More than the perquisite; then law shall speak And equity; not jealous more to guard What a blessed transformation of society will be every where effected, by the preponderating righteousness of those happy times! Righteousness exalteth a nation, as nothing without it can. In every department of human interest, social and individual, what a reformation, what a melioration, what a metamorphosis; truly a new creation of sentiment and character and action! Think of those monster evils that continue for chiliads of time to haunt and mar our social welfare; and which, law, and police, and jails, and gibbets, and military power, and worldly education, and worldly legislation, can never coerce or cure-they will all disappear and vanish from our view. Nothing is wanting but sincere and enlightened faith in the gospel of Christ among all nations, to introduce the millennium and regenerate the world. The spirit of love to God will diffuse that of love to man; the very way for the development of true piety. Hence each will feel an interest in the weal of every other member of the species. The color of the skin will not then be the critefion of duties or of rights. Education will be honest, and Christian, and universal, in the main. Mind will be every where informed, developed, invigorated, and matured. The only monarchy on earth will be properly the theocracy of God our Savior; and under him, like Israel before monarchy was given them in his anger, every state will be a homogeneous and worshipping republic, a commonwealth of Christians. It is probable that a qualified and virtuous democracy, without ambition, usurpation, envy, or military coercion, will generally prevail and endure. Laws shall be few, reasonable, useful, and well administered. Wars shall cease; slavery be no more; no duelling, no gambling, no infernal profaneness, no lewd pleasures, no intemperance, no idleness, no calumnious assassination of character, no corrupt merchandising or com merce, no sectarianism-CHRISTIAN will be all, the brotherhood of human nature will be restored, and physical comforts, it is supposed, will abound. The age of man will be lengthened; disease will be lessened; the productions of the earth will be abundant; marriage will be honored universally as the institution of God; the population of the world will be tenfold, and earth itself will reflect the countenance of heaven. The Lord's day will be every where honored and obeyed. It will be richly enjoyed, appreciated, and blessed. What Christians will those ages produce, when men shall show themselves Christians, and Christians shall show themselves men! How omnipotent will be the truth; no madness left on earth to doubt it! Children will be generally converted early, will grow in grace as they grow in years; and rare will be the mother, the sin of whose son, and perhaps his violent death, will break her heart! What a procession of glorified millions, in those ages, shall crowd the brightened way to the open portals of the realms of glory! What a colony of multitudes, countless and beatified, will earth remit to heaven, fixing there at last the grand majority of the species, the glorious peculium and the proper premium of the Son of God! Theology will be improved-that is, the truth of revelation, in itself unchangeable, will be more simply and fully studied, more perfectly understood, with more purity inculcated, and with more wisdom used and applied. No impious hypocrite will ever attempt to supersede the truth, or alter it, or modify its heaven-descended unity, or dare to prostitute it as the mere medium of his own vapid self-glory. No elaborate simpleton will ever aim at originality for its own sake, or make it an end instead of a means, in appearing as the exponent or the advocate or the oracle of the truth, vaunting himself to be somebody; and none will be so squalid as to make a party, or even desire the pre-eminence among his peers; humility, that signal of wisdom, will then predominate, qualifying all, and 'Sometimes with augmented reason, when she neglected or deceived or corrupted his arly education, and the consequent remorse is felt. making demonstration in all, of simplicity and godly sincerity, not fleshly wisdom, by the grace of God, characterizing his ministers and all their works. There will be then no heresy-hunter, no heresy-finder, and no heresy-maker, to disturb the faith of saints and mar the devout peace of the churches of God. O scenes surpassing fable and yet true; Scenes of accomplished bliss! which who can see, His soul refreshed with foretaste of the joy? With respect to that happy era that is before us, we state1. That they greatly err, in our conviction growing continually stronger, who deny or disparage the truth, that this prosperous condition of the church on earth, is to be referred to no other dispensation of the grace of God, than the present, the Christian dispensation. Commencing with the mission of the Spirit on the day of pentecost, that dispensation, called expressly the ministration of the Spirit, is to continue to the end of the world. The millennial glory is only the meridian of its day, not another day. A change of dispensation is properly a change of the instituted manner, order, and duties, of divine worship on the earth, to which