address, "glad tidings, how that the promise "which was made unto the fathers, God hath ful"filled the same unto us their children, in that he "hath raised up Jesus again; as it is also written "in the second Psalm" (observe the peculiar term here applied to the Resurrection) "Thou art my "Son, this day have I begotten Thee." These passages lead us to conceive of the Resurrection of Christ as a Birth-Process. And what is Birth? It is simply the bringing into light of the embryo, the development of a substance substance previously formed, and previously endowed with a principle of life, into a new element. The substance in this process preserves, not only its identity, (as is the case in vegetable and insect transmutation,) but also the very form which it assumed in its preexistent state. In all other respects this analogy resembles closely those before considered. All of them when examined give up the notion of the unfolding of a living substance according to the law of its being-such as ushers it into and qualifies it for a higher condition of existence.

The view thus arrived at may borrow some confirmation from another statement made by the Apostle Paul in reference to the Resurrection of our Blessed Lord. He parallels that Resurrection, not only with the Birth-Process of the human species, but also with the first formation of man.

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"The first man Adam was made" (literally became into, éyéveto eis) "a living soul—the last Adam "was made a quickening spirit." Now, what does this parallel teach us? In the formation of the first founder of the human race there was a development out of a rudimentary stage of existence into a higher condition. The first step was from unorganised to organised matter. "The Lord God," we are told, "formed man of the dust of "the ground." The curiously constructed system of the human body, with all the mechanism of the animal œconomy, was in the first instance fashioned by Divine energy,-dust being made the basis of the fabric. But this organised mass informing principle of

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of matter lacked an vitality, such as might give it a distinct and separate existence. The human body was then part and parcel of what we call inanimate nature, if indeed that can be called inanimate, in which the movement of decomposition and the formation of new combinations is continually proceeding. But it was not always to be so. Man was to be endowed with a separate principle of vitality. "The Lord God breathed into his nostrils the "breath of life, and man became a living soul." Henceforth man's condition of existence, denoted according to its highest principle, was one of animal vitality rather than of material organiza

tion. And the parallel here drawn leads us to believe that the Resurrection of man is a process something analogous to his original formation. Resurrection is the rising out of a rudimentary into a more advanced condition of existence-a transition process from a state of animal to a state of spiritual vitality -as it is said, "The last Adam was made a quickening spirit." It is obvious to remark that this development into spirit must not be supposed to involve a destruction or annihilation of the material element of which our nature is composed. When it is said that the first man Adam was made a living soul, we are not to understand that the organized bodily structure which had been fashioned out of the dust of the earth was abolished, but simply that it was informed by a principle of animal vitality; and so by parity of reasoning, when it is said that the second Adam was made a quickening spirit, we are not to infer that the body was abolished, but simply that it was informed by a higher principle than heretofore.

The animated man and the risen man are both defined according to the higher element of their condition, leaving out of sight the lower element. The three component elements of human nature, as specified by the Apostle to the Thessalonians, are Body, Soul, and Spirit, (σῶμα, ψυχὴ, πνεῦμα.)

Each of these words may be made to denote a distinct stage of human existence. In the first stage-that of organised matter-man was merely body; in the second, that of animal vitality, man is living soul; in that third stage, which we by faith anticipate, he will be (though without loss of any essential element of his nature) more justly characterised as spirit.

Hitherto our attention has been occupied with terms or passages descriptive of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus. In the light which those terms and passages afford we now proceed to examine the somewhat peculiar language of our text, and find it conveying the very same notion of the future Resurrection of the righteous which we have been led to form of Christ's Resurrection. The Sadducees, unbelievers in the Resurrection state, and doubtless confirmed in their unbelief by the carnal and earthly associations with which the Pharisees were wont to invest it, had demanded of our Lord the solution of a difficulty, the very statement of which, as it appeared to them, reduced the doctrine of the Resurrection to an absurdity. Jesus, in his reply, begins by divesting the Resurrection state of those attributes of an animal condition of existence which in the notions of many attached to it. Generation and dissolution, the all pervading law of the

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present œconomy, is not to be looked for in that higher state. "They who shall be accounted 'worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection "from the dead, neither marry nor are given in "marriage; neither can they die any more: for they "are equal unto the angels, and are the children of "God; being the children of the Resurrection." In the figurative expression "children of the Resur"rection"-we recognise at once a confirmation of that view of the process which we have arrived at by the study of other Scriptures. If Resurrection be a process closely analogous to that of natural birth, this of itself will sufficiently warrant and account for the denomination of the risen dead who are the issue of the process as children of the Resurrection. But how does their relationship to the Resurrection involve a relationship to God himself? How is their sonship to the Resurrection a ground and reason of their Divine Sonship, as those words certainly intimate: "They are the children of God, being the children of the Resurrection?" Because that bringing out of his rational creatures into a higher state of existence, which is termed Resurrection, is by far the most stupendous of all the acts of divine power, and is therefore more than other such acts attributable to the operation and energy of the Divine Being. The implied figure holds