the place wherein tears are to be wiped away, and death swallowed up in victory, is not the heaven of religious systems; so thus it will come to pass, that the New Jerusalem is not that heaven; for it was in that holy city that all tears should cease, and there should be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, neither any more pain, the former things being passed away. This is a most scriptural conclusion, and we are rejoiced to see that it is a conclusion at which Professor Bush has arrived. He writes as follows: "We are for ourselves perfectly satisfied that in the scheme of revelation the curtain drops upon the human race in the mid career of its evolving destiny. The predictions of Daniel land us in the everlasting kingdom of the saints, established upon the whole earth, and under the whole heavens. The disclosures of the Apocalypse conduct us into the bosom of the New Jerusalem state, equally established upon the earth, and there leave us. Nothing in our view is clearer than that the events commonly assigned to what is termed, by one of the grossest philological errors, the end of the world,' i. e. as implying the physical conflagration of the globe, do in fact occur at the commencement, and not at the close, of the grand Sabbatism of the world; for it has no close, i. e. none revealed. The single declaration of the Apocalypse, The leaves of the tree shall be for the healing of the nations, (Gentiles,)' leaves all the common theories of the future at fault, because they afford no solution of the problem, 'What Gentile nations remain to be healed in heaven ?"" With these remarks we cordially concur. The concluding question is indeed a puzzle to all the common theories of the future, and there are very many such. We read, "There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels." It might be asked, How were it possible that the Devil should find entrance into heaven, that holy, happy, sinless paradise of our thoughts? We know that Milton, in his "Paradise Lost," has set forth this war as occurring before the creation of the world; and we know also that nothing can be more preposterous. The angels of Michael overcame by the blood of the Lamb: was then the blood of the Lamb shed before the creation of the world, or four thousand years after? The angels of Michael are the Apostles in their ministry, "wrestling not with flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, the rulers of the darkness of that age, and spiritual wickedness in high places," and these were the dragon and his angels. But it is all vanity. We repeat, that we cordially concur with the above extract, as exhibiting the Bible in the light of a manual, for beings in flesh and blood, on the earth, and not as a revelation of matters connected with the world of spirits, and for a simple reason, because there is no medium through which to convey such revelations: these are indeed to us, while enveloped with our temporary bodies of clay, unutterable things. While we are happy to agree with Professor Bush upon this important point, we must confess that we are grieved to read, in connexion with it, sentiments like the following: Speaking of the passage, "There shall be no more sea," Mr. B. writes, "Our own impression is, that under the new earthly economy the sea will no longer exist as a sea, i. e. as a separating barrier in the way of the intercourse of nations. Such will then be the improvements in the various arts of navigation, that

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the ocean shall be, as it were, bridged, and offer no more impediment to travelling than the land!" When one falls in the way of a passage like this, it is time to question ourselves whether we be awake or asleep; whether mesmeric passes have captivated our senses or no. How preposterously absurd! Does Mr. B. mean to say, then, that John saw a literal sea of glass, like unto crystal, before the throne of the Lamb, as mentioned in Rev. iv. 6? How simple and easy the interpretation, if writers and readers would but bring these things to the simplicity of the two covenants; would but remember that there was such a thing as a sea in Solomon's temple; that the heaven and earth of the Jewish world could not be complete without mention of a sea; and that the symbolical sea of glass, in John's vision, was to be done away on the expiration of the first dominion of the kingdom, when there was the pure river of the water of life, which proceeded and proceedeth out of the throne of God and the Lamb. Equally absurd things are written, in Mr. B.'s work, respecting the saying, 'There shall be no more death;' but we have not leisure to criticise further. Evident it is on every side to us, and we trust to every unprejudiced mind, that the whole of the Bible is, or is to be fulfilled, totally irrespective of what is generally termed the end of the world;' and this being so, the question will naturally arise, What must become of such notions as the popular doctrines of the resurrection of the dead, and the day of judgment? Plainly enough they must, by inevitable necessity, be counted false. Plainly enough, moreover, it is, that all religious systems, which depend for their existence upon such doctrines, must sooner or later come to nought. Plain enough it is, that if a person ground, for instance, a millennial, or New Jerusalem scheme upon a fancy of this literal heaven and earth being made at some (unknown) time new, the whole fabric of his fanciful imaginings must totter and fall; for if there be no making new of a literal heaven and earth, the key-stone of the arch is gone,-"Ye have taken away his gods, and what hath he left ?" And here we may observe in passing, if we ask the advocates of future fulfilments to attach a definite idea to their favourite scriptures, such as, 'Behold I make all things new,' they cannot give it. They will repeat to you, over and over again, the assertion of the ultimate subjection of all persons and things to God: but all things' is a wide term, if we take it out of the Bible. ́All things' may mean all animals; all the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea, and the creeping things of the ground, and much more; and it may be asked, Are the wolf, and the lion, &c., to dwell together in the New Jerusalem, and is the literal version the truth? All things,' on the showing of these same persons, is a phrase of divers meanings, for they will tell us, that when Peter wrote, 'the end of all things is at hand,' he meant simply, the end of things pertaining to the Jewish dispensation; but when John writes, " Behold I make all things new," 'all things' there has quite a different meaning. O what miserable inconsistency; what loopholes for infidelity to spy through; what a making void of the word of God, by man's tradition, is this! When will men cease to pervert the Scriptures, and suffer them to speak for themselves? when will they obtain a glimmering of the distinction between Moses and Christ, between that covenant which, when John

