not seen’; at the favour, the image, and the glory of God; as well knowing that ‘the things which are seen are temporal’, a vapour, a shadow, a dream that vanishes away;
See Jas. 4:14.
>2 Cor. 4:18.
18. What then can be a fitter employment for a wise man than to meditate upon these things? Frequently to expand his thoughts ‘beyond the bounds of this diurnal sphere’,
A paraphrase of Milton, Paradise Lost, vii.21-22; see also No. 70, ‘The Case of Reason Impartially Considered’, II.4.
The point here (Socrates’s deflation of Alcibiades’s arrogance) is a theme of the pseudo-Platonic Alcibiades I, along with a reference to his ‘huge possessions’ (in §104) and a disparaging comparison between the vast landholdings of Persian royalty and Alcibiades’s ‘three hundred acre farm at Erchiae’ (§123). But this is not the source of this anecdote of Wesley. Nor does it appear in Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates, nor Plutarch’s ‘Life of Alcibiades’, nor even in John Gilbert Cooper, whose biography of Socrates (1739) was Wesley’s source for his comment on Socrates’s daimon (see No. 71, ‘Of Good Angels’, §2 and n.). One may guess that it belonged to a common stock of Socratic lore that Wesley shared. But whence?
Cf. Young, The Last Day, ii.221; and Wesley’s Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems (1744), II.80. See also Nos. 103, ‘What is Man? Ps. 8:3-4’, Proem; and 119, ‘Walking by Sight and Walking by Faith’, §4, where the phrase does appear as a quotation.
19. But if naked eternity, so to speak, be so vast, so astonishing an object as even to overwhelm your thought, how does it still enlarge the idea to behold it clothed with either happiness or misery! Eternal bliss or pain! Everlasting happiness, or everlasting misery! One would think it would swallow up every other thought in every reasonable creature. Allow me only this: ‘Thou art on the brink of either a happy or miserable eternity.’ 02:371Thy Creator bids thee now stretch out thy hand either to the one or the other—and one would imagine no rational creature could think on anything else. One would suppose that this single point would engross his whole attention. Certainly it ought so to do; certainly if these things are so there can be but one thing needful. O let you and I at least, whatever others do, choose that better part which shall never be taken away from us!
See Luke 10:42.
20. Before I close this subject permit me to touch upon two remarkable passages in the Psalms (one in the eighth, the other in the one hundred and forty-fourth) which bear a near relation to it. The former is: ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man that thou visitest him?’
Cf. Ps. 8:3-4.
>Ps. 144:3-4 (BCP).
I.e., of 1611. Cf. also No. 103, ‘What is Man? Ps. 8:3-4’, II.4, where Wesley makes this point again. For other comments about the AV, cf. JWJ, Sept. 14, 1785, and Apr. 22, 1787; and No. 51, The Good Steward, II.8.
Epworth, June 28, 1786
How to Cite This Entry
Bibliography:
, “.” In , edited by . , 2024. Entry published February 28, 2024. https://wesleyworks.ecdsdev.org/sermons/Sermon054.About this Entry
Entry Title: Sermon 54: On Eternity