And as we look on, we feel that there is a meaning for us, one on which instinctively we repose, as the first and dearest of the many proofs Scripture gives us, that when like him we die, in him we shall also live again, that "to depart, is to be with Christ," that immortality springs very speedily out of mortality, that, in a word, when a man dies, and immediately after he dies, he lives again. And so And so strong and convincing are the persuasions from this and other utterances of the New Testament, in favor of an instant assumption of life immortal when death has dealt with us, that, as we have shown you, nearly all Christian believers, differing on a score of other dogmas, differing even as to the circumstances and characteristics of this, yet agree in the essential point, that, mortal being ended, immortal being is begun. In the second place. If then, such be the Scripture doctrine in respect to the future life, what construction must we place on those passages which seem to assert the dogma of a yet future, and universal res urrection. These, in the New Testament, are only two in number. We need scarcely say that in the Old there are none. For that in the xii of Daniel, where it is said that many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt," is a prediction, not of the resurrection of all, but of many men, and by all good critics, I believe, is now applied to the national and political recovery of the Jewish people from the terrible oppressions of Antiochus Epiphanes. In the New Testament, the xv. of 1 Corinthians, and the last paragraph of the iv. chapter of 1st Thessalonians, include all the information given us in the Bible on the subject. We propose no searching or extended examination of these passages. We shall offer only a few general observatious in reference to the dogma they are supposed to teach, and to what we think they really do teach. en] saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted." He was the same, yet he seemed not quite the same, and they doubted, but they worshipped. In the 1st place in this much at least, all Christians will coincide; that by what ever dogma, whether that of a simultaneous or of an individual resurrection, the doc trine enforced in both passages is that of a future and immortal life. But what provoked the apostle to elaborate that truth at such length, and so vividly as he has done in these two instances? His allusions to it in his epistles to both churches, the Corinthians and the Thessalonians, are frequent and decided, and doubtless they were so also in his personal ministry among them. They could not have been ignorant that he believed and taught it as an essential of the gospel. Why then dwell upon it in the two letters so largely, and with such care and force? The causes were very similar at Corinth and Thessalonica. Some of the members of the church of the former city, though believing the resurrection of Christ as a historic fact, too recent and well attested to be doubted, were devoid of an equally confident faith in the resurrection of men. "How say some among you that there is no resurrection from the dead?" (verse 12.) Where a part were found using language so unhesitating in its infidelity, the apostle might well feel alarm for the general soundness. And to stem the spread of an unbelief so fatal to the whole Christian faith, he writes the earnest, vehement, and pictorial xv chapter of his 1st epistle to them. Similarly in the church at Thessalonica, we find that some were mourning over their dead, as he intimates, like the heathen who had no hope. And to them does he address that equally picturesque sketch in the iv of 1st Thessalonians. His object in both cases, you see, was, not to furnish us with details of the mode by which we shall enter upon the future being, but to convince them of the fact that there is such a state, that "those" who to us seem to "sleep, shall God bring with him in Jesus." Now how shall he accomplish this with the greatest certainty of success? How shall he quicken and possess their whole minds and hearts with an assurance of it, which shall never forsake them? He is a Jew, they Greeks and Jews; all with the bounding blood of the Orient in their veins, vivid of fancy, and familiar with imagery. Can he, no so describe, but so depict it to the eye' that as they read, the sky shall seem to kindle with the glory of the Lord, and the air grow populous with departed multitudes, while with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God," Christ shall sweep from heaven to catch them up to himself and to those already with him, once lost, still loved, and now their own again in the Lord, and with the Lord forever! Jesus, while on earth, wishing to predict the overthrow of his foes, the deliverance of his friends, and the recompense to be bestowed on those among their countrymen who befriended them,-who ministered unto them when they were an hungered, or athirst, or sick, or in prison, throws his prophecy into drama, and the Son of Man ascends the throne of his glory, surrounded by multitudes of his Father's angels, ga hers all nations before him, separates them as a shepherd his sheep from his goats, setting the protectors and friends of his disciples on his right, their adversaries on his left hand, themselves before him, and makes their cause his own. Then, with the words, "Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me," promoting their Benefactors to the Kingdom of his Father, thus realizing his promise that he who gave even a cup of cold water to a disciple, should have his reward, he expels their Adversaries into an everlasting banishment from the Holy City, and the Temple where dwelt the Presence of the Lord, and to a torment which should burn like everlasting fire; and these go away into everlasting punishment, those into life pomp and majesty of such a scene, was designed simply to enforce the fact that the cause of his disciples would be vindicated by the establishment of the religion of which they were the ministers, and the utter overthrow of its adversaries, does Paul assume too large a liberty, when, either in xv Corinthians or iv Thessaloni ans, to enforce the far more glorious truth of our resurrection from death to an immortal being, he too dramatizes, and sounds the trump, and summons the dead to rise simultaneously from corruption to