will die. For what do we read by the spirit of prophecy placed on record these many years? "These waters issue out towards the east country, and go down into the desert (of Judah), and go into the sea, which being brought forth into the sea the waters shall be healed. And it shall come to pass that everything that liveth which moveth whithersoever the river shall come, shall live, and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither, for they shall be healed, and everything shall live whither the river cometh. And fishers shall stand upon it from En-gedi even unto En-eglaim, they shall be a place to spread forth nets, their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea (Mediterranean) exceeding many." (Ezek. xlvii. 8-10.) Surely such a deposit of life will not continue to be called The Dead Sea !

So much then for Millennial blessedness. One Lord, and his name one. The knowledge of the Lord covering the earth as the waters cover the sea. Satan bound and saints free. Truth springing out of the earth, and Righteousness looking down from heaven. Swords beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; the art of war forgotten in the arts of peace abounding. The wolf and the lamb feeding together, and the lion eating hay like the bullock. The days of men like the days of a tree, and long enjoying the work of their hands, for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord and their offspring with them, and it shall come to pass that before they call He will answer, and while they are yet speaking He will hear; for the tabernacle of God shall be with men, and He will dwell with them, they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them and be their God. And this for a thousand years!

O scenes surpassing fable, and yet true,

Scenes of accomplished bliss; which who can see,
Though but in distant prospect, and not feel
His soul refreshed with foretaste of the joy?
Rivers of gladness water all the earth,

And clothe all climes with beauty; the reproach
Of barrenness is past. The fruitful field

Laughs with abundance; and the land, once lean,
Or fertile only in its own disgrace,

Exults to see its thistly curse repealed.

The various seasons woven into one,

And that one season an eternal spring.

The garden fears no blight, and needs no fence,

For there are none to covet; all are full.

The lion, and the libbard, and the bear,

Graze with the fearless flocks; all bask at noon
Together, or all gambol in the shade

Of the same grove, and drink one common stream.
Antipathies are none. No foe to man

Lurks in the serpent now; the mother sees,
And smiles to see, her infant's playful hand
Stretched forth to dally with the crested worm,

I

To stroke his azure neck, or to receive
The lambent homage of his arrowy tongue.
All creatures worship man, and all mankind
One Lord, One Father. Error has no place:
That creeping pestilence is driven away;

The breath of heaven has chased it. In the heart
No passion touches a discordant string,
But all is harmony and love.

Disease

Is not the pure and uncontaminate blood
Holds its due course, nor fears the frost of age.
One song employs all nations; and all cry,
"Worthy the Lamb, for He was slain for us!
The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks
Shout to each other, and the mountain tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy;
Till, nation after nation taught the strain,
Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round.

COWPER'S" Winter Walk at Noon."

VII. THE LOOSING OF SATAN AND HIS FINAL RUIN.

But the seventh chiliad of time as the day of man's rest will have its evening too. When the seventh day is recorded as God's day of rest, it has for its limit no morning no evening. His time for rest or work has no limit. When "God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth" it was not His beginning but theirs; when He rested from all His work which He had made He ceased not from work, but only in that particular. Ever working, ever resting. Watts nobly sings,

Thy throne eternal ages stood
Ere seas or stars were made,
Thou art the ever living God
Were all the nations dead.

Eternity with all its years

Stands present in Thy view,
To Thee there's nothing old appears,
Great God, there's nothing new.

Our lives through various scenes are drawn,
And vexed with trifling cares,

While Thine eternal thought moves on
Thine undisturbed affairs.

But Earth and Time, as the scene and space of man's work and man's rest, will, with its seven-thousandth year, we believe, complete its history and reach the limit assigned to both by the Creator, so far as revealed in His word. Hence we read of the closing in of this day of millennial glory with shadows dark and deep, though happily of brief duration, termed a little season. For the Dragon, that Old Serpent which is the Devil and Satan, is bound only "until the thousand years should be fulfilled, and after that he must be

loosed a little season." (Rev. xx. 3.) This is a most wonderful fact in revealed truth; and one end of his life being thus prolonged will doubtless be to magnify the power of God as greater to hold him in check for a thousand years than at once to crush and destroy him. But power and daring enough remain in him after this his long imprisonment to dare and defy Omnipotence yet once again, and he will find moreover ready and willing agents through whom to carry out his presumptuous design. For we read, "When the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog (which we must be careful not to confound with the pre-millennial gathering to battle under the same name) to gather them together to battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city, by which we understand an encampment round about restored Jerusalem, which for a thousand years has been the earth's metropolis. This will be Satan's and man's combined and crowning act of presumption, in chastisement for which we wonder not to read on, 66 And fire came down out of heaven from God and consumed them. And that enemy who deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and sulphur (the most effective for the destruction of life), where both the beast and the false prophet were cast, and they will be tormented day and night for the ages of the ages." (Emphatic Diaglott, Rev. xx. 7-10.)

