have undertaken to examine. Some may think it of small consequence whether this system be true or false; but no one who intelligently surveys its nature and bearings can be of that opinion. Premillennialism is no barren speculation-useless though true, and innocuous though false. It is a school of Scripture interpretation; it impinges upon and affects some of the most commanding points of the Christian faith; and, when suffered to work its unimpeded way, it stops not till it has pervaded with its own genius the entire system of one's theology, and the whole tone of his spiritual character, constructing, I had almost said, a world of its own; so that, holding the same faith, and cherishing the same fundamental hopes as other Christians, he yet sees things through a medium of his own, and finds every thing instinct with the life which this doctrine has generated within him.

Let us not, however, prejudge the question. There is danger of this on both sides. On the one hand, there are certain minds which, either from constitutional temperament, or the particular school of theology to which they are attached, have tendencies in the direction of premillennialism so strong, that they are ready to embrace it almost immediately con amore. Souls that burn with love to Christwho, with the mother of Sisera, cry through the lattice, "Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?" and with the spouse, "Make haste, my Beloved, and be thou like to a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of spices "—such souls are ready to catch at a doctrine which seems to promise a much earlier appearing of their beloved Lord than the ordinary view. "I have heard," relates an honest and warm-hearted premillennialist of the Commonwealth time, "I have heard of a poor man who, it seems, so loved and longed for Christ's appearance, that when there was a great earthquake, and when many cried out the day of judgment was come, and one cried, 'Alas! alas! what shall I

do?' and a third, How shall I hide myself?' &c., that poor man only said, 'Ah! is it so? Is the day come? Where shall I go? Upon what mountain shall I stand to see my Saviour?""* How deeply we sympathize with this feeling will by and by appear. It is for such as feel thus, more than for any others, that I have undertaken this investigation.There are next, your curious and restless spirits who feed upon the future. These are charmed with the multifarious details of the millennial kingdom. They are in their very element when settling the order in which the events shall occur, separating the felicities of the kingdom into its terrestrial and celestial departments respectively, sorting the multitudinous particulars relating to the Ezekiel and Apocalyptic cities-and such like studies. For such minds, whose appetite for the marvellous is the predominant feature of their mental character, and who live in a sort of unreal world—for these, the confused and shadowy grandeur of a kingdom of glory upon earth, with all that relates to its introduction, its establishment, its administration, and its connection with the final and unchanging state, opens up a subject of surpassing interest and riveting delight-the very food which their peculiar temperament craves and feeds on. And, to mention no more, there are those who seem to have a constitutional tendency to materialize the objects of faith, and can hardly conceive of them save as more or less implicated with this terrestrial platform. Such minds, it is superfluous to observe, will have a natural affinity with a system which brings the glory of the resurrection-state into immediate and active communion with sublunary affairs, and represents the reign of those who neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven, as consisting in a mysterious rule over men in the flesh, who eat and drink, buy and sell, plant and build, marry wives, and are given in marriage. To set * Christ's Appearance the Second Time for the Salvation of Believers. [By John Durant] 1653. Hatchard's Reprint, p. 119. Lond. 1829.

about proving to persons of this cast of mind that premillennialism will not stand the test of Scripture, is like attempting to rob them of a jewel, or to pluck the sun out of the heavens. To such minds, any other view of the subject is perfectly bald and repulsive, while theirs is encircled with a glory that excelleth. To them it carries the force of intuitive perception; they feel they know it to be true.

