Word, breaking on the soul in clearer splendor, so as to search it and show its quality? what but the voice of truth sent home to the conscience, as if tongued for a sharper utterance? Conceive all men to have passed from earth into a mediate state in the spiritual world, each one bearing his own affinities, and polarized with the love of the good and the true, or of the evil and the false. Conceive, moreover, that into such mediate world the Christ shall appear, and the heavens open down their angelic illuminations. What must follow from the irrepealable laws of the human mind? Exactly what is here described, or rather painted by the Divine pencil in colors of flame. The peoples and nations would be cloven asunder, part drawn up among the blest societies, and part repelled or driven deeper down among the coverings of darkness, and "Hades" would be emptied of its inhabitants. What the primitive Church believed universally, what the Apostles preached with fragmentary speech, we have here set forth in majestic utterance, not as the arbitrary appointment of God, but as the grand result of the eternal laws of being. Must not this be so, we exclaim, even if no Bible had ever told us! We do not say that the doctrine of a mediate state is asserted in terms in this discourse of our Saviour; we say it is presupposed, and we are confident that no other view can give his language a tolerable explanation.

We are now prepared to take in the plenary sense of a passage to which we have twice referred, but to which until now we could not offer a complete illustration. "Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil to the resurrection of damnation." (John v. 28, 29.) The leading terms of this passage we have already explained. The "voice of the Son of Man" is Christianity preached and applied, or, what is the same thing, the efflux of Divine truth as it touches the conscience. And it is obvious now why Christ enounces here a universal rule of judgment, to be applied to all men, not only to those who were then living, but to all who had ever lived or ever should live. "The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man." And immediately after, "The hour is coming when ALL WHO ARE IN THE GRAVES" shall hear the same voice; and here the Saviour sends forward his thought to the gathering-place of all the peoples, where every soul shall be opened up to the same truth which he was declaring on the earth; shall have its quality shown and its class and order assigned to it in the ranks of the universe. Not only those who have heard Christ preached on the earth, but all

that have ever lived, shall hear the Gospel and be judged by the Gospel, according as they have "done good" or "done evil," under previous privilege, or by such light of nature as had been given them while living in the flesh.

John vi. 39: "This is the Father's will who hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day." Verse 44: "No man can come to me except the Father that hath sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day." John xii. 48: "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day." "The last day" is a phrase which has been so appropriated to describe an imaginary destruction of this material structure, that the clear force of this language is liable to escape us. And yet nothing could be in more complete harmony with our preceding expositions, than these words of our Saviour. It is evident to us that "the last day" means that grand crisis of humanity referred to all through the New Testament, and that these sweet and blessed promises of our Lord, alike with the warnings of the passage last quoted, point to the solemn results of that crisis. "I will raise him up at the last day," is the same as saying, I will draw him up from the mediate

state into the angelic abodes by the bonds of attractive love, when the separating judgment shall come on, and each determines to the place he loves, as doves that fly to their windows.

CHAPTER V.

ST. PAUL ON THE RESURRECTION.

ST. PAUL was born and educated in a city where flourished the most celebrated schools of the Grecian philosophy. Afterwards he went up to Jerusalem, and there at the feet of Gamaliel, the most distinguished of the Jewish Rabbins, who was called afterwards the Beauty of the Law, his mind was stored with Hebrew learning, and imbibed the very spirit of the Jewish theology. He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and though he had become familiar while at Tarsus with the Greek language, literature, and philosophy, he adhered firmly to the faith of his fathers. Of course his mind had become thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of his sect touching the resurrection of the dead, and the formulas under which they bodied forth their doctrine had become to him as household words. Christianity came afterwards, using the same forms of speech and imagery on this subject, which, however, were