and Peter lived and wrote, was waxen old, and ready to vanish, and that covenant, which was and is, as the waters of Noah, a sign to perpetual and never-ending generations of men?

Having established the truth, that the whole of the contents of the Bible was intended to be fulfilled, irrespective of what is known by the name of ́ an end of the world,' the only question for consideration is, Have the whole of the contents been fulfilled or not? We are contented to rest our answer on the exposition which we have given of Isaiah xxv. 8, and 1 Cor. xv. 51, in their connexion with Matthew xvi. 28, and their illustration from the life of the Apostle John. We might fill pages with a summary of proofs of past and complete fulfilments, drawn from what we have written, but we are willing to trouble and to be troubled no further, than by simply transporting ourselves in imagination back to the day when Paul wrote, "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." We ponder for a moment over our fancied position, and over the letter which thus speaks to us, and the thought steals into the mind, Can the Apostle be writing of a great while to come, and is it of something which is to transpire thousands of years hence, that he predicates a change? Could the fathers die in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off? and are we told that the same period of time which is called 'afar off,' having transpired between the promise of Christ's second coming, and the present period, that second coming is to be called a little while?' Could the Lord rebuke the false prophets for saying that the vessels of the Lord's house should shortly be brought again from Babylon, when that captivity was only seventy years, (Jer. xxvii. 16,) and is there no rebuke for the prophets of gospel times, for the spiritually discerning Apostles, who spake of a return of the Lord in their life-time, when 1800 years have transpired, and that return appears as far off in the distant future as at the beginning? Can we believe this? We answer No, and our answer is echoed, in tones that cannot be mistaken, in every page of the Epistles. We dwell with delight on the promise made to the writers of those Epistles, that they should be guided into all truth, and we hear them declaring the speedy advent of a grand event: and is our delight the less for this ?—yea, it is exchanged, it must be exchanged, for the blackness of darkness and despair, if that advent did not as speedily come, as it was speedily announced. Far too positive are the declarations of the Epistles, to lead us to doubt of what was passing through the Apostles' minds. The time would fail us to transcribe but a tithe of their exhortations which were founded upon the expectation of Christ's speedy coming. Let a few scriptures suffice:- -"The Lord is at hand." (Phil. iv. 5.) "The night is far spent, the day is at hand." (Rom. xiii. 12.) him who is ready to judge the quick and dead." (1 Pet. iv. 5.) "The coming of the Lord draweth nigh: behold the judge standeth at the door." (James v. 8, 9.) Ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief." (1 Thess. v. 4.) "Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ." (Titus ii. 13.) "For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry." (Heb. x. 37.) Exhorting one another, and so much the more as ye see the day

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approaching." (Heb. x. 25.) "And now, little children, abide in him, that when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming." (1 John ii. 28.) "Seal not up