the devout conformity of all men is obligated and due. Such a change occurred, and shook earth and heaven, once more, when the Mosaic was superseded by the Christian dispensation. But this, in comparison, is not to be shaken or removed. In it we, and all the elect of God to the end of time, are to be educated for heaven. Wherefore we, RECEIVING A KINGDOM WHICH CANNOT BE MOVED, let us have, let us hold fast, or apprehend and firmly grasp, grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear; for our God is a consuming fire. It is in this dispensation, to which all previous ones were tributary, that our Lord Jesus Christ, our blessed Savior, all accomplished and all accomplishing, is to consummate together his glory and his work. There is no subsequent dispensation for the church, except that of eternity and glory in heaven. He that descended, to the nadir of his humiliation, is the same also that ascended to the zenith of his exaltation, culminating for ever, up far above all heavens; and for what end? plainly that he might perfectionate his church, and ultimate the success of his cause, and consummate the glory of his eternal enterprise-that he might fill all things, ïva xλngáón, that he might fulfil, perform, accomplish all things; that in the dispensation of the fulness of times, that is, in the Christian dispensation, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in him, in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him, who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. The idea here, as the chief word, ανακεφαλαιώσασθαι, is plainly military; that he might reduce under one grand command, or captaincy, or generalissimoship, in Christ, all related or congenial elements, celestial and terrestrial, angelic and human, as his great army of light and glory, combined and united for ever in him. Here indeed we have neither time nor place, for extensive argument against opposing theories. Some of them we view as equally specious, and erroneous, and noxious to the interests of the missionary cause. Hence we say of them the four following things; 1) Their advocates seem to us to interpret Scripture on principles either partial, or puerile, or false. The plain should govern the doubtful, the lucid control the obscure, the didactic interpret the allegorical, and great known principles rule against those hypothetical and visionary; general views and analogies well ascertained, taking the lead against those that are private, empirical, and short-witted; as, with honest and simple-hearted men, it is both custom and nature to do. Instead of this, their plan seems rather the reverse, than the identity, of the right. To interpret the word of God on no principles, or on those mainly conjectural, or certainly mistaken, or plainly false, seems to be the prestige or the preference that besets this class of interpreters-we mean all those who expect or believe ANOTHER DISPENSATION OF THE GRACE OF GOD, ulterior to the Christian, in this world. We condemn them all by this criterion, as very faulty and unsafe, in these great matters of the kingdom. Compare 1 Cor. 10: 11. Eph. 1: 10, 22, 23. 4: 10. Heb. 9: 26-28. 12: 26, 27. 1 John 2: 7, 8, 18. 2) Their views, especially some of them, would perfectly revolutionize the nature and relations of true religion. A temporal dynasty, with Christ regnant in human form at Jerusalem; trumpets, bugles, and military music sounding near his awful pretorium: oriental grandeur, and magnificence, and state, outpeering the glory of Solomon, as it surrounds Solomon's greater Son and Lord, in the same ancient and holy metropolis; the sword puissant, in his realm, more than the pen, the press, or the pulpit; and Prince Messiah, dashing, with his war-club, all his enemies to the earth, papacy, islam, idolatry, infidelity, and error; putting in the fore-front scenery of his throne the ocular glare of his omnipotence; superseding faith by sight, and love by consternation, and hope by absorbing the future into the revelations of the present: with countless other normal and judaizing inventions or implications of their pious day-dreams, show us truly another Gospel, another Savior, another kingdom of heaven. Such views are-to say the least-just as sensuous, quite as unspiritual, about as materializing, and obviously as dissimilar and inferior, to the appropriate moral glory of the Gospel, revealed from heaven and prehensible by faith, as are the abhorred contrivances and the silly pageantry of puseyism, or its sire popery, or even its sire gentilism itself: and these three we consider as having much of a common origin and character; the best of them as a heathenizing caricature of the Christianity of God; and there needs another Bible, or possibly much more than this, to commend it to our confidence. For one, I incline not to believe in the restoration of the Jews to the land of their fathers; but only to their fathers' faith and hope and inheritance, by sound conversion to Christ. The declarations of the New Testament ought to interpret, modify, and control, the figures, the analogies, and the abounding poetic hyperboles, of the Old. In the New, there exists not a syllable, known to me, that imports mainly any thing more than this-their spiritual conversion to God, and their |