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enters the spiritual world.

But he does not

enter heaven, even though a descendant of Abraham. Hereditary evil was entailed on all the children of the first Adam, which the ceremonial law had no power to remove. Jew and Gentile alike must have passed into the mediate realm where the people of God wait the coming redemption. By the deeds of the Law no man who has ever lived can be justified.

4. But Christ has appeared, and the redemption comes. He appeared on earth; he died and entered the mediate realm, and rose out of it into heaven, the first fruits of them that waited in those preliminary abodes. And he promised a second appearing out of the heavens to which he has gone.

5. What the Law could not do, the Son of God is mighty to accomplish. He can remove the hereditary curse laid upon humanity by the first Adam, for in the second Adam shall all be made alive. At the second coming of Christ with his angels, or the opening down of heaven to the earth and into Hades, all who belong to him will be raised up, and meet the Lord in the skies, and be with him for ever. Those who belong not to him, that is, whose inmost life is not in unison with his divine perfections, will be driven

from "the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power"; and thus the second coming will bring on the judgment-day, and Hades will be

cleared of its inhabitants.

6. Those Christians who live to see that time will be "changed," without resting in the mediate place of souls. The entailed curse shall cling to God's people no more, but under the new redemptive force now made available to the race, the death-realm shall have no power to retain the believer in Christ, and "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord."

These several points are brought out in Paul's writings, now for one purpose and now for another, sometimes to confute the Jew, sometimes the Gnostic, and sometimes the half-believing Gentile. Whatever heresy he finds invading the Church, he confronts it with that special truth adapted to bear it down. It is only when you gather them together that you see their severe logical coherence, each fitting into a comprehensive plan of Christian doctrine, and harmonizing with the teachings of Christ, and showing that the ideas and the imagery that clothes them flowed into his mind from the same fountain of inspiration.

In treating of the resurrection of Christ, we saw that the phrase in its extended signification did not mean merely the reanimation of the natural body on the third day, but the whole process through which Christ emerged out of earthly conditions to his place of power on high. The reader will be impressed with the close congruity between the resurrection of the Divine Exemplar and that of all his followers, as illustrated in the Pauline pneumatology. As a universal fact applicable to all mankind, the resurrection is the emergence of the spiritual body out of mortal decay into immortal existence. But applied specially to the people of Christ, it includes the glorious adjuncts of that fact,-rising out of the mediate state, freed from the whole burden of evil, to complete redemption with Christ on high. As a universal fact, it is that stage through which every one must pass in his transit to immortality. It is the fact with those concomitants so auspicious and animating to the Christian believer, that Paul treats of in his first letter to the Corinthians. It is the emergence of the spiritual body out of mortal dissolution, and its further emergence out of the Hadean shadows, that inspire the exclamation of double triumph,-"O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?"

CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

OUR object in the preceding pages has been accomplished, if we have brought out in bold relief the Pauline philosophy respecting the immortal life. It has not fallen in with our plan to show how it accords with the universal reason, or how it is necessitated in the development of the well-known principles of human nature. We are persuaded, however, that after the sectarian theologies have all perished, after the tangles of metaphysics in which they sought to involve the great Apostle have been brushed away by time, after Romanism and Protestantism have both subsided, and a universal theology, having its scientific basis in the indisputable facts of nature and psychology, shall have taken their place, his writings more than ever will be regarded as the utterance of a reason that transcends that of man and speaks to the ages.

What is it to be prepared for heaven? It is to

be entirely regenerated, to have the last remnant of evil extinguished within us, and angelic affections unfolded, so as to fill our whole nature, and become solely effusive in all our speech and actions. Entire regeneration has not been accomplished until all necessity for self-denial has ceased, and the Divine Love has a spontaneous flow into our whole external life. So long as there is self-denial, there is conflict between the Holy Spirit working in us and our own unextinguished selfishness. We are as yet in the Church militant, not in the Church triumphant. Our redemption is but partial, so long as there is not perfect harmony between our external and internal man. When the external man with its passions and appetites, down to the very body which it wears, has become cleansed of evil and interfused by the Divine Love from within so as to bend to it spontaneously in all its motions, all conflict ceases; the whole nature is a unit, and redemption is complete. Then "it is finished," and, the thin veil of mortality dropping from around us, we should stand forth glorified. This is the heavenly state in its fulness, and he who has attained to it has only to be freed of the natural body to find himself the companion of angels.

None can say how many have thus attained since Christ hath become a new power in human

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