incorruption, from mortal to immortality, till, roused by the grandeurs he has conjured to a rapture of enthusiasm, he peals forth the shout, 'Death henceforward, is swallowed up in victory; Oh Death, where now thy sting, where now, O hell, thy victory?" There is another remarkable coincidence between these extracts from Paul, and that from Christ. Both, scenically crush into the lapse of at most a few hours, occurrences which actually pervade all time. The demolition of Judaism, and the secure establishment of Christianity, were only the initiatory incidents which signalized the assumption by Christ, of the moral and spiritual government of mankind. He then entered upon that kingdom which had been prepared for him and his followers from the foundation of the world, and these were the conspicuous intimations that he had begun to reign. Yet they only are specified and illustrated with all the wealth of the most transcendent imagery. But that reign of the Son of Man, to which he elsewhere alludes when he tells us that the Father hath "put all things into his hands," and "has given him authority to execute judgment, (exercise government) because he is the Son of Man Now if his Master, under such hyper-extends over all time, claims us and all bolic images, could thus symbolize the ruin Christian peoples as its subjects now, and of the Jewish state and policv, and the de- will find its consummation only in a uniliverance from its persecution of his own verse reconciled to holiness and God, adherents, whether believers or the patrons of believers, if the throne of glory, and its attendant angels, and the "all nations "* assembled round it, and all the eternal. * For the loose sense in which this comprehensive phrase is used here by Christ, let the reader turn to the preceding (xxiv chapter of the sorrows And before that generation passed, and "the whether in eternity or time. And all this is hinted in the first verse of the paragraph, which shows us the Son of Man for the first time, securely seated upon the throne of his glory, with all the holy angels for his ministers. There he mounts the seat from which he is to descend only when the whole creation is won back to God. "For he must reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet, till death, the last foe, is vanquished, and God all in all." Yet in the scene he shows us in the XXV of Matthew, he sums up, and comprises the events of thousands of years, in the visible transactions of a drama, which, if we take it literally, might be compressed into the interval of an hour. And so Paul, in one grand tableau, represents a series of ten thousand, it may be ten millions of years. Nearly nineteen hundred of them have elapsed since he painted it, and myriads of human, have become heavenly spirits during their passage. And, irrespective of his details, of the accompaniments and accessories of his representation, every one of these, we believe, dying in Adam has been made alive in Christ, every man in his own order, the order of his succession from death to immortality. We think it quite likely that along with a conviction of the truth of a future life in heaven, the two churches he addressed. might also receive from his depiction, the impression that the entrance on that life was to be solemnized by some imposing manifestation to the world at large, of an opening heaven, and a descending Christ, begirt with heavenly legions, halting in mid air, and, first summoning to his side those who had already died in the interval between his death and his re-appearance, catching up next, together with them in the clouds, those still alive and remaining, that so all should be forever with the Lord. They might, too,-nay, from 2 Thessalonians, we learn they did infer from his vivid sketch in 1st Thessalonians, that all was to take place speedily, in a very few years, perhaps a few months at farthest. Of this mistake as to the accompanying manifestations of the resurrection, and the precise term when their immortality should begin, so he could but possess them with a vital faith in its reality, the apostle would reck but little. When, indeed, their misconceptions on these points yeasted into a feverish impatience for the instant arrival of the coming of Christ, disturbing and unfitting them for their worldly duties, he admonishes them in his 2d Epistle, that they "be not soon shaken in mind, or troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word," nor by his own former epistle, with the anticipation "that the day of Christ is at hand; " and he beseeches the Lord to direct their hearts into "a patient waiting for Christ." (2 Thess. iii. 5.) But, the main object of his communication, their earnest persuasion of the doc trine of their own and their friends' resurrection from the dead, accomplished, Paul cared but little, we suspect, what unessential misapprehensions they might mingle with it, as to the circumstances, or the ex-act period of its occurrence. In regard to these, indeed, we are by no means certain how far he himself was en lightened by the Holy Ghost. The proph ets of the Old Testament were inspired to foresee and to proclaim the coming, the life, the death, and the resurrection of a Christ. But when he should come, and what was to be the nature of the salvation he was to bestow, with a thousand other particulars connected with his missionwere withheld from them. Read their prophecies carefully, and of this one grand fact we think you will feel assured, that they foresaw and forespoke a Messiah of their own nation, who was to bring salva tion to mankind. That fact they grasped with a firm and clear consciousness. But the details of time and mode, which they. disposed around it, were obscure and uncertain. 1 Peter i. " Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you; searching what, or what manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand, the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow." And I think it quite possible that Paul, similarly informed of the great truth of the resurrection of all men through Christ, and cherishing it as the most efficient motive of his life, may yet similarly too, have been left to doubt as to the period of its accomplishment. "Of that day and hour," said Jesus, of the overthrow of Judaism, "knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father. (Mark xiii. 32.) That, hid from the Only Begotten, is it incredible that something may have been withheld from Paul, on a still more momentous topic?