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kingdom of heaven' (Matt. xix. 14); although the saved will come out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation' (Rev. v. 9), they will yet constitute, it may be, a majority of the human race, being a great multitude which no man could number' (Rev. vii. 9); as many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea-shore innumerable (Heb. xi. 12).

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"Meanwhile time flies-the end of the ages approaches-the harvest is ripe-the press is full-the vats overflow, for the wickedness is great-the judgment day impends, and the door will soon be shut. As for ourselves, a twenty-five years' careful study of the sacred Word of God conducts us to this conclusion-viz., There is but one doom for the great world of sin and evil, and that doom is conflagration and perdition (2 Peter iii. 7); and but one hope for the dear Church of Christ, that hope being the occurrence of a startling and stupendous miracle, that miracle the second coming of our blessed Lord with power and great glory' to extirpate sin and Satan, redeem His chosen, and renew the face of the whole world.

"This august event is at the door; nay, it hasteth greatly. And if that soul who reads this warning would be found in the day of eternity among the countless hosts of God's redeemed, let him, without cavil or delay, take his place among the few now composing the holy and militant Church of God, and waiting for the consummation."

Thoughts upon the Parable of the Ten Virgins. By the Rev. J. L. V. Cachemaille, Jersey.

There is much of earnest and striking remark in this little book. The following note may contain something new :

"If we accept the conclusion that very few are looking for, and speaking of the return of Christ, this would prove that there are very few true Christians, much fewer than is generally thought. The fair show of many is deceptive, and people are fond of deluding themselves with the idea that there are many whose hearts are with Christ, and who have the necessary oil in their lamps. But it is possible that this attitude of expectancy is a mark of the last days that it may be seen whether the faithful shall be many or few in number. This will only stand out clearly when the Bridegroom is at the door, as it was in the case of the foolish virgins; but this proves nothing against the wise who are found ready, and always have been so, and who by this expectation show that they look forward with patience to the coming of the Bridegroom. The outward manifestation of the expectation of the coming of Jesus Christ by the faithful Church will not be very apparent in the last times, on account of the small numbers of the true servants of Christ, and for other reasons which lead us to believe that this waiting for Him will cause no sensation-it will be marked by scarcely any visible or striking demonstration. In conformity with the spirit of the parable, the duty of the virgins is to remain within the porch of the house to which the Bridegroom is coming; they await His arrival either in the vestibule or porter's lodge; they should not be seen in the public streets with their lanterns and bridal garments; as midnight approaches they are occupied in watching, whilst all is silence, the rest of the inhabitants of the town being asleep. Here, let us ask, does the parable indicate that all the town should be aware that a marriage was to take place, and that certain virgins were in immediate expectation of the Bridegroom's arrival? Evidently not so. It appears that all the other inhabitants of the town or village were in complete ignorance of the event. According to such

a state of things, the parable seems to us to have its historical parallel, and leads us to think that such will be the case regarding the expectation of the return of Christ. In fact, let us observe God's command to His people in Isaiah's announcement of the return of Christ (Isa. xxvi. 20, 21), 'Come, My people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. For, behold, the Lord cometh out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity.' Where are the people of God at that moment? In their chambers with closed doors, where they are hidden. How do they manifest their expectation of Christ? Is it by publishing it! Certainly not; but by concealing themselves. Noah shut himself up in the ark seven days before the deluge began; he showed his expectation of its arrival by taking refuge in the ark. It was in the middle of the night that the angel warned Lot of the coming destruction of Sodom, and he only communicated it to his two sons-in-law. When the angel was to pass over Egypt to slay the first-born, God ordered the Israelites to shut themselves up in their houses on that night. How did the Church at Jerusalem manifest her belief of the approaching destruction of the city? by fleeing far off and hiding in the mountains. These examples show that the nearer the time the more the Church, like the virgins, will hide its expectation."

The Coming Earthquake; and the Signs that Betoken its Approach. By D. T. Taylor. Boston: Scriptural Tract Repository. 1869.

