are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." Gal. 6. 16, "As many as walk according to this rule, peace be upon them, and upon the Israel of God." Eph. 2. 12, 13, 19, "Ye that were without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenant of promise, are now brought nigh by the blood of Christ. and are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints." Out of these mystic twelve tribes of Israel, shadowing forth the whole professing church in the Roman empire, an election of 144,000 was to be made, and this election constituted all along the Apocalyptic history, which is the history of the church, the true Israel, in contradistinction from the professing Israel.*

And let us here remark that it is to this very sealing of the elect Israel here shadowed forth, which is spread over a wide lapse of time, that we conceive allusion to be made in these words of Christ: "And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." These 'angels' are the ministers of the everlasting gospel, and the 'trumpet' is a collective term for the sevenfold series of trumpets mentioned in the Apocalypse in connexion with the sounding of which the preaching of the gospel and the gathering of the elect was to be carried on through the whole period of the Christian dispensation.†

* See this point elaborated with pre-eminent ability, and established upon an impregnable basis, in the "Hora Apocalyptica" of the Rev. E. B. Elliott, published in London, 1844-a work which no one can well read without being grateful for having lived in the age which produced it.

+ "When Jerusalem shall be reduced to ashes, and that wicked nation cut off and rejected, then shall the Son of man send his ministers with the trumpet of the gospel, and they shall gather together his elect of the several nations, from the four corners of heaven: so that God shall not want a church, although that ancient people of his be rejected and cast off; but that Jewish church being destroyed, a new church shall be called out of the Gentiles." Lightfoot Heb. & Talm. Exercit. on Mat. 24 31.

This gathering,' however, does not here, any more than in the case of the 'nations' before the throne of the Son of man, imply a local assemblage. It is a term simply indica tive of their enrolment into the ranks of the faithful, and is in fact equivalent to the sealing in the more figured style of the prophet. In both cases the brief symbolical prediction swells out in the fulfilment into an extended course of events embracing centuries of time. This is the genius of inspired prophecy. This forms the grand canon of its interpretation. Nor can we doubt that the attainment of satisfactory results in the field of prophetic investigation will depend upon the degree in which this principle is recognized as sound and unquestionable.

CHAPTER X.

The First Resurrection and the Judgment of the Dead.

We now proceed to avail ourselves of the principle and the results brought to view in the preceding chapter, by applying them to a passage shrouded in the thickest folds of symbolical darkness, with some hopes to "pluck out the heart of its mystery." We allude to the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse containing the account of the Millennial reign of Christ and the saints, termed "the first resurrection," and of the 'judgment of the dead' before the great white throne. Our object is to show that what is there termed 'the first resurrection' affords, when correctly interpreted, no evidence whatever of the resurrection of the body. As the whole system of prophetic Eschatology, when rightly understood, must form a harmonious whole, it becomes all important to determine how far the oracle before us may be made consistent with the views already presented of the meaning

of other passages relative to the Resurrection and the Judgment. With a view to this we observe,

(1.) That the Apocalypse in general contains but little in the way of announcement that is absolutely new. The title of the book itself—'Apocalypse,' i. e. unveiling-carries the implication of its purport. It is the disclosure of the inner hidden sense of the mysteries, i. e. the symbolical things of the Old Testament. Thus Babylon the great, the harlot mother of abominations, is the substantiated truth of what is contained in Isaiah respecting the Babylon whose character and catastrophe he describes. So the vision of the white horse bearing the celestial champion with bloodstained garments is the fulfilled verity of the warrior coming from Bozrah clad in similar apparel, and performing similar achievments. And so of numerous other items which might easily be specified. This unveiling is indeed managed in such a manner as not to dispense with the use of symbols. It is seldom made in plain literal language; but the symbols are of a nature capable of being understood, especially by aid of the express interpretations which are occasionally interspersed; and as the book is in the main a sort of pictorial history of the church in a continuous chain, it is supposed that a careful study of the history will leave no great difficulty in the application of the symbols.

(2.) Assuming the above as a postulate, it follows that wherever a striking parallelism is discovered between the utterances of the older prophets and of John, the presumption is that the inditing Spirit intended that the two should be regarded as of identical import. The imagery of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, is not merely accommodated to the purposes of John, but he is to be regarded as the veritable expounder of the true-meant sense of the Spirit as expressed in the shaded diction of his predecessors. In accordance with this we remark,

(3.) That the 'judgment' portrayed in the opening of

the present vision is identical with that of Daniel as related in his seventh chapter. This we infer from its general scope and character, and from the parallelism of the language in which it is described. Mede's argument on this subject is in our view conclusive. "The kingdom of the Son of Man, and of the saints of the Most High, begins in Daniel, when the great judgment sits. But the kingdom of the Apocalypse, wherein the saints reign with Christ a thousand years, is the same with the kingdom of the Son of Man and saints of the Most High, in Daniel: therefore it begins also at the great judgment." He then presents the following tabellated view of the parallelism between the two prophecies, which is undoubtedly well founded.

The judgment here described we take to be the same; and certainly if it be not the same, some adequate reason must be assigned for the community of phrase in which the

*It is, however, to be borne in mind, that as in Daniel the saints' reign is not limited to a thousand years, so neither is that mentioned in John. The thousand years is merely one grand department of their reign severed off from the rest as a kind of Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) of the world's great week-as it was according to their reckoning-whereas the New Jerusalem that follows answers rather to the Christian eighth-day Sabbath, only it is a Sabbath that " ne'er breaks up." It is this which properly constitutes Daniel's everlasting kingdom of the saints.

two are set forth. But the judgment of Daniel assuredly commences synchronically with the commencement of Christ's kingdom, and flows on with the flux of his earthly sovereignty during the Gospel age. The judgment of John therefore must be assigned to the same period. The obvious inference from this is, that the Millennium of John must be referred to a past and not a future period of history. It is merely the designation of one illustrious portion of the reign of Christ during the dispensation, that commenced at his inauguration as king of Zion, of which the second Psalm recites the decree. It is not necessary indeed to maintain that the thousand years is to be dated, with punctilious exactness, from the very epoch of his commencing kingdom. A considerable margin of time may be allowed both before and after the lapse of this Apocalyptic Chiliad, for preceding and subsequent events; but what we confidently affirm is, that it enters into and forms a part of this 'great day of judgment' which has already extended over the space of 1800 years. This follows, in our view, irresistibly from the legitimate interpretation of the 7th of Daniel. We have adduced, we think, irrefragable evidence, in our commentary on that book, that the sitting judgment there described does cover the period of the Christian dispensation down to the era of the destruction of the Fourth Beast, or the Roman empire, when the Gospel kingdom begins more signally to assume its predicted character of universality. Consequently, as the sitting of the Millennial judgment is described in precisely equivalent terms, we know of no possible mode of avoiding the conclusion of the identity of the two. The stress of the proof evidently depends upon the correctness of the interpretation we have given of the true sense of Daniel's oracle; and to that we refer, as we cannot introduce it in extenso in the present connexion.*

* We may perhaps learn from the view now presented what opinion to form of the doctrine of the pre-millennial advent of Christ. The theory