sequences, it is an event which has no parallel in the revolutions of time,-an event, in either case, the issues of which no tongue can tell, no finite mind conceive. Ah! it is not the position to which we may attain, the height from which we fall, or the circumstances of our descent to the tomb, which invest Death with its importance. It is because life is linked to immortality; Because being once begun can never end; and because continued being implies an immortality of suffering or enjoyment, that Death, to whomsoever it may come, is the event unparalleled in its issues.

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In this aspect let us view it. Let those eternal issues enter into our estimate of Death, and let them control our choice, in the governing objects and pursuits of life. Let us cease from man," alike as our dependence, and as the source of our enjoyments; and, contemplating the wreck of human greatness, and the end of human ambition, in the death of him who had reached an eminence, beyond which there was no higher to be hoped for or desired, let us ponder anew the emphatic interrogatory of Christ. "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul; or what shall he give in exchange for his soul?"

THE HEAVEN OF THE BIBLE.

REASON is the chief faculty in putting us in possession of our knowledge of God. As the understanding receives the rays of knowledge which fall upon it from every quarter, like so many sunbeams, Reason compares them one with another-discerns their agreement, or difference, and makes its various inferences from them.

Light shines upon us from a thousand sources concerning the character and government of God. We see him in the countless wonders of nature and providence. We reason from one class of facts to another. We judge what must be the character of such a being as God, from the facts we have ascertained concerning him. And from all we have learned about him from other quarters, we come necessarily to certain conclusions concerning the character of the final abode we believe he has provided for his people.

We cannot doubt, for example, its boundless splendor, from the fact that even in this sinful world, we see such an exhibition of God's glory. We doubt not its holiness, from what we have elsewhere learned of the purity of God. We doubt not its perfect exemption from every evil, reasoning from the benevolence of God, which we cannot question must have a complete development in such a world, wiping off all tears from all faces.

And we actually find the heaven of the Bible answering all the just demands of an enlightened reason on this point. Our sober judgment cannot array before us one item in the account of what such a world would provide for a rational being, but we shall find that item, either a precisely stated fact, or a matter of fair inference from some other fact. We can have no conception of anything that contributes to the dignity and happiness of moral beings, that is not included in the Bible account of heaven. And we can make no fair inference from the elsewhere revealed character of God, or from the nature and wants of man, concerning what heaven should be, but we shall find it implied in the actual revelation made by the Scriptures of that blessed world.-Evangelist.

BY REV. G. W. BLAGDEN, D. D.

PASTOR OF THE OLD SOUTH (CONgregational) church, Boston.

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY.

"Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth: they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of domnation.--JOHN V. 28, 29.

IN preaching from these words-the doctrine of "the resur-. rection of the body"-a difficulty may have to be met, arising from the probable general belief in it, by most, if not all of those who hear me, without having entered very minutely into its details, or investigated closely the arguments which have been urged against it. And thus anything like an extended argument on such a generally admitted subject may seem to many to be tedious and unnecessary.

Nevertheless, there are some points needing study and explanation, when we enter into these details ;-and some very plausible and ingenious arguments have been urged against it, not only in former times, but of late, and in our own community not only by some who strenuously oppose all miracles, and deny even the resurrection of Christ, but by other more serious and excellent men, who held mainly to the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg.

These last forms of opposition to the generally received doctrine include two points:-First, the alleged unreasonableness of the resurrection of the body, and the asserted failure of its advocates to show its truth from the Scriptures; and secondly, the affirmed want of evidence for a future fixed day of judg ment, as being connected with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body in the common belief of those who embrace it.

They who engage in this opposition, argue that the resurrection of the dead is continually going on-as individuals die, each one rising immediately from the grave in a spiritual body; and that the judgment also is continually progressing, every one with world, being virtually

before Christ all the nations of manner in which all and,

now, and tried by the

each treat the gospel, and that all, and each, at death, go away into everlasting punishment, or into life eternal.

In answer to such positions, it will be my endeavor to show in this discourse :-

First. That the bodies of the dead shall be raised.

