look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."

Now let it be distinctly understood that this covenant that the waters of Noah should not again go over the earth, is to stand for perpetual generations, that is, for the time that the generations come and go, to the final end of the world, or while the earth remains, or as the margin more forcibly has it, "as yet all the days of the earth." The seasons were interrupted during the year of the flood, they are not again to be interrupted from the same cause till all the days of the earth shall have been fulfilled, and so it is written, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." This is what the Lord afterwards refers to as his covenant of the day and night, saying (Jer. 33: 20-23), "If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign on his throne; and with the Levites the priests my ministers."

The Thousand Generations

Since the flood, God has made certain covenants which depend for their fulfillment upon the fulfillment of his covenant of the day and night and seasons, especially the covenant which he made with Abraham, "and his oath unto Isaac, and confirmed the same - for an everlasting covenant" (Ps. 105: 8-9). This covenant, which is guaranteed by the oath of God, we are positively assured in this same connection is to stand for one thousand generations. This remarkable declaration is three times repeated in different places in the Holy Scriptures (Deut. 7:9; II Chron. 16: 15 and Ps. 105:8). Therefore it follows that the waters of Noah will not again go over the earth, at least until after one thousand generations shall have passed away, commencing with Abraham. Matthew says that "from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations" (1:17). Thus only forty-two generations of the thousand had lapsed from Abraham until Christ's first appearing into the world. From these premises some estimate in the rough may be made of the great number of generations which are yet to come and go before the end is reached. A little reflection on the part of persons interested in the Holy Scriptures, who know something of the covenant made with Abraham, will enable them to see how that covenant as time moves on opens out, covers and comprehends the wonderful works of God for the salvation of men, in connection with the seed of Abraham, the friend of God, as it is written (Gen. 28: 14), “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed." The seed of Abraham comprehends: first, his natural descendants in the line of Isaac and Jacob; second, all Jews and Gentiles who are of the faith of Abraham and who become his seed by adoption, as Paul says to the Galatians (3:29), "If ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise;" and third, it comprehends Christ, who is referred to in that covenant from which Paul quotes when he refers especially to the promise made and confirmed of God in Christ when he called

to Abraham out of heaven the second time, and sware saying of Christ in this oath (Gen. 22: 17-18), “And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies: and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed."

This covenant, therefore, covers the work of Christ; he is to possess the gate of his enemies, and in him all the families of the earth are to be blessed. Accordingly, it is written of him in the eighth Psalm, "Thou hast put all things under his feet." Interpreting this Scripture, Paul says to the Corinthians that Christ must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet, and adds (I Cor. 15: 26), "The last enemy which shall be destroyed is death," and he there also shows us how death is to be destroyed: on the part of the righteous by resurrection, and by translation, an example of which will be furnished to the inhabitants of the earth at his second coming, when the righteous of past ages, who are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, will be raised to incorruption, and the righteous living at that time changed from mortal to immortality, all of which will be accomplished in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, by the almighty power of God, by which he is able to subdue all things to himself.

These resurrected and translated heirs of the kingdom of God, and joint heirs with Christ we learn elsewhere are to reign with him a thousand years, and Christ's reign on the earth over Israel and the nations will not commence until he leaves the place which he now occupies and returns again to the earth, as it is written in the hundred and tenth Psalm, where the Father says to him, "Sit thou at my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool." When this reign of Christ on the earth is completed and his work is finished. and the last enemy destroyed, then says Paul, "cometh the end when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power" (I Cor. 15:24). Therefore is it not manifest that the reign of Christ on the earth will terminate with the termination of the thousand generations which were to measure the time that God's covenant made with Abraham was to stand, and that the reign of Christ and his saints for a thousand years will comprehend and fill up the last of those generations? And as the days of man upon the earth during the reign of Christ, when righteousness shall cover the earth as waters cover the sea, will be greatly lengthened, and like unto the days of man before the flood as the prophet Isaiah testifies saying (65: 20), "There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner, being an hundred years old shall die accursed "; there will therefore be but few generations in the last thousand years of our world's age. Consequently, the generations that are to come and go between the times in which we live and the return of Christ to reign on the earth must necessarily consist of many hundreds of years.

Who, with these things before their minds, and the words of Christ to his apostles uttered by him after his resurrection from the dead, saying, "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power" (Acts 1:7) — who with these things before their minds would presume to fix the time for Christ's second coming to judge the world in righteousness? And yet ever since Christ ascended into heaven there has

not been wanting presumptuous men, improperly and superficially instructed in the Scriptures, who have continually from time to time down to the days in which we live been setting times for Christ's second coming.