—that perhaps he looked for some startling demonstration of immortality to signalize the advent of that “ day of the Lord," when the kingdom of his Master was to be delivered from the oppressions of Judaism, and liberated from its hampering connexion, by the overthrow of the Hebrew nation? Then "the Lord was to be revealed from heaven in flaming fire, to take vengeance on them who obeyed not the gospel of Christ." And with every allowance for the hyperbolical phraseology in which he predicts those occurrences, we do think we discern an expectation, now latent, and anon loudly uttered, of what he styles a manifestation of the Sons of God" to the world. That he thought it quite likely that he himself might yet be alive when those events transpired, has always seemed to us the most natural interpretation of his expressions, and we are gratified to find it endorsed in the admirable Life and Epistles of St. Paul, by Howson and Conybeare. That some heavenly display, perhaps some visible ascension of the saints, which, it might be, he might survive to share, would signalize the full establishment of his Master's church, when, the dawn past, the full bright day of the Lord began, that some such prospect as this fixed his thought, and even sug gested some of his figures, is, to us, the easiest and the most natural explanation of many of his expressions. Let us read, as perhaps the most conspicuous passage which reflects this remark, 1 Thess. iv. 13-18. 'But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore, comfort one another with these words.” Much of this is no doubt rhetorical and picturesque description, designed chiefly to carry the vital truth of the resurrection of the dead with such a vivid force into their hearts that it shall never be effaced, But under all the weight of imagery and illustration, we do think we detect in his mind, what elsewhere he calls an earnest waiting for" some scene and transaction of which his sentences shall be, not a description, no, but yet a presage, and perhaps an indefinite sketch. Once already had a light shone round him from heaven, when, blinded with glory and bewildered, he cried at his conversion, "who art thou Lord? Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” And, a heavenly manifestation, thus made for one man, should not a more affluent display of prodigy and splendor be accorded to the establishment of the church of Christ? That he should have thought so, is, I think, very natural; and that he did, is, I suspect, an idea which occurs often to the mind of every careful reader of numerous passages and allusions in his epistles. Yet, assuming that he did so believe, it is not a universal and simultaneous resurrection at the close of all things earthly, but one partial and local. A signal event in the world's history! Yes: but one, which, passed, that history should flow on again with all its current of human activities and experiences as before, with this difference only, that each human soul as it departs from the body, becomes present with the Lord, that "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ are all made alive, every man in his order." Whatever his expectations on the subject were, whether we are right or wrong in our conjecture con cerning them, this, at least, is clear, that they never for a moment disturbed his conviction that "to die is gain, to depart, and to be with Christ." If he were not alive and remaining when the Lord came, if previous to that event he died, why then "absent from the body, he should be present with the Lord." What can we make of expressions like these, but that, whatever expectations he might have of a demonstration of immortality of some kind possibly to be made at the coming of the Lord in the form of a partial resurrection, of this one thing he was very confident, that, prior or subsequent to any such occurrence, every human soul dismissed from earth by death, awake anew to life in Christ, and with Christ forever? This is the staple truth running under and running through all the argument and all the rhetoric of the xv of 1 Corinthians. And therefore, notwithstanding a verse or two apparently suggestive of a general resurrection, (and only two verses in the whole can be so construed,) very consistently and properly do we read that chapter as the burial service over all who die. For the cardinal truth it teaches, is, that dying in Adam, we are made alive in Christ, in the order in which we die. Our conclusion is, that no doctrine of a general and universal resurrection of human souls is inculcated in Scripture; that a simult: neous resurrection can be believed consistently only by those who believe also in a general day of judgment at the close of all earthly affairs; that, as Prof. Stuart asserts, whatever geology may teach of the destruction of the world, Scripture is silent upon the subject; and so, that the only hope we ought to have of a future and immortal life, is linked, not to a universal and simultaneous rising from the dead, but to an individual and immediate resurrection of the soul from death, through the redemption that is in That is so manifestly the doctrine of the New Testament, that it is Christ Jesus imperceptibly imbibed from it, even by those readers who think they also find there an assize of judgment, to which souls already adjudged to heaven and hell, are to be recalled and judged again. It is the doctrine inculcated by Paul even in those dramatic passages where he represents to the eye, the transition of the spirit from earth to heaven, surrounding the scene with imagery of grandest splendor. And whatever may have been his anticipations of some unusual manifestation of the Sons of God at the coming of the Lord, it is still his doctrine, that before and after that event, all who die, leaving the body, are present with the Lord; that when we cease to bear the image of the earthy we begin forthwith to bear the image of the heavenly. The doctrine of a simultaneous resurrection is but an integrant part of that of a general judgment at the close of time. We have discarded the latter as unsanc tioned by Scripture. Let the other follow for the same reason. Death is another Life. Another golden chamber of the King's, |