will introduce the numerous posterity of Adam into the same condition of immortal glory and honor, being made, by the power of God, “equal unto the angels, and be the children of God being the children of the resurrection.”  As to the judgment day, they do not believe, that the whole human family will be congregated in one amazing throng at one period of time, but that the judgment of the world, by Jesus Christ, commenced at the destruction of Jerusalem, when the Mosaic dispensation, with all its imposing rituals, passed away, and that this judgment, or in other words, this gospel reign of Christ, is still progressing, and will completely terminate before the resurrection takes place.  Notwithstanding this view of the day of judgment, yet they suppose that the resurrection day is a designated period when the cerement of the dead shall burst, and all the slumbering nations, simultaneously, start up from their beds of clay, the living at the same instant be changed to immortal beings, and this countless throng, in one unbroken strain, shout—­“O death!  Where is thy sting?  O grave!  Where is thy victory”?

Though this scene would be full, and immortally sublime, and disclose a grandeur which a seraph’s eloquence never can describe, yet I take the liberty to dissent from this long and fondly cherished opinion, and will humbly endeavor to present you my views on the immortal resurrection of the human dead.  The ideas I have advanced in my sermons on the new birth, require me to do this.  And no one has more occasion to rejoice than myself, that we are bound by no creeds, and that the preachers of our order encourage and cherish free investigation.  Among such able and benevolent theologians, I feel conscious, if I err, that they will endeavor, in the spirit of meekness, to set me right.  I therefore hold no one responsible for the ideas I am now about to advance.  I am by no means in favor of new theories built upon mere human speculations, nor do I deem it an enviable task to make innovations on the long and universally established opinions of the christian community.  I shall simply appeal to the scriptures to sustain me in my present exposition, and by that standard I am willing my views should be tried, for by that alone, they must ultimately stand or fall.

From the text we have selected, it might, perhaps, be expected, that we should proceed to prove the final holiness and happiness of the human family by showing, that he who is “made alive in Christ is a new creature”; but as this has, heretofore been done so often and so ably, we shall confine our attention, principally, to the different scripture accounts of the resurrection of the dead, and endeavor to ascertain whether it is indeed, to take place at the end of time and be general, or whether it is continually transpiring as gradual as the successive deaths of our race in Adam.