Thus we see every dealing of God with man commencing with blessing, through man's degeneracy ending in curse. In Eden "God blessed them and said, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," but how soon! "Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." And curse continued until "God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and it repented the Lord (wonderful words) that He had made man upon the earth." The very faculty given to man above the brute, that he might glorify God and enjoy Him for ever, he employed to sink himself beneath the brute and to corrupt his way upon the earth, and so the flood came and destroyed them all. Again God began with man, and to Noah and his sons He said, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth;" but how soon he had to interfere with devices laid in defiance of Himself! and He scattered them abroad upon the face of the earth. They said, "Go to, let us build ;" and they went to, and 'got up a company' without God; and what came of it? What has come to many companies since, whose reckoning has been without God-Babel. Again God began with Abram, saying, "I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing." A few centuries pass away, and what do we hear Him say to the seed of Abraham ? "Hear this word that the Lord hath spoken against you, O children of Israel against the whole family which I brought up from the land of

Egypt, saying, You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities. Can two walk together except they be agreed?" (Amos iii. 1-3). And when they had filled up the measure of their iniquity by crucifying their Messiah, soon, very soon, the curse fell upon their city to its destruction, and upon their nation to its dispersion. The very canon of Old Testament Scripture, commencing with so much of blessing to the race, closes with the warning, "Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse (Mal. iv. 6). Again God began with man on the day of Pentecost in the endowment of the church with blessing and power to bless, and the chapters that open in greatest blessing we have seen close in the greatest curse the earth has ever seen, in Satan's masterpiece, the Man of Sin.

But now the greatest wonder of all is, that millennial blessedness should end in curse let loose again, resulting in the siege of restored Jerusalem, "the beloved city:" for which act of presumptuous folly and wickedness fire descends from God out of heaven and devours them. Thus briefly and graphically is the overthrow of man and man's enemy described, and such a direct intervention of judgment we may suppose to have been imperative, for we cannot conceive of the city and its inhabitants as in any way qualified to sustain a siege or resist an assault.

Now must take place that most awful if not most wonderful event of human history,

THE GENERAL RESURRECTION AND JUDGMENT,

wherein, according to our Lord's words, "all that are in their graves shall hear His voice and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment" (see Alford), and according to John, "The sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades delivered up the dead which were in them." And here let us note that the resurrection of the one class is as real a bodily resurrection as that of the other; for we must insist that the promise to the believer is not less a threat to the unbeliever, "I will raise him up at the last day." Not only in the words above quoted have we this revealed, but Paul to Felix declares, "there shall be a resurrection both of the just and the unjust." (Acts xxiv. 15.) Nor may we inquire of these, any more than of those in the first resurrection, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?" It should suffice us to hear our Lord first say, “Fear Him which hath power to destroy both soul and body in hell;" and finally John, "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God." In the body, men have sinned; sin hath been to a great extent the result of its promptings; in the body, therefore, men must receive

their sentence, and the body as well as the soul must become the subject of the second death." We must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done through the body according to the things that he did, whether good or bad." (2 Cor. v. 10. See Alford.)

Thus before the great white throne (emblem of omniscience, purity, and perfection in judgment) set up in the heavenlies must appear in one dread assembly all fallen intelligences, human and angelic. But first in order we think must come the judgment of angels; sinners as they were before men, we suggest that their judgment will be likely to precede that of men. And that they are to be judged is evident from two passages, "Know ye not that we shall judge angels ?" (1 Cor. vi. 3.) and "The angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, He hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day" (2 Peter, ii. 4; and Jude 6). From which it is evident that before Satan and his legions are consigned to the lake of fire, he and they must stand in the judgment to receive their sentence from Christ and his saints, then seated with Him in the throne of His glory. Now it shall be seen whether all the angels who kept not their first estate come under the judgment of condemnation; or whether (as some think) Christ went and preached to these spirits in prison during the forty days that elapsed between His resurrection from the tomb and His ascension from Mount Olivet. What Peter meant when he wrote that crux of all commentators, 1 Peter iii. 19, 20, we then shall know. That the preaching of our blessed Lord to any spirits anywhere could be in vain cannot be thought; "He shall not fail nor be discouraged;" but to whom and to what end this was, we then shall see. Certain it is that Peter apprehended a feature of our Lord's mission to fallen spirits about which, to say the least, there is much obscurity. That Satan, the tempter of our race, was first the tempter of his own, we believe. That the sin of the tempted is less in degree than that of the tempter is certain. That the weak are always the prey of the strong, if God be not their helper, is equally certain. That His tender mercies are over all His works, His word declares. That His rational creatures, both human and angelic, share those mercies most, is evident. That He has been long-suffering toward men, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, Peter declares. That grace has been shown to elect angels, enabling them to keep their first estate, and may yet have been shown to others who kept not their first estate, is at least suggested by the passage quoted from Peter.

With what absorbing interest, an interest surpassing all other, shall we then discover the origin of evil. How amidst the hierarchy of heaven one was found with pride and daring enough to dare Omnipotence, and others too of meaner rank to join the rebel host! How much of fact or fiction, how much of inspiration our