and ceremonies in another way. This is the method in which the personal responsibility of every teacher in the Catholic Church is to be used, and not by seeking for texts to uphold merely the fragment of truths admitted in his sect.

In conclusion, I warn you against the insidiousness of these writers, who, being called servants of God, are really doing the work which in past times has ever been done by His enemies. Enlarge your minds and spirits, that your faith may not stand on texts and half-verses, but upon the whole Word of God, taken as a whole. See God's work as you know it to have been, one from the beginning, continually unfolding and developing itself through individuals, through nations, through forms of worship, through sovereigns, statesmen, and ecclesiastics, all being necessary to express, in different times, the fulness which is in the great Melchizedek King Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is God over all blessed for ever, through whom worship and service shall be offered to the alone Immortal, Invisible, and True God for ever and ever.

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THE RESURRECTION AND TRANS

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LATION.

Y present object is to direct your attention to the difference between the manner in which the power of the Lord is exercised in raising from their graves those who have fallen asleep in Him, and the manner in which it is employed in translating our bodies to meet Him with His saints in the air. Few persons, until very lately, have had their attention turned to the resurrection of the bodies of the departed at the coming of the Lord, and it is a subject which has been less considered than any other in Scripture.

We have heard, for many years, the voice of the Holy Ghost speaking in the midst of our public assemblies. This voice has been the means of shewing the outward confusion of the Church, by putting some few individuals into the true order, and thus rendering evident, by the contrast, to the eyes of all men the want of order in which the rest of Christendom lies. This is one great part of the work effected by the voice of the Holy Ghost; it is palpable, evident to our senses, and undeni

THE RESURRECTION AND TRANSLATION.

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able, and easy to understand. This is the silent witness for God and His Church, and against the city of confusion.

There is another subject which the voice of the Holy Ghost has pre-eminently declared above all other topics, more frequently, and in a greater variety of forms, and that is, the gross ignorance of God's ways in which we all are; which ignorance is not imputed to us as a sin, but declared to us, nevertheless, as a fact, under the name of our living in darkness so gross as to be unable to see God and His ways; and frequent allusion is made to those passages in holy Scripture which speak of Egypt, referring to that particular plague of darkness of which we all know the history.

Now, so far as the larger portion of baptized people are concerned, no doubt the assertion of their being covered with darkness may be sufficiently explained by their ignorance of the plan and purpose of God to be effected by His Church in this world, as well as in the age to come; by their incapacity to see the signs in the heavens of the coming of the Son of Man, to understand the organization of the Church in its four ministries, so clearly stated in the Scriptures, to see the true meaning of the Tabernacle as a figure of the Christian Church, the sacrifices of the Law as the guide for the ritual

of Christian worship, the ceremonies for the consecration of the High Priest as the shadows of the essential characteristics of the Christian priesthood, and many similar things: but still the voice of the Holy Ghost, in the midst of us who already know all these things, continues to reiterate the charge that we are all in Egyptian darkness; hereby signifying that, however good all this knowledge may be in its place, still it is merely an intellectual knowledge, derived through the Spirit if you will, but nevertheless not going beyond the region of— and easily to be apprehended by—the reason, and by no means reaching the point which the Holy Ghost is pressing upon our attention.

Darkness and light are figures used in Scripture for sin and holiness, ignorance and knowledge, hidden places and open places, unbelief and faith, death and life; and passages of this description are very numerous. The sense, therefore, in which the word is used in any particular place must be determined by the argument of the context. Throughout the Prophets, where God's final judgment or separation of His people from the rest of mankind is spoken of, it is declared sometimes that the world is in darkness, sometimes that God has inflicted darkness upon the rebellious people, and sometimes that men love darkness, and will not come to the light. It

may be said that this only means, that men in general form a false estimate of the value of all created good; that they are so engrossed by objects of time and sense, however necessary, that they cannot see the things which make for their everlasting peace : all which is very true, but does not account for the urgency of God in pressing this subject so continually upon us, nor give the full force of the passages in holy Scripture. A distinction must be drawn between knowing a thing in the Spirit and knowing it in the understanding, after we have been taught it by the Holy Spirit. For example, we are enabled clearly to see that the organization of the Church, as we know it, is the only true and proper organization of the Church of God; but very few really feel this in the Spirit: and the proof that they do not is the constant tendency that we see in people of all classes to get out of their proper spheres; for if they did feel this truth, spiritually, they would no more try to do what is not in their border than they would try to fly: for example, evangelists wanting to meddle with the management of Churches ; angels of Churches wanting to preach, in order to gather unbelievers into their communion; people of every rank in the Church looking for prophecy to guide it, and thereby set aside Christ as the only Ruler, and to substitute the Holy Ghost as ruler,