us we shall be like unto the angels.

"Sown a natural body;

it is raised a spiritual body." The work of Christ was just as efficacious in a past eternity to those who believed God's Word, as it was in our world before his advent.

The finite mind cannot grasp the purposes of God," how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!

As I have said before, we do not know what convulsions and changes have taken place in those seven cycles of time, as the Deluge in this dispensation. We are told there is to be a universal reign of darkness; and the fire in our earth speaks to us of the judgment prophesied of by the Prophets. In central America there are thirty-nine volcanoes; perhaps as many in Java; and we read, in 1835 the volcanoes in the Chilian Andes were cotemporaneously in eruption for 720 miles in one direction, and 400 miles in another; so that in all probability there was a subterranean lake of burning lava below that end of the continent twice as large as the Black Sea. And these are but a very few of those volcanoes which exist in many other places upon our earth. If God should command these to come in violent contact with the outer air, and ignite, the result would be what is foretold, "The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Nevertheless, we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."

If these days had been periods of twenty-four hours, it

M

How

could not have been said at the end of each day, "God saw that good." He could not have seen the seed, the blade, the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, in their natural growth; nor the acorn, and the stupendous oak; the cedar 800 years old; nor the mammoth in its divine glory. Nor could He have seen the signs, and the seasons, the days and the years of the fourth day, in their glorious, natural courses; "that good," the greatest of all man's natural blessings, the revolving change of day and night, of spring to winter, of summer to spring, and, again, of the golden autumn to summer, could not have been beheld by Him. But He did see them in their glorious operation and perfection. Who can estimate aright the succession of day and night? would a continual flood of light weary, and darkness be productive of death! Man, in the morning, rises, as it were, fresh from the hands of his Creator. And does not the soul, as it were, revel in the changing seasons,-in the first sweet bud of the early spring, and so of the successive changes of the year? "God saw that good." The natural day of twentyfour hours was not instituted till the fourth day, therefore it could not have had place in the three former days. If God's work of creation had been completed before the work of these seven days, as the earth shows us it must have been if these were seven natural days, then there could have been no new phenomenon, and "God saw that good" would have been superfluous.

This view of the grand operations by which we surrounded leads me on to the seventh day.

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CHAPTER VII.

ON THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

"THUS the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them." (ii. 1.) This refers to the universal heavenly bodies, the work of creation was finished; after this we do not read of God creating anything, save in the first and second verses of the fifth chapter, which is a reference to His sixth day work in connexion with the formation of the Adam of another economy. To create and to make are not the same thing. When the Spirit of God brooded upon the face of the waters, I think He created the seed of those things, which He afterwards commanded the earth and the waters to bring forth. (i. 11, 20, 24; ii. 9, 19.) On the sixth day, when man came upon the scene, God created him, and I think this is the distinction between created and made.

Six times we have read, "And the evening and the morning were the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth day; now as night follows in the order of nature, so nights succeeded these periods, or cycles; or rather a stop, a pause: and so the sixth day dispensation came to an end like

the five foregoing; and a night succeeded to that evening. I think man and beast had been swept away by some convulsion of nature, by Divine judgment for sin. This history of creation is so worded, that the belief has been, the second chapter is a repetition of it; but I am sure it is not. It was so worded by the wisdom of God, that He might reveal the fact of a past human race when He would, and by whom He would; and there was Divine goodness, Parental love in this. The world was only to receive the Revelation, the knowledge of the mystery of death and judgment, as she was spiritually strong enough to bear it; or wicked and callous enough to require it. God is now opening to us the earth, the volume of nature, to reveal to us what has gone before; there we find the infusoria, and fossiliferous remains of the third day; the monsters of the deep of the fifth day; and the great beasts of the sixth, or tertiary period: admitting as I have said before, that there may have been great changes by convulsion in the seven periods of the first economies; as the Deluge in our own day history. There are strata in the Bible as well as in the earth, and God can lay them open when He will, and by whom He will, to show that the testimony of the rocks is the testimony of His Word.

If we read His gracious dealings with His people after the Flood (Gen. ix.), how He allayed their fears by the promise that there should never be another, and yet withheld from them the knowledge of that regeneration by fire

which is yet to be, and revealed it later as His people became spiritually stronger, we shall see His love to the world in only opening these revolutions of time as they are able to bear the knowledge of so much Almighty Power and grandeur; or as their cold, callous, sinful, estranged hearts may require to know them. He will thus lead on the world from strength to strength, and from glory to glory, until earth unite with heaven.. Well, then, follow me patiently through the second chapter, and I am sure you will agree with me, that a human economy existed before the Adamic period. "Judgment is his strange work."

There was a night between the evening of the sixth day cycle, and the morning of the seventh day. "Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place?" The morning of the seventh day period dawned; our earth on that morning lies before us in holy rest, in Divine grandeur, in glory. "Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth." "I am the resurrection and the life."

"And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." What does it mean here, "God ended his work?" We keep holy the Sabbath-day because Christ rose from the dead, this is the Christian Sabbath; and so I think God blessed and sanctified