Secondly. That this resurrection of their bodies is consistent with reason.

Thirdly. That it will occur at a future appointed time.

Fourthly. That this time will be connected with a future appointed judgment.

To these topics, the fact-the reasonableness--the time-and the connections of the resurrection of the body with the religious uses of the doctrine,-I affectionately ask yonr attention.

I. In affirming that the bodies of the dead shall be raised, we assume, what we think is very evident from the Scriptures, that the soul exists in a spiritual state immediately after death ―a state adapted to its moral charcter, and not improbably in a spiritual form. Therefore, Christ said to the dying thief, "To-day thou shalt be with me in paradise :" and narrated of the rich man, that he died, and was buried, and in hell (i. e. the place of departed souls,) "lifted up his eyes, being in torment."

We hold, further, that this state will be final, but not consummated, the beginning of an endless life-the budding of a process growing and reaching at last its more developed state, at the time of the resurrection and the judgment.

1. In evidence of the fact that the bodies of the dead shall be raised, we have, first, the text of which one of the most ingenious opposers of the resurrection of the body has beer constrained to say,--" This is undoubtedly the strongest passage in the New Testament in favor of the common view of the resurrection, and one in respect to which it becomes us seriously to guard against any undue bias, from theoretical promptings, to wrest it from its true-meant design." (Bush.)

If we guard against undue bias, certainly it is difficult to conceive how any other meaning can be drawn from it, than that the bodies of the dead shall, in some sense and form, be summoned from their sepulchres by the voice of Christ. For it is not merely the dead of whom it is declared that they shall hear his voice; but "all who are in the graves." And, by the very terms of the theory of those who deny that in any reasonable sense our bodies rise,-the spiritual bodies which

they affirm do rise at the time of death, cannot with any pro priety be affirmed to be in the graves. But Christ de clared, the hour is coming, when all who are in the graves, shall hear his voice, and shall come forth!" It seems impos sible to invent a form of words more directly adapted to express the idea of bodies, once buried, raised from the grave."

2. Secondly. In all the cases of thranslation to heaven, or raising from the dead, recorded in the Bible, the body is affirm ed 40 have been translated or raised. (Or, these facts are af firmed of the body.)

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In the Old Testament, when Enoch saw uot death, but was taken of God; when Elijah was taken from earth, in the chariot of fire; when the dead man was brought to life on touching. the bones of the prophet; and in the New Testament, when Jairus' daughter was raised to life again by the power of the Redeemer; when the widow of Nain had her son restored to.. her, from the biar on which they were carrying him to the grave; when at the voice of Jesus, crying with a loud voice, "Lazarus come forth," he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes; when, at the crucifixion (of Christ) "many bodies of saints which slept, arose and came. out of the graves after his resurrection, and appeared unto many "---(MATT. xxvii. 52, 53 ;)—when of Jesus himself, it was said to the women by the angels clothed in white, "he is not, here, he is risen ;" and in that sublime discription of the resurraction given by the apostle Paul to the Thessalonians, when they "which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them (the dead in Christ') in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air :"--(1 Thess. iv. 17 :)-in all and in each of these cases, the bodies of the dead are affirmed to have been raised, either in flesh and blood, still to continue, for a season, in this present world, or in a glorified, spiritual form, that they might at once inherit the kingdom of God, as flesh and blood cannot do.

Reasoning, therefore, from what has been to what shall be, and using only the same form of words to express the resurrection of the dead which shall arise, that the Scriptures use in asserting the resurrection of those who have been raised,-we can come to no other reasonable conclusion, than that the bodies of the dead shall come forth (from their graves,) at the voice of Christ.

3. There are, thirdly, a number of expressions used in Scripture, respecting the resurrection, which cannot be fairly. explained except on the theory that the body shall he raised.

a. Thus Christ, on one occasion, drew a motive from the inability of men to kill the soul, to urge his disciples not to fear their ability to kill the body only: exhorting them rather to fear him, who, after he had killed, had power to destroy both soul and body in hell. Does not this imply that the body ex