enly order, transfusing them with his own life and health, and purging them of all acquired or hereditary evil, and thence life and health spread through our animal frames, restoring them to a unison with divine laws. The inward nature in time transmutes the outward one, and will make it its befitting body and drapery, when not only individual but humanitary regeneration is complete. And again, as we shall see more fully in what follows, Christ brings the realm of immortality distinctly within the range of the eye of faith, making this life and the next one and continuous, so that to man as he essentially is, death is banished from the view and is no more.

Under whatever conditions it occurs, whether diseased or healthful, we cannot mistake the nature of mortal change. It is closing one set of perceptions, after man is to use them no longer. It is abolishing one set of relations, after the objects to which they bound us have accomplished all their intended work. Man may live in many worlds at once, but he can have open and conscious relations with only one at a time. He may live in many at once, for he has life concealed within life, and each world may act on the correspondent province of his being and put him in communion with it. But only one world is unveiled to him at a time and discloses its scenery, that in which his present duty lies. He may

attempt to break through and act in two at once, but when he does, confusion is the pretty sure result, the blending of activities which do not harmonize together, and which may clash with awful and maddening disorder. The veil which hangs between is the guard of an interposing and protecting mercy. If our course is indeed progressive, our walk through the mystic galleries of the universe is from the more outward to those more inward, where God in greater fulness dwells; but we must close the doors after us as we go! Death is the orderly and withal the beautiful method of travelling inward and upward through those degrees of existence whose wards unlock one after another towards the shining courts of the Eternal King. In that ascent it is a glorious privilege to die, to shut off the past when its ministries are done. Death does this, and no more, when the duties of one department have been accomplished. It shuts off the fore-scene, that no fond longings may make us keep looking back, and reaching back with divided attention. What can we do with our mind parted and our affections cloven? Death is shutting the door, shutting it on a pleasing retrospect it may be, on sweet and loving faces, on objects around which fond memories cling, on skies that smiled over our infancy, and led on the gay procession of our happy years; but then another door opens higher upward through the solemn galleries!

CHAPTER X.

THE RESURRECTION.

THERE is a general acknowledgment among mankind of such a connection of the present with the future as to necessitate some kind of retribution. We say that sin and suffering, goodness and enjoyment, have the relation of cause and effect; that if not in this life, yet in some other, we shall reap down the harvest which we sow. We need not say, however, to those who observe human conduct very closely, how much this doctrine is practically denied or evaded. It requires so little of special pleading for one to make his own case exceptional, and such abundant provisions to escape from it are supplied by artificial theologies, that men do not, after all, regard this as an intrinsic LAW of spiritual existence. Those theologies do not make the resurrection of man a fact included under the operation of any law whatsoever, but a monstrosity thrust in among the orderly operations

of the Deity. They make it not only a miracle, but a miracle wrought mechanically, and not spiritually. The idea of God coming down to the cemeteries, and, potter-like, building up from their contents a set of human frames externally, and putting spirits into them afterward, is shocking enough, if we had not long ceased to be shocked by the fantasies of religious naturalism. And it is not very strange that a conception, of which the human reason is so utterly intolerant, comes to have the feeblest influence on human conduct.

But the pneumatology of the sacred writers brings home to us the doctrine of the resurrection in such wise as to give it the closest logical connection with the subject of retribution and the judgment-day. They do not make it a fact thrust in from without, and arbitrarily inserted between two dispensations. They make it the necessary result of the development of a divine law, whose workings are brought home to us with such graphic delineations as almost to hinder us from sleep. By a careful collation of passage with passage, a truth rises upon us with harmonious relations, and with features surpassingly bright and grand. We will call it THE

ORGANIC CONNECTION BETWEEN THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE LIFE, and we will endeavor to draw it out in as clear an illustration as it will bear.

First we will develop the Scripture doctrine of the resurrection, and then we shall see how it puts the present and future state in organic connection with each other.

The time when the resurrection is to take place, and the nature of it, are the two points in our inquiry. On the first, we shall not need to inquire long; for the Saviour has made this point clear enough in his reasonings with the pseudo-rationalists of his day.

The Sadducees held that all of human existence was bounded between birth and death. They were gross materialists, believing in no future state, and thinking that the whole office of religion was to keep this world in order. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in a doctrine of the resurrection, but they held it very much as it has been taught since, namely, as a resuscitation of dead bodies from the graves. The Sadducees, knowing that Christ taught a doctrine of resurrection, and supposing it was the same as the Pharisees believed, for they were incapable of conceiving of any other, came to him with what they thought were very puzzling questions. If the carnal body is to be raised again, they very naturally thought that its carnal re

*

* This, however, they believed only in respect to the descendants of Abraham. For a view of their whole doctrine on this subject, see Part Third.