is no other promise of this kind in the Bible but the 17th verse of the 65th of Isaiah: "we according to his promise look for a new heaven;" not another heaven, but "a new heaven;" not another earth, but "a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." It is therefore plain that the picture contained in the 65th of Isaiah is a picture of an economy subsequent to the conflagration of the globe, and the return of the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. It is also perfectly parallel with the picture in the 21st of Revelation: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth "--the very same words" for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away." But the difficulty meets us on the threshold, how is it possible to reconcile the assumption that the 65th chapter of Isaiah, at the 17th verse, describes the regeneration of the heavens and the earth, and is parallel with 2 Peter iii., and with Revelation xxi., and yet that there should be in this picture, subsequent to this restoration of all things, the strange and startling words : "For the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed?" In the Book of Revelation it is distinctly declared, there shall be no more tears, nor crying, nor death." In this very chapter, at the 19th verse, we also read: "the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying." But if infants die; if sods are broken for the dead; there must be, if human sympathy and affection survive the last change, tears, and crying, and sorrow. Here is a difficulty that has perplexed some of the best and wisest interpreters of

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prophecy. I will collate in this and the next lecture many of the judgments of the most eminent divines, and give perhaps less what is my own judgment, and more what are the opinions of some of the most gifted writers upon the subject. In the mean time, let me mention the different translations, or rather amendments of translation, which have been proposed upon this very difficult verse: "The child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed." The first is by Procopius, who thus explains or paraphrases it: "All those who attain to that resurrection;" for the resurrection of the pious dead, you observe, is cotemporaneous or synchronous with the change of the heavens and the earth; "all those who attain to that resurrection shall be perfect and vigorous in soul; so that none shall be imperfect, or infantile, or aged. The adult that is saved will be always young." The Rev. Mr. Govett says: "The distinction must be made between those living on the earth, or born into the world at that time, and the risen saints who have been raised from the dead by Christ." The Septuagint translation is probably the most correct. The Septuagint Greek was translated from the Hebrew by some seventy scholars selected for that purpose 260 years before the birth of Christ. They were masters of the Greek and Hebrew tongues. Their translation differs occasionally from the authorized translation in our Bible. Translated literally from the Greek of the seventy it is thus: "There shall not be any more carried out from thence to burial an infant of days, a youth, nor an old man who hath not filled his time; for the man of an hundred years shall be a youth; but the sinner dying at an hundred years old shall be accursed." This translation it would be easy to piece with the rest of the passage, except for the last clause. The opinion of Mr. Govett, a very able commentator upon Isaiah, is that the declaration that the sinner an hundred years old shall be accursed refers not to a sinner existing in the millennial day, but to that outburst that takes place at the close of that day, when we read in the Apocalypse that

the nations at the four quarters of the earth come up and encompass the saints of the Most High, headed by Satan, loosed from his prison, and are at last destroyed by the fearful judgments of God, and sent to their own place. I must say that this last solution seems to me more accordant with the tone and the analogy of Scripture than the other. But I must add, what is not without weight and probability, that in the judgment of some the millennial state is to be composed of two distinct classes: first, the dead that are raised when Christ comes to inaugurate it; the living that are changed by his word, lifted up into the glory cloud, and ministering as angels to the other; but that there shall survive the conflagration thousands of men, the mass of whom are believers, but mingled with whom will be unbelievers; and that these last will continue to the end; but that the good and the bad, the converted and the unconverted, shall live to the age of the antediluvian patriarchs; a hundred years of age being the period of infancy; a thousand years, the length of the millennial day, being the full duration of the life of its happy inhabitants. Let us honestly look at some of these thoughts, and show the grounds on which they are laid. First of all, I may state that Hitchcock, the eminent American geologist, and no less eminent Christian, holds, and has reasoned it out with some force, though not conclusively in my humble judgment, that death was not introduced into Paradise by sin; but merely the penalty, or the sting that is in death. We know as a geological fact that death existed in the vast pre-Adamite epochs; of this we are sure; but I have always associated death, in the pre-Adamite geological epochs, with the fall of the angels, though Scripture is silent, and conjecture is all that I have to adduce. Hitchcock maintains that if Adam and Eve had never sinned they would have died; but he says that to them, after probably a thousand years, death, instead of being a struggle, an agony, a conflict between the body, reluctant to let its inmate go-and that inmate, reluctant to leave the old and the familiar home-would have been in Adam's

case, if he had never sinned, a peaceful sleep, a joyous transference; à gentle, unfelt step from the low lands of beautiful Paradise to the higher lands of yet more beautiful heaven, into which Paradise should culminate and close. This opinion, if, of course, it be true, would justify what seems to be indicated here, the contingency of death even during the millennial period; for if the millennium be Paradise restored, as I believe it will; and if death in that type occurred in Paradise that was; there can be no difficulty in assuming that death, as a mere transference, a mere passing out of one house into another, may take place, not of course among risen saints, in the millennial era. But it seems to me there are fatal objections to the theory of Hitchcock; for let any honest man, without a theory or a crotchet to support, read the Bible, and in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred the impression will be that death and sin are inseparably associated. I cannot get over such a passage as this: "Death reigned from Adam to Moses;" ;""the wages of sin is death;" and the triumph that the apostle predicts as the crowning glory of the age that is to come is: "Then shall be brought to pass the saying "it is not yet brought to pass-"that is written, O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" "And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." All these passages seem to me to prove that Hitchcock's theory is untenable, and that the true opinion is what I have constantly urged and commented upon-" The wages of sin is death."

The second theory that undertakes to solve the difficulty of this passage is that the millennial rest which succeeds the conflagration of the earth, and is inaugurated upon the bosom of a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, is not a perfect, but a progressive state; that the everlasting state is described in Revelation xxi. and xxii., upon the same earth, however; and that the millennial state will be as much superior to our present state as the future glorious state in the 21st chapter of the Apocalypse will be to the millennial state; that it is one of the great stages, as

thought by the Rev. Edward Bickersteth, a man of eminent piety, of fine intellect, and of thoughtful habits; he regarded the millennial rest as one of the grand stages in man's progression to his perfect and his everlasting state. He thinks it will be a stage superior to that which is now, vastly superior: the majority of the human race ǹow are unbelievers; then, if this theory be correct, the vast majority will be believers ; the mere handful, the exceptional case, will be the "sinner that is accursed," and "the infant dying at a hundred years old." And on this hypothesis the picture of the future, like the picture of a landscape, contains the millennial state in the foreground, the everlasting state beyond it in the background; but the two so interlacing and intermingling, like a binary star, that we often think the picture denotes the one when really it denotes the two. If this should be the correct solution it will be at least a presumptive explanation of the difficulty which has puzzled and perplexed so manythat there will be incidental death or incidental curse in that holy, and happy, and blessed state. The Rev. Horatio Bonar, a very admirable and excellent minister of the Free Church, says: “In the millennial state there will be only incidental instances of death, remnants of sin, as spots on the face of the sun, hid in the excess of splendour." His idea is that the millennial state will be glorious sunshine; but that there will be exceptional clouds, specks or spots, two of which are contained in the text on which I am now commenting; but that these shall be as nothing in comparison of the overwhelming splendour in which they are merged and lost. But then, again, the difficulty will occur to you, as it

has occurred to thousands-we can understand the dead in Christ being raised, and taken beyond the reach of the last fiery baptism that makes our earth a new earth; we can understand the living Christian being changed and translated from the touch of the overwhelming and the destroying flame, but you naturally say, how can you suppose that God will spare from that consuming flame even those that are unbelievers and his enemies,