obedience, "to the full assurance of hope unto the end." For in life and in death "blessed is the man that hath the God of Jacob for his help; and whose hope is in the Lord his God."

SERMON XXV.

RESURRECTION IN CHRIST.

1. CORINTHIANS, XV, 22.

As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

If there be not something which has existed for ever, nothing could ever have been. If we exist, showing in our bodies so much skill and design, and having a spirit within us, then there is some skilful Spirit which has been for ever. This Spirit we call God. The very nature of God is to be, or to exist, always; and hence, he is called Jehovah, that is the everexisting. To time he gave being, to eternity he gave being, to all things he gave being; but he himself, of himself, by himself, has ever been, will ever be. However mysterious it may be that God has ever lived through all eternity; yet it must be, if we now live, if anything in the world exists.

It is God's nature to live: life belongs to him, life alone. Death is foreign to God: it has no connection with him it is his opposite. Death came from Satan:

:

to us death comes from Adam: it is in all, engrained in all descended from Adam. Therefore, the first part of the Text says, "In Adam all die," that is, not through Adam, but in Adam, viz., to all who are in Adam, descended from him, and possessing his nature.

We are all in Adam; we all have his flesh and blood, and are united with his spirit. We are in him, as a branch is in a tree, deriving life or death from him; life partly. we call it life to see the sun, and converse with men, or rather a capability of life; not life but admitting life hereafter; not life, but death for "in the midst of life we are in death." It is death truly which we derive from Adam; for "in Adam all die:" everything that exists in him dies, not shall die, but now dies; for as soon as it exists in him, it dies. Over us, on our first day, death reigns; and in God's sight, though hidden from us, there is over every birth the stillness of death.

But now, how has this come upon us? It is because it first came upon Adam. The fearful warning of God to him ran thus: "In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." In the day, the very day of the transgression in Eden, he died. How does this appear? That very day, in the cool of the evening, "Adam and Eve hid themselves among the trees of the garden." From whom? From God; for "they heard the voice of God, and were afraid." Why were they afraid? Because of their transgression: as Job says. "If I covered my transgression as Adam, by

hiding mine iniquity in my bosom." What was transgression? Guilt, sin, and death before the All-holy God. St. Paul says to the Ephesians, though some were children, "Ye were dead in trespasses and sins;" and of himself, in his natural state, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" His sins, like a corpse, clung round him, and were as his own very form.

What, then, followed this death? That which neces sarily follows sin, viz., natural death, or the death of the body. On the same awful evening when man once stood face to face with his Creator as a guilty being, another sentence, or the result of the first sentence, was passed upon him, "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." The first death in sin was, "in the day thou eatest;" but this mortal death is only future, "thou shalt return to dust." Nine hundred years and more the patriarch lived to repent himself, and to preach with voice more awful than Elijah's to his own offspring that they should not sin. So long he could speak of the fair garden, of his days of perfect innocence, of his hours of unclouded peace; and also of his banishment, and toil, and guilt, and upbraidings of conscience; so long could he see the tree of life, and also the flaming sword that guarded it, preventing him from living to God in innocence again, and hindering his body's immortality. But at last the end came the patriarch, father, monarch of the old world, the source of being and of death to all, like the mighty

oak of the forest, yielded to the unchangeable sentence, "unto dust shalt thou return," and he died.

So death came upon Adam. From him it came upon us, for we are his offspring, descended from him, and partakers of his nature. We read that after Adam was fallen, "he begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth ;" and this likeness is mentioned to point out that all, even the best, are born in Adam's likeness. For Seth is one of those called "the sons of God," yet he was born in Adam's likeness, and, therefore, the best are so. This, then, was not the likeness of God, but a disfigured likeness; like a lost piece of money, rusty by long neglect. For Seth was not born in the likeness of God, not like him in innocence, power of will, and immortality, in which God's likeness consists; but with innocence ruined, the will enslaved to passion, and immortality exchanged for mortality. For the Scripture says, "There is none righteous, no not one;" and "death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." There is no exception. Death in sin, and mortal death belong to all by nature, to all who are in Adam: for as the Scripture saith, "Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression," that is, who had not sinned consciously and wilfully, viz., over infants; as David also shows, when he says, "Behold, I was shapen in wickedness." O, how terrible is this description of man, "shapen in