the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand." (Rev. xxii. 10.) We close with the closing words of the sacred volume; "He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly" (Rev. xxii. 20); and the echo of the church was this, "Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus, come quickly." We ask, Can we, with such an array of that word, which is the testimony of Jesus, think that that word hath returned to the Lord void, having failed to accomplish his pleasure, or to prosper in the thing whereunto he sent it? Can we conclude that this evidence, deduced from the Epistle to the Romans, to the Revelation of John, was no evidence whatever whereby to show that Zion's watchmen saw eye to eye? Can we be persuaded that a Paul would leave the feet of Gamaliel, to be counted the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things, for the sake of that which, in the belief of the Christianity of our day, has turned out to be a fable and a delusion? Is it credible that he who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and the strictest of Pharisees, would suffer such unheard-of trials, persecutions, afflictions, stripes, imprisonments, stonings, deaths-would be contented to labour, working with his own hands-to have no certain dwellingplace to be in perils, tumults, watchings, fastings, and all for the purpose of being the head and front of the greatest deceit that was ever palmed upon his fellow men, that was ever invented by the father of lies, that ever entered into the imagination of human nature to conceive? Yes-it is possible; yes-it must be so: we cannot help coming to a conclusion like this, preposterous though it be, absurd though it must be counted, yea, so as that the force of absurdity could no further go-if we can for a moment suppose that the declarations then made, and the exhortations thus, with all the energy of that Apostle's ardent mind, expressed, were not verily, and indeed, the truth of the everlasting God. If the truth of God they were, then it is quite clear-it is evident to a demonstration it is plain as an axiom that is its own proof, that the coming of Christ must have been accomplished, and the counsel of God in Christ fulfilled, within a very short time after these declarations were made, after these solemn warnings were issued. This coming will attach to no event other than the fall of Jerusalem. This event is exhibited in our Diagram at the end of the Zion state and passing the fourth boundary line, the authoritative ministry ordained and appointed of God, the ministry of the Apostles, with Christ, the Head of their body under that first dominion of the kingdom, was fulfilled: and the kingdom of our God and of his Christthe inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away-the last, the final, the unchanging, the eternal state, whose sun doth no more go down, is established, and established to eternal, never-ending ages of Since this coming of Christ there has been no intermediate state, no divinely-appointed ministry remaining. The Apostle John, as we have seen, lived on the earth in the life of the animal body until this coming again. Then prophecy failed, tongues ceased, knowledge which was neither clear nor dark vanished away: and then, John, to whom the revelation of the mystery of Daniel was given, became as another man,

men.

for in Jerusalem was found, and of Jerusalem was required, the blood of all the prophets; so that, were it evident that John had written, or taught, or said however little after Jerusalem's desolation, the conclusion would be equally evident, that what he said, wrote, or taught, was not, and could not be, by any divine authority or appointment. In the ceasing of tongues, in the fulness of knowledge, in the vanishing of prophecy, then that Apostle realised his glorious anticipation, "It doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." He received then the fulfilment of the promise on which his mind runs throughout his Epistle, where he declares, “Whosoever is born of God sinneth not:" the promise we mean, which saith, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." The light was no longer as it had hitherto been, neither clear nor dark,' for then the Lord became the everlasting light and that city into which John and all that were alive and remained were ushered, had no need of the light of the sun nor of the moon, for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb was the light thereof. Then, in that day, when they cried in the fulness of the knowledge of a kingdom established in victory and peace, "Lo, this is our God, we have waited for him," their hope was no longer laid up in heaven, no longer within the vail, for the forerunner was come out therefrom, and with him their hope, as he was their life. "What a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? and if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it." They did see, face to face, they were like him: they were persuaded that they had not run in vain nor laboured for nought. They beheld the astonishing fulfilment of all that Moses and the prophets did testify, when "they spake beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow." The Apostle John was an eye-witness of the majesty and coming of the Lord at the overthrow of the Jewish world, as he had been an eye-witness to the glories of the Transfiguration. He was a spectator of, he could set his zeal to, the awful denunciation, "There shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down," as, in his ministry during the Zion state, he could tell of the vail of the temple which was rent at the crucifixion. He could thus turn round upon the Jew, who had derided the death of the Nazarene, and ask him if there were no witness there of his life-if there was no record of his mission in the total overthrow of the holy and beautiful house where their fathers worshipped,' which was burnt up with fire ? In a word, he could echo his own Amen, when he cried, "Even so, come Lord Jesus, come quickly, Amen:" and as he and his fellow-believers had already, in their adoption of sons, passed from death in Adam to life in Christ, so their life being hid, and Christ appearing, in that appearance they passed to the fulfilment of the promise of that eternal life which God, who could not lie, promised before the world began. And now to sum up our grand conclusion in connexion with our great subject, the resurrection of the dead— to adopt and apply the eloquent peroration of one who was speaking of another and different subject. How sublime the inference which follows! All the family of God found in the second Adam Head, participants of the divine principle of resurrection life, which they derive from their connexion with him, are passed at once, in the moment they are