Augustus Charles Thompson

The Better Land Augustus Charles Thompson

Reproduced from the 1858 edition. In its original format. Having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, they are persuaded of them, and embrace them, and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth, - that they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly. It is too late in the history of a race groping in darkness, to embark in an attempt to find the garden that was planted eastward in Eden. In former times there was, to be sure, no geographical problem which awakened so much interest as that ancient locality. No other has given rise to such extravagant opinions. Some of the allegorizing fathers believed there never was, actually, any Paradise; that it existed only in metaphor. Others, allowing it a local reality, placed it in the third heaven, in the moon, in the air, under the earth, where the Caspian Sea now is, and under the equator. Classical nations pictured their traditional Paradise, the Garden of Hesperides, as an island, or islands, somewhere in the ocean. There have been those who supposed that the primitive abode of man was in Ceylon, in Tartary, in Sweden, on the Danube, in Ethiopia, or among the Mountains of the Moon in Africa. There are, indeed, other and comparatively probable theories; but it must be confessed impossible to identify the precise spot of the present globe where our first parents were originally placed. The sooner men give up searching for a terrestrial Eden, and direct their inquiries after the Paradise of God, the better. Hebrews 11:16: But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.