of the Lord Christ. While on earth Christ himself had declared that he had power to lay down his life, and likewise power to take it up again, an evident intimation of his intention to do so; so that Christ, who is our head and representative, being risen, his church, who are the members of his body, have in him an assurance of the resurrection and re-union of this mortal body with the soul at the day of judgment; when that which is mortal, after the example of Christ, shall put on immortality, according to the divine power of him, who is able to subdue or to assimulate all things unto himself; when a glorious immortality of bliss will be conferred irreversibly on those who have followed Christ in the regeneration of the spirit. The Apostle says "if Christ be not risen, then are we false witnesses for God," thus viewing an erroneous evidence where Christ is concerned, as an act of guilt of a very aggravated kind; first as regards his divine and risen Lord and Saviour, who could not require or stand in need of impious and unholy support; and in the second sense, as respects the salvation of those to whom he was addressing himself, his own eternal condition being

bound up in the truth of that faith, which he was then employed by Christ to disseminate for the benefit of others, and he could not have been guilty of doing so had he not known in whom he trusted.

The Apostle then brings before the Corinthians, with great humility, his inveterate malignity against the Church prior to his conversion, and infers that the persecution voluntarily undergone by believers, together with the witnesses already spoken of, constituted abundant proof of the sincerity of the Church, and that the events effected by Christ in his death and resurrection, ought to be sufficient to guard the Corinthians against the impious errors of the Saddusees. St. Paul then shows that the first Adam, by transgression, was the cause of death, and his natural seed are the hereditary partakers of the sin and death of their progenitor; and as Christ was the Lord and Creator of all life, so in his resurrection, we behold the general resurrection of mankind, as well the righteous as the wicked; yet according to the determinate order and council of the Deity, and to this particular end, that Christ should be the first-fruits of harvest, of the resurrection, and then at the

day of judgment they that are Christ's shall arise after him.

We will now return to consideration of the "Morning" of the first day, and connect with that method of calculating time, the triumphant assumption of life in his natural body by our Lord Jesus Christ.

It has been observed that the Hebrew Doctors think that the method of reckoning the natural day by the "Evening and the Morning," was adopted in commemoration of darkness having preceded light, which very sapient observation has a strong tendency to stamp the frequent repetition of those two amazingly significant words with a character of needless tautology; I apprehend, however, that we are not justified in looking to a Jew, a Deist, or an Antinomian, for a scriptural exposition of this somewhat enigmatical language now under consideration; a plain form of reasoning will therefore be adopted to prove that the word Morning" has reference alone to the resurrection of Christ.

The mind now places itself at the beginning of the creation of the world, and makes this rational enquiry. What intelligencies were in

being when the Evening and the Morning are made to constitute the "first day,?" When the angelic host were created we know not, though assuredly they had been and were in existence when the creation of this world first began; but the Angels had nothing instrumentally to do with the creations of Christ, either mediately or immediately; and the condition of such of them as had not fallen from that primitive state of purity in which they were originally created, being irreversibly fixed, the "Evening and the Morning" could not by possibility be spoken with relation to them.

This form of argument brings us to what Moses in the outset of inspired Revelation calls "the Gods," or the distinct Persons of the Trinity; for with respect to man, though eternally present to the divine omniscience or prescience of the Deity, both individually and collectively, alike in time and in eternity; and though the race of mankind is alone connected by the affinity of the divine essence to his creator, it is to be remembered, that on this first day of which we are now speaking, that there was at this time an utter absence, so far as related to this, our lower world, of both inanimate and

sentient life, and therefore that this very significant mode of reckoning time by the "Evening and the Morning," could alone relate in its primary and highest signification, to one of the co-equally divine and eternally distinct persons, constituting the Trinity of the Godhead; yet in a secondary sense, and its equally just application, the times of Christ, death and resurrection, embrace all the objects of man's salvation.

I think it only now remains to put the following very simple interrogations for our conviction, with respect to that person of the Godhead, to whom the words, "Evening and Morning" can possibly be alone applicable. Did any, and what vast events, pregnant with temporal and eternal consequences of the highest conceivable moment to God and man, occur to any person, or persons, constituting the co-equally divine Godhead, at the precisely specified and daily reiterated time of the "Morning and the Evening" in the sacred history of the creation? Scripture, from the mouth of an heathen, furnishes the certain and sufficiently satisfactory response. "Behold the Man," behold the incarnate Deity, whose death eternally