Luther said that he expected Christ's coming about three hundred years from his day. Miller fixed 1843. Cummings, Thomas and others, 1866. And the number of misguided men who have been, and are, deceived, and have deceived others by their spurious interpretations of the prophetic word is legion. And we might say that the reason why all these time settlers fail is because these interpretations of the prophetic numbers are based upon unwarranted and unauthorized assumptions. Because the forty days of the spies were employed to interpret the forty years' sojourn in the wilderness, counting a day for a year; and because the forty days that the prophet Ezekiel lay upon one side, and the 390 days which he lay upon the other side, at the command of God, represented forty years, and 390 years, in which the house of Judah and the house of Israel are yet to go into captivity out of their own land in the latter days; and because the seventy weeks of Daniel, reduced to days, represent years, reaching not from the decree of Artaxerxes, but on the contrary from the decree of Cyrus to restore and build Jerusalem, down to the crucifixion and death of the Messiah, and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus I say, because these numbers in these cases are correctly so interpreted, it by no means follows that all the numbers found in the visions of Daniel and John are to be so understood, for in the cases above cited, the evidence is ample and unmistakable that a day is employed to represent a year, but in the case of the seven times, the time, times and an half, the 2300 days, the 1260, 1290, 1335 days of Daniel, the forty-two months, the time, times and half, and the 1260 days of John, there is not a shadow of proof that they are to be interpreted upon the principle of a day for a year, and therefore those who do presume to so construe them, do so presumptuously, and without scriptural authority; whereas the seven times are clearly seven years, and the other periods are to be understood in the same literal manner, and they still apply in the future and find their fulfillment in the latter days, and they measure certain steps and times of sufferings, persecutions, and treading down of the rebellious house of Israel by the terrible nations while they are in actual invasion and occupation of Israel's land, by vast armies which are to be as clouds to cover the land; all of which will transpire as Luke informs us in the compass of one generation, for he says, "This generation (that is the generation which sees these things begin) shall not pass away till all be fulfilled" (Luke 21: 32). But of these things we shall treat more at length in another place, and under another head.

THE FINAL END OF THE WORLD

When all the days of the earth are passed, and all the generations of the children of men have run out; when the work of Christ is finished, and the last righteous man of Adam's posterity has been redeemed, what then? When a man does a certain thing and says he will not do it again until the lapse of a certain period, does that not indicate that after that period lapses, he will do so again? And when the Lord sware to Noah and all his posterity, and to every living thing wherein is the breath of life, that as yet all the days of the

earth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night should not cease, and that he would not again for perpetual generations destroy all flesh by a flood as he had done; does not this language and these conditions indicate that when the generations of men are ended, and all the days of the earth are passed, then the earth will again be destroyed by a flood? The earth has once already been so destroyed, and we have already proved that Peter's words have been wrested from their proper meaning by the unlearned, and that the theory that the natural heavens and earth are to be destroyed by fire is not taught by him, and that such a doctrine is not taught in the Scriptures. Why then not accept the only natural deduction from the words of the Lord, that when his work is done, the final destruction of the earth and the closing up of human affairs will again be by a flood?

...

The means of so destroying the earth are at hand, for it is said, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights . and the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. . . . And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark."

The waters by which the old world was destroyed were obtained by opening the windows of heaven, and by breaking up the fountains of the great deep. The two great reservoirs of water were drawn upon the one which

is carried in the heavens in the form of mist, and surrounds the whole earth, the other, which exists upon the earth in forms of lakes, seas, and oceans by condensing the vapors which exist in the atmosphere surrounding the earth, and elevating the beds of the great deep, for the depth of the ocean in many places is greater than the height of the highest mountains which are upon the earth. By these means the inhabitants of the earth would again soon be swept away, and dissipated in the mighty waters. And it is well to remember the condition of our earth as it was at the beginning, when the six days' work of creation began, for the very first act in the drama of creation is couched in these words, And the spirit of God moved upon the face of

the waters, and God said Let there be light: and there was light."

The first verse of the book of Genesis is a general statement of what was done during the six days of creation, and the second verse is a statement and a description of the earth as it was, and as it existed when the work of creation began, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." From this and from what is said in the ninth and tenth verses of this chapter, the earth at the beginning, and before the creative work of God began, existed and was submerged under water, and the waters were shrouded in darkness. How long the earth had existed in that form we have no account, but that the earth which we now inhabit has existed in a similar form to what it is now, long before it was again created and fitted up for the abode of man at the beginning as described by Moses, is evident from

many things which have been exhumed, and from many things which can be seen to-day. For instance, the tops of mountains have been islands; and the ledges of rock running around and below their summits, are composed in some instances of petrified, water washed, and water worn gravel and stones, such as we see lying loose upon the shores of lakes, seas and oceans to-day, showing conclusively that these ledges of rocks have been the shores of great waters, and that the coarse and fine gravel and sand of which they are composed were worn smooth by the constant action of the waves of ancient seas and oceans, a good example of which may be seen around the tops of the Catskill Mountains.

In preparing the present earth for the abode of man, as the earth was submerged under water, on the second day God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so." Thus the waters which at first covered the earth were divided into two great oceans, one above the firmament in the form of mist or vapor, and the other in the form of water upon the earth below the firmament. The firmament consists of the space between the earth and the clouds. The clouds form the base of the ocean above us where the rains and snows are formed, from whence they descend upon the earth and are restored again to the ocean above by evaporation. On the third day God said, "let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas."

THE NATIONS AFTER THE FLOOD

The tenth chapter of the book of Genesis furnishes us an account of how God re-peopled the earth after the flood. Shem, Ham, and Japheth begat children and rapidly under God's blessing multiplied, and became numerous, and the early posterity of Noah became patriarchs, and heads of families and nations, and their names were not only given to their posterity, but their lands upon which they were settled. Consequently, such names as Gomer, Togarmah, Misheck, Canaan, Philistim, Asher and others that were given to the peoples and countries of antiquity remain to this day, and will to the end of the world, and although these names may, as time goes on, be sometimes changed, yet they are known in the Scriptures and especially in the prophecies by their ancient names and spoken of accordingly.

Japheth

It is said of the posterity of Japheth, which are enumerated and called by name (Gen. 10:5), “By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." Isles as here spoken of, are not to be understood as lands entirely surrounded with water, but rather as countries, such as the Mediterranean countries, which border on great seas and bodies of water, and are frequently referred to in the Scriptures as islands.