be insensible to their presence, or ignorant it is the familiar and the once-beloved face. The promised future is not a series of cold, insulated cells; but our Father's house. "In my Father's house are many,' not cells, but "mansions." It is amid the warmth of his fireside that we shall gather; it is under that rooftree that never shall be broken that we shall meet; and as sure as we gather round our Father's fireside and beneath our Father's roof-tree, shall I recognize and know all my brothers and my sisters in Christ, when we sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of our Father.

Then surely holy and happy is he that hath part in this first resurrection. No thorn will be about the brow; no moth will fret those shining and beautiful robes; time will leave no snows upon the hair, and it will grave no wrinkles upon the brow. There will be no sere leaves then on earth, the bequests of preceding years, and there will be no dead leaves on the soil of thought, in the garden of the heart, that we should not wish to be there; all things shall be made new; no frost shall nip the blossoms, and no shadow shall fall upon the sunshine; and the years of eternity, like the hours on the sun-dial, will be measured by sunshine, and not by shadow.

"Blessed and holy is he that hath part in this first resurrection." O Lord, may we be numbered with these thy saints in glory everlasting, for Christ's sake! Amen.

LECTURE VII.

REIGNING PRIESTS.

GLORY follows glory as we read the future of the sons of God. So brilliant a destiny should animate our fainting hearts, and strengthen our feeble knees as heirs of God, for

"On such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years."-REVELATION xx. 6. I HAVE explained the blessedness-and it is a great blessedness-of those who have part in this first resurrection. I know that if I speak to mere secular, and worldly, and unthoughtful minds on these subjects, it gives them matter only of infinite merriment; they will only deride or sneer at it. But you may rest assured that what God has thought it right to inspire, that ambassador is unworthy of the name who thinks it not right to try to teach and explain. The mission of a

minister of Christ is not that of a person who is to please the taste, gratify the appetite, indulge the notions, of a world that is thoughtless; but of one who has to speak the truth, and the whole truth, as that truth is unfolded from the first verse of Genesis to the last verse of the Apocalypse. And I am sure that Christian minds, I not only think and hope, but I know, weary with the toils of the week, fretted with its disappointments, and sick of its troubles, its aches, and its sorrows, rejoice to get a glimpse of heaven's sweet sunshine amidst the shadows of the present; to sip a little from the fountain of living waters on the plains of this world's parched and fevered desert; and surely, surely, if Christianity be not simply a directory for man's walk, but as we believe and are persuaded it is, a shower of bless

ings, a burst of sunshine, to make men not simply holier, but to leave them happier in this present world; then I feel that in ministering to the happiness of men I am serving God as much as when I minister to their holiness. I have ever tried to teach and to persuade, and I am sure I am right, that this blessed religion of ours makes men happy; and. I have tried to adduce and to bring forth from the page of sacred writ those grand truths that are fitted to waken in the heart's strings music, the very music of the skies; and in trying to make men happier, and in the consciousness that some are made happier, I feel my reward in my work, and am encouraged to persist in teaching those grand lessons, in impressing those bright hopes, in gathering those handfuls of sunshine in order to make you happy in this world as well as holy. When I think that we address on Sundays hundreds who are toiling all the week from early in the morning to late at night, who hear ceaselessly the sound of pence, and shillings, and pounds; who are struggling to make ends meet, and have a difficulty in doing it; who are disappointed here, and balked there, and cheated elsewhere; and worried, and vexed, and tormented, and troubled for six days; let us shut the door on the world's troubles on that beautiful day, the queen of the days of the week, the Christian sabbath; and let us look into the sunshine, and try to hear unspent celestial music; and to meditate together upon themes that will strengthen us to go into the valley of the week, having been on the sunny mount, the Tabor of the Sabbath, in communion with Christ and with all that bear the name of Christ Jesus.

What is this second When God told Adam "In the day thou

It is, then, a blessed thought if you and I shall be numbered in the first resurrection, for the second death shall have no power over us. death? What does it mean? the consequence of his sin he said: eatest thereof," literally, "Dying thou shalt die." Every one has understood that to mean death in its most comprehensive shape; and its comprehensive shape is threefold: death physical, death moral, death

eternal. In its physical shape I need not try to teach its certainty; the young, the good, the beautiful, die daily. The long procession of the dying began at the gates of Paradise lost, and it will go on dark and gloomy till the gates open of Paradise returned and restored. Few families are without one sad reminiscence at Christmas eve; few firesides are without one empty chair; but, glorious thought! those meinories of yours, that like picture-galleries have stored in them the paintings and likenesses of them that are gone, shall not surrender those likenesses until the originals return, and you shall see and know even as you are seen and known. The second death is in its first aspect what we all must experience, physical; with this distinction, however, that in the case of a Christian the venom of death is gone; that is to say, he dies; but he only changes the crypt for the cathedral; this cold world for yon bright and beautiful one; and death to him is not dying; there is no penalty in his sufferings, but only chastisement; there is no curse in his death, but only transference; for death in his case has lost its sting, and the grave is denuded of its victory. This death includes in the original sentence what we call spiritual death. What is spiritual death? It is the soul living on the lower plane of this world, but insensible to the great things and the grand things of a higher. For instance, the man whose soul is spiritually dead is alive to literature, alive to politics, alive to science, alive to all the questions and the criticisms of taste; but his soul is so dead to the things of the higher world that if you speak to him about regeneration, about the righteousness of Christ, about the atonement, about heaven or the resurrection, he will turn round to his neighbour and he will ask, "Doth he not speak parables ?" What does he mean? He is a mystic, he is a transcendentalist; we do not understand these things; if he had told us not to pick pockets, or if he had told us not to defame our neighbour, we could have understood that; but when he speaks of those things that belong to another realm, those higher truths that touch the inner part of Chris

Why?

tianity, then all is mystery. Because his soul is dead. Just as a man who is dead does not see, I mean as far as his body is concerned, the room in which his body lies, so a man whose soul is dead does not see the spiritual truths, the great lessons, the bright hopes, the blessed sympathies, the inner and upper world amid which he is placed in the church of Christ. We have evidence of this natural death being reversed, when Lazarus rose from the dead, and multitudes rose with Christ; and we have evidence of this spiritual death being reversed in increasing thousands who are regenerated, and translated from darkness into light, and from the power of Satan into the power of God. There is, thirdly, as the last aspect of this second death, the suffering, or destruction, if I may use the word, of soul and body in hell for ever. This is in its strictest and most absolute sense the second death. The body is not annihilated in the grave when it dies; so the soul is not annihilated in the second death when it dies. Annihilation is not only an impossibility, but scientifically looked at it is an absurdity. Your body never can be annihilated, and so your soul never can be annihilated. Your body may be dissolved, and be disintegrated, and mixed up with a thousand forms, but there it is; the soul may be spiritually dead, spiritually miserable, spiritually wretched, spiritually unhappy, but annihilated the soul never, never can be. And all the language that is employed in Scripture to denote this second death seems to me inexplicable, unless upon the assumption or admission, painful and awful as it is, that the souls of some-God forbid it may be any of us!-shall suffer for ever and ever. What can I make of such words as these? I appeal to you: "Some shall go into outer darkness; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." What can I make of these words: "The Son of man shall send his angels, and they shall gather together all things that offend, and them that do iniquity, and shall cast them into outer darkness?" I have often said, what I now repeat, that the only difficulty I feel in the Bible, and