But are there no anti-premillennial tendencies, which require to be guarded against? I think there are. Under the influence of such tendencies, the inspired text, as such, presents no rich and exhaustless field of prayerful and delighted investigation; exegetical inquiries and discoveries are an uncongenial element; and whatever Scripture intimations regarding the future destinies of the Church and of the world involve events out of the usual range of human occurrences, or exceeding the anticipations of enlightened Christian sagacity, are almost instinctively overlooked or softened down. Such minds turn away from premillennialism just as instinctively as the others are attracted to it. The bare statement of its principles carries to their mind its own refutation—not so much from its perceived unscripturalness, as from the absurdity which it seems to carry on the face of it. They have hardly patience to listen to it. It requires an effort to sit without a smile under a grave exposition and defence of it. If they undertake to refute it, it is a task the irksomeness of which they are unable to conceal, and their unfitness for which can scarcely fail to appear. Let us try to avoid both extremes, investigating reverently the mind of the Spirit.

Much irrelevant discussion has been mixed up with the question of the premillennial advent, and arguments have been advanced on both sides which originate in confused apprehensions of the whole subject.

Some premillennialists, for example, seem to think that the

belief in a personal advent is confined to themselves, and that those who repudiate a premillennial advent are not expecting their adorable Lord in person at all. Surely so gross a misrepresentation does not require to be protested against. It is the objects and, in connection with this, the time of the Redeemer's coming that are in question-not its reality.

Another misconception relates to the final destiny of the present physical system-" the heavens and earth which are now." That these are not to be annihilated, but to furnish the elements out of which "the new heavens and the new earth" are to emerge, after the general conflagration, is zealously maintained by most modern premillennialists, as part of their system, and as what their opponents may be expected to repudiate. But this is a mistake. In point of fact, the primitive and the earlier English advocates of that doctrine seem to have taken other views of the final abode of the redeemed; while in our own day, neither do all of them affirm it, nor is it denied by all their opponents. Mr Tyso, for example, insists that after the thousand years' reign of Christ upon earth, he and his people will take their leave of it for ever; while Dr Urwick of Dublin, writing against the premillennial doctrine, maintains, at some length, that the eternal abode of the glorified Church is to rise out of the ashes of this present earth. So does Dr Fairbairn, in his able work on the Typology of Scripture, and several others.* Some minds shrink from this latter opinion, as tending to carnalize, or at least to lower, our views of the celestial state. But may not such sensitiveness spring from an unconscious confounding of the present wretched state with that which is expected to take its place? May there not be in it some tincture of that morbid spiritualism, which shrinks from the very touch of materialism, as if separation from it in every form would be the consummation of happiness! May not the Gnostic element

The literature of this question, in the Augustan age of theology, may be seen in DE MOOR (Comm. in Marck. Comp.) xxxiv. § 30.

-of the essential sinfulness and vanity of matter-be found lurking beneath it? Certainly, if the earth was implicated. in the curse, it is natural to expect that it should share in its removal. Certainly, the glorified bodies both of the Redeemer and the redeemed derive their elements from the dust of this ground, which will thus-in their persons, at least -for ever endure. And if it be no degradation to the Son of God to take it into his own person, "as the First-born from the dead"-if the dust of this ground is capable of becoming a "spiritual" and a "glorious body," meet vehicle for the perfected and beatified spirit, the sharer of its bliss in the immediate presence, and the instrument of all its activities in the service, of God and the Lamb-it does seem hard to conceive how the very system which has furnished all these elements of incorruption, and spirituality, and beauty, and glory-when its present constitution shall be dissolved, and when new and higher laws shall be stamped upon it should be incapable of furnishing a congenial abode for the glorified Church. Nor is it easy to make any thing else out of Paul's singularly interesting and noble announcements regarding the deliverance of a groaning creation from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom. viii. 19-23), or fairly to interpret the celebrated prediction of Peter (2 Pet. iii. 10-13), otherwise than as intimating that "the new heavens and the new earth," physically considered will be the same which God originally created for the abode of men-when it shall have undergone an igneous, as it has already undergone an aqueous, transformation. Nor let any one ask, Of what consequence is it whether the one opinion or the other be the correct one? For if this be what the Spirit has seen fit so specifically to reveal, it must be worthy of being held fast by us; and whatever view we take of it will necessarily give its hue to all other statements of Scripture regarding the earth.