tion. It is devoutly to be hoped that this is only the first instalment of female benevolence to the sick and suffering. I shrink as much as any one, from sisterhoods at home, organised on the scheme of foreign conventual life. But I shall be rejoiced to hear that many hitherto unemployed and unconnected females have learned that their own peculiar sphere of action is the ward of an hospital, and that they are disciplining themselves for foreign service by proper drilling at home. The race of middle-aged unmarried women is often the subject of vulgar and most unwarranted sarcasm. But women will most effectually redeem themselves from such reproaches, by showing that as they are already the best labourers in our parishes, they are also the best nurses in our hospitals.

If we turn from the injuries inflicted by war on our countrymen abroad, to those to which we have also referred as likely to affect our home population, the duties of Christian men, as respects such dangers, are not, I think, difficult to point out.

In the first place, we are surely to seek earnestly from Him who is emphatically termed the "Prince of Peace," that we may be rescued from a warlike spirit; that while we are not slow to put on our armour if the call be urgent, we shall always unfeignedly rejoice to put it off. War is to be regarded by every man in a nation as a national curse, which he will spare no sacrifice to extirpate.

In the next place, there must be a steady and anxious endeavour to check the growth of all those angry passions which are the natural offspring of war. Many fine examples have presented themselves, especially in the present war, of deep sympathy, even among the soldiers, with the sufferings of their enemies. Many "cups of cold water" have, we believe, been supplied to dying lips, which will be registered in the imperishable volumes of the Divine remembrance. Let the same spirit be cherished amongst ourselves; may justice be done, but let pity be felt for our antagonists as well as our friends. The darker the crime of the northern Emperor, the more he needs our supplication at the Throne of Mercy.

Next, let especial care be taken that those pious and peaceful occupations for which war is apt to create a distaste, have even more than an usual share of our regard. It is with much grief that we have heard of defalcations in the funds of the Religious Societies. War will have inflicted her worst curse upon us, if she succeeds in lessening our regard to Institutions, some of which are, I confidently believe, from hour to hour drawing down the blessing of God upon the land.

Above all, I need scarcely say that the cultivation of personal religion is the strongest security against all evil, public and private, at home or abroad. The presence of the Lord will be granted to His devout worshippers, and the man living closest to God will be the surest effectually to repel all deterioration from within or without. At the entrance on a New Year it especially

behoves every man among us to enquire what measure of the Divine displeasure his own special offences have drawn down upon his country. If the prayer of Abraham was heard for a city, the sin of Achan was visited on an army. It is therefore for the man of God to be much in prayer; to stand on his watch-tower; to look out for coming evils and guard against them; to search out the best means of usefulness, and set them vigorously in action; to hold deep and filial communion with the Father of Spirits, that, so, the "windows of heaven may be opened," and a blessing be poured out large enough to satisfy all the wants and wishes of a bleeding world.

H.

CHRISTIAN PROSPECTS OF THE WORLD TO COME.

PERHAPS you will allow me a place in your pages for the suggestion of an enquiry which has for some time been ripening in my own mind into a conviction. Is there not a serious deficiency in the popular way of looking at and dealing with the subject mentioned above? Is there not a divergence from the language of Scripture, which first throws over the future a greater degree of indistinctness and uncertainty than is left upon it by Revelation, and then allows and fosters conceptions on the subject which are actually at variance with the truth? I am quite sensible that some of the most essential truths concerning the world to come are firmly held and plainly declared, and am also quite ready to agree that a considerable degree of obscurity is intended to hang over the prospect; but after all allowances, I believe that the enquiries I have proposed have long been receiving from thoughtful minds a most unsatisfactory reply: and if the fact be so, it is time to speak, because a Christian topic of such peculiar interest and power cannot lose any measure of the fulness and distinctness which Revelation has conferred upon it, without diminishing the treasures of the Church, weakening the motives of the Christian, and impairing the resources of the minister of the Word.

Fully believing that these consequences have ensued, I venture to entreat attention to the subject, and especially the attention of those whose office calls them to guide, correct, and mature the religious sentiments of others. Religious ideas that are general, religious expressions which are prevalent, naturally find their way into the pulpit, influence the thoughts, and offer themselves to the use of the preacher. But it is from the Bible which he holds, that his message is to be derived; and, in delivering it, he is not to accept the ideas and expres

sions which float around him, the views of his party, or even of the religious community in general, as the adequate exponents of the Revelation itself.

