will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire, and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh; and the slain of the Lord shall be many." After this shall new heavens and a new earth be made, and all flesh come to worship before Jehovah.

Then "it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, they shall go forth, (meaning all flesh that worship God) and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh." These were evidently not literal carcasses, worms and fires, seen month after month in the valley of Hinnom. The passage undoubtedly means, that after the universal spread of the gospel, the people of God shall in all their religious services contemplate the judgments of God brought upon the wicked, and their endless destruction from the presence of the Lord, shadowed forth by symbols taken from the literal Tophet. The church in her millennial glory will not cease to remember the millions of men, self-destroyed, whose conscience will for ever be as a gnawing worm, and whose sufferings, like those produced by unquenchable fire. The universal church will for ever abhor the remembered wickedness of all nations that have forgotten God, and will be turned into hell. All past generations that have rebelled against God, and died in their sins, will be contemplated as carcasses cast out into the place of polluted idolaters, to become the food of worms and flames.

In the 34th chapter of Isaiah, not only temporal but endless pains are denounced against Idumea, and " upon all nations," in highly figurative language. In "the day of the Lord's vengeance, and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion," it is said the Lord's "sword shall be bathed in heaven, filled with blood," and "made fat with fatness." In the same style it is said, that the

streams of Idumea, the dust and the land, shall become burning brimstone and pitch, which shall never be quenched, and through which none shall pass for ever and ever; to denote the utter destruction of that country and the endless punishment of its wicked inhabitants. The same is true when God says of the wicked Jews, whom he has long since destroyed in hell, that his anger and his fury shall burn against them and shall not be quenched. Merely temporal fires must burn out, if not quenched, but God symbolizes his punishment of wicked nations and individuals by streams of burning brimstone and pitch that shall never be extinguished. These very passages of Isaiah and Jeremiah, instead of destroying the force of our Saviour's expressions concerning the unquenchable fires and gnawing worms of hell, show that he employed terms familiar to the Jews, and frequently used by their own prophets to denote the interminable vengeance of the Almighty.

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The Idumea that was denounced has been destroyed; none shall pass through it for ever and ever ;" and the fire of wrath kindled upon those Idumeans is burning now, and the smoke thereof shall go up for ever.

In Jeremiah vii. 20, Jehovah says of his anger, it shall burn, and shall not be quenched; and surely it still burns against those idolatrous Israelites whom he slew in his wrath. He caused tens of thousands of them to be east, as to their bodies, into a literal Tophet; and this external punishment was but the figure of that which he brought upon their souls in tartarus.

The fire which God kindled in the gates or among the rulers of Jerusalem, was the fire of his wrath, and not a literal flame kindled upon the doors in their walls. The fire of his wrath in due time laid Jerusalem waste, and still burns against her wicked kings, nobles, and common people; and of this fire he said, Jer. vii. 20, "it shall not be quenched."

In short, where you find in God's most awful denunciations nothing but natural death and endless blessedness

immediately following, I see temporal destruction as a prelude to endless pains.

You complain, that I have disregarded your statement, "that a passage which was future in its reference when spoken or written, is not necessarily future in its reference now." This I grant, but I deny that the remark is applicable to those portions of Scriptures which speak of the general Judgment. Some events predicted by Christ as future when he spake on earth have been fulfilled, and now we may speak of them as past; but other events yet remain to be fulfilled. It is for instance, " appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment." Now some have died, and gone to judgment; but to you and myself, and millions of mankind, death and judgment are still future events.

Moreover, "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation," Heb. ix. 27, 28. If Christ appeared in the destruction of Jerusalem, there are others that still look for him; among whom I profess to be one; yes, there are hundreds of thousands of persons who still look for him, to whom on his second coming to our world in his bodily presence he shall yet appear, for we have not seen him; and he shall come, not bearing sin as a sin-offering, as he did when he first came, but without sin unto their salvation who are prepared to meet him in his judicial capacity.

You make what seems to me a desperate effort to show that Acts xvii. 31, refers to some past time, or else to the whole of the dispensation of the gospel, and not to a future General Judgment. Paul was addressing the Athenians concerning the true God, who was "the unknown God" to them, and he assured them that "he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained." It is not at all likely that he referred these Greeks to any temporal calamities about to come on Jerusalem. He did not say, God is now judging you by causing the gospel of Christ to be preached to you. Nor did he say God has

already judged the world; but God has appointed a day in which he will do it by Jesus Christ, to whom the Father hath committed all judgment. The Judge of men in the last great day is to be God manifest in the flesh. Immanuel, or God in our nature, and hence Paul said that God hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world by that man whom he hath ordained. According to the gospel preached by Paul, "God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ," in the last day, when all the dead shall have come forth from their graves. This is the real meaning of Rom. ii. 16, for Paul does not there intimate that his preaching of the gospel was God's judging of the world by Christ. The 13th, 14th and 15th verses of Rom. ii, are evidently a parenthesis, and are so marked in the most accurate edition of the New Testament. Omit this parenthesis in reading, and you will find that Paul asserts in this chapter, that "God will render to every man according to his deeds;" to some who "seek for glory and honour and immortality-eternal life; but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness,-indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish." At the same time he tells us God in judging the world will be no respecter of persons, but regard as he ought the different circumstances and talents of mankind, so that as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law." If you ask, when shall this equitable judgment of all who have not heard the gospel, take place, the answer is, "in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel." In preaching the gospel, Paul told men, that God had appointed a day in which he would judge the world in righteousness: this judging of the secrets of men in the last day, by Jesus Christ, was therefore according to the gospel of every other person who preaches the same doctrines which Paul and Jesus Christ did.

Your attempt to prove, that there is no future general judgment of the assembled world of mankind after the general resurrection to take place, because God is a Judge,

and to a certain extent executes righteous judgments in the earth, I cannot think deserves any serious regard. I deny that God has ever yet judged the world collectively. He hath committed the judgment of the world of mankind to be collected after the resurrection from the dead to Jesus Christ; and that judgment he is to execute at the appointed time, when he shall descend from heaven with the trump of God.

Concerning the effects of the resurrection from the dead, I have learned without going to the Sadducees or Pharisees for instruction, that "in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven," spiritual, active, intelligent immortal beings, who have entered on their final state; and that in this resurrection some arise to damnation. It is true, though no sacred Scripture; and since you have first quoted the saying, I must avow my belief, that as death leaves us, so will judgment find us;-that after death there is no saving moral change wrought in any impenitent sinner; and that in the grave, or the state of the dead, no works are done preparatory to the settlement of one's final destiny.

The questions, How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? were attributed by Paul to some man" of infidel character who wished to raise some philosophical objection against the possibility of any resurrection. Paul stopped the mouth of the " fool," by referring him to the resurrection of a new stalk of grain from the seed buried in the earth. It is just as easy, "thou fool," for God to raise up out of the body laid in the grave a real body, differing in many respects from that which was corruptible and corrupted, as to raise up a green blade of wheat from a bad grain of wheat sown in the furrow.

The apostle then proceeds to show that real bodies differ from each other in many of their attributes, and that the bodies of mankind, when raised out of their graves, will differ from what they formerly were before death; and yet be real, material bodies.