"I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." Such is the concise statement in the Creed of that part of the Christian system to which I allude. These words are repeated among us continually, and I have not the least doubt that the two facts which they announce are unfeignedly received by the great body of those who utter them. They do believe in the resurrection of the body, and in the life everlasting; but I do not think that they have in general any clear idea of the connection between the two facts, or of what is implied in and represented by the two statements taken together. For what is the system of thought with regard to things to come, which is present with more or less of vagueness or distinctness to the generality of minds, religious as well as irreligious? What is the prevalent impression on the subject which we find floating around us, propagating itself unquestioned from mind to mind, discovering itself in common conversation, expressing itself more plainly in moments of strong feeling, and giving its colouring to popular hymns, religious compositions, and the language of the pulpit? Is it not something of this kind? That we are placed here on our probation, transient inhabitants of a temporary world, in the destiny of which, when once we have left it, we have no further interest: that our connection with the body, and our local habitation in the material world, are only the disparaging conditions of this first stage of our being that the moment of death conveys the departing soul to its judgment and sentence: that the spirits of the saved pass at once to heaven-meaning by that word, some scene suited to the abode of disembodied spirits, where they find their real home and everlasting dwelling-place among angels in the immediate presence of God, and live in whatsoever gladness and glory can be feebly represented to the mind under the imagery of light and splendour, and harps and crowns. To these ideas the plain statements of Revelation compel us to attach the supplement of a general judgment and resurrection of the dead, when the appointed time comes for the final destruction of this material world. Many unreflecting minds are probably not in the least aware that there is any want of consistency between these two parts of their belief, while others would perhaps state the connection between them in some such way as this: that the blessed are called to leave for a moment their seats of glory, and to reassume their bodies in order to be present at the great pageant of the condemnation of the ungodly and the destruction of the world; and that they then return with their Lord to the kingdom above, only perhaps receiving some accessions of happiness and greater degrees of glory. In the passage, the body which has been raised is again dropped by their imagination, or is rarefied to the nearest possible approach to nobody

at all. I do not speak of those whose attention and enquiries have been more or less awakened on the subject, and whose ideas about it have therefore assumed a greater degree of distinctness, but of those who simply imbibe the ideas and adopt the phrases which float around them. No doubt the readers of your "select and venerable pages (as I have lately seen them described) belong to the former rather than to the latter class; nevertheless, considering that the latter class includes the great body of mankind, I will venture to appeal even to some of those who will read these lines, whether they are not conscious that their own ordinary and habitual views of the future have been nearly in accordance with the account just given. But however that be, I am sure I may appeal to them, whether the language which they hear from men in general, and from the poor almost universally, does not limit itself to that general notion which is expressed by the common phrase "going to heaven," representing the immediate emigration of the souls of the saved, one by one, to some distant and glorious scene which has no sort of analogy to the present; etherial regions, composed as it were of light, where they mingle among the innumerable company of angels, and dwell to all eternity with God.

Now for this vast emigration of redeemed mankind to other scenes, this total abandonment of the original seat of humanity, this absorption of men in the community of angels, this merely spiritual and disembodied condition of existence, and this immediate entrance into the eternal glory at the hour of death, Revelation affords no pretence whatever. The substance of Revelation on the subject is summed up in the words, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting;" a life, therefore, (as far as it is given to us to look forward into it) to be passed in the body which is raised again not merely to be worn as a garment for the day of judgment, but to be the fit habitation of the glorified spirit, the instrument of its actions, and the medium of its connection with the material world. How vast the difference between "our vile body" and that "glorious body," no tongue can tell. St. Paul is commissioned to intimate some of the distinctions, but human words cannot express them. Nevertheless we are not at liberty, on account of those distinctions, to rarefy that body into no body at all. The "spiritual body" is not to be composed of "corruptible flesh and blood," which "cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" but, whatever it is composed of, it is as really a body as the "natural body" is. Spiritual body is no more a periphrasis for spirit, than natural (or as it should be rendered, if we had such a word, soul-ish, XIKOV,) is a periphrasis for soul. The one is a body bearing the same relation to the πνευμα as the other does to the ψυχη. The destiny of the material creation in general is likewise plainly declared to be analogous to that of the body, which is itself but a portion of that creation. It is stricken with death, CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 205.

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is doomed to destruction, and in the meantime, in testimony of its intended dissolution, is "made subject to vanity." But that destruction is to issue in a change like that which converts the "vile body" into the "glorious body." It "groaneth and travaileth in pain," as it advances not only to an hour of ruin, but of a new birth which is to succeed. "Its earnest expectation waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." It is thus that St. Paul interprets the promise in Isaiah: "Behold I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered or come into mind." That promise St. Peter declares that the Christian Church was looking for, and St. John saw it accomplished in anticipatory vision.

And as the promise includes the restitution of the body and of the material world, so also it includes the restitution of human society, of course under far different conditions from those under which it exists now. "The children of this world marry and are given in marriage; but those who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." But they are not wafted away to dwell among the Angels of God in heaven; whatever correspondence and intercourse they may have with them. They dwell in " that world" which follows "the resurrection from the dead," and their own society is reconstituted in its own abode. Every expression suggests the ideas of community, of varied relations, of righteous order, of harmonious system. It is a kingdom which is to be judged in righteousness, and governed by the immediate rule of its true and only Lord. It is a city with its walls, and gates, and streets" compact together" and "at unity in itself," "lying four-square," and described by every expression that can indicate exact order and perfect arrangement. The promise in Isaiah does not end with the creation of the new heavens and new earth; it is immediately added, " And behold I create Jerusalem a rejoicing and her people a joy." We might have thought that these expressions were to have their fulfilment in beneficent changes under the present dispensation, did not the concluding chapters of the Revelation fix them as being accomplished after the great day, and as constituting the final scenes of human history. As soon as St. John has seen the new heaven and the new carth, he sees the second part of the promise fulfilled, and beholds "the holy city, new Jerusalem," not rearing its towers in some distant scene to which men are to be transported, but "coming down from God out of heaven." Within those walls the prospects of the future close, and men are left walking in its light, and that not in mere undistinguished multitudes; for the last words speak of "nations of the saved," and of "kings of the earth who bring their glory and honour into it." It is a most suggestive fact, that the sacred record of man's history which