There may be a little of the sensational in this work, but the tone is earnest, and the doctrine is according to Scripture. Thus writes the author:

"Alas! where now is that solemn awe that trembles before that terrible hand which has of late shaken every part of the world? Where are the public and humble thanksgivings for our preservation from the destruction which has fallen upon others? Where are the ten thousand admonitions from an enlightened ministry, which should have followed the convulsions of our fire-doomed planet during the past two years? And where are the warnings of that greater earthquake, and the day of God that is behind it, of which these increasing commotions are but types and signs? The priests' lips should keep knowledge' (Mal. ii. 7). The ministry and the whole Church should awake to the importance of this solemn crisis-this awful interval of suspense-and give the alarm, lest the blood of lost multitudes who hang upon her lips be found in her skirts, and be required at her hands. Gracious God, do Thou arouse Thy people from their slumbers on the verge of the great day!

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A Swiss traveller,' says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, 'describes a village, situated on the slope of a great mountain, of which the strata shelve in the direction of the place. Huge crags, directly overhanging the village, and massy enough to sweep the whole of it into the torrent below, have become separated from the main body of the mountain in the course of ages by great fissures, and now scarce adhere to it. When they give way, the village must perish-it is only a question of time, and the catastrophe may happen any day. For years past engineers have been sent to measure the width of the fissures, and report them constantly increasing. The vil. lagers, for more than one generation, have been aware of their danger; subscriptions have been once or twice opened to enable them to remove, yet they live on in their doomed dwellings from year to year, fortified against the ultimate certainty and daily probability of destruction by the common sentiment, "Things may last their time and longer."'

"Like the dwellers in this doomed village, the world's inhabitants have grown careless and secure in sin. The scoffers of the last days are around us, saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.' But in saying this they are too confident. Nothing is permanent that has sin about it—nothing secure that has wrath above it, and flames of fire beneath. Sin has once deluged the world with water; it shall deluge it again with waves of fire. Sodom and Gomorrah are the types that foreshow the doom of those that live ungodly in these later times; and he who can walk this reeling world unmoved by all the tokens of its fiery doom, must either have a rock of refuge where his soul may rest secure, or else must have fallen into a strange carelessness, and a sad forgetfulness of God.

"But we need not wonder that the world has little thought of the coming day of wrath. Thus it was foretold. The virgins will slumber and sleep until the solemn cry proclaims the Bridegroom cometh!' and men will say 'Peace and safety,' till the final storm bursts in fury on their heads. For as it was in the days of Noah and of Lot, when men were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting and building, marrying and giving in marriage, till the day of trouble came, even thus shall it be when the Son of Man appears.

"But when the long-forgotten prophecies shall be fulfilled, in which God says that there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel, so that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heavens, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at My presence; and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground' (Ezek. xxxviii. 19, 20), men shall sorrow in vain over their carelessness and sin, lamenting that the harvest is past, the summer ended, and they ungathered, unpardoned, unsaved, unblest at last.

"And will a careless, guilty world, to whom these pages shall come, continue to forget the coming Judge, and slight His offered Son? Will none heed His breath in the cyclone, nor see His hand in the tossing main, nor perceive His awful march, His stately steppings in the earthquake's desolating tread, nor hear His voice in the thunders that shake the air, nor discern the glance of His angry eye in the lightnings that flash and burn? And will sinners still refuse to listen to the entreaties of Jehovah's living Word? Shall all things continue to be attributed to secondary causes, and the Omnipotent Being who performs these wonders, and before whose tribunal of judgment, sooner or later, every soul must certainly appear, be put far away? Reader, dare you continue in sin, and forget God?

"Pressed down, and awed with an overwhelming sense of the impending doom of our world, and the possibility of that doom overtaking the worldlyminded and thoughtless multitudes of mankind at any moment, and shuddering at the terrible sins that are lighting the torch with which the last fires are to be kindled, we send out far and wide our solemn and earnest warning, beseeching men, by the love of Christ, not only to prepare to meet their God, but to seek meekness, and live holily before Him, and to watch and pray always that they may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man!"

What the Christian has amid the Ruin of the Church. By J. N. D. London.

Some friend has sent us this little work of J. N. D. unscriptural, much of it we do not understand, and

Much of it is very all of it breathes

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the odour of a spiritual pride which is as truly offensive as it is supremely childish. The author seems to write by inspiration, and that inspiration enables him to dispense with the apostolic framework of the Church, and to constitute another organisation of his own, which much resembles socialism, and which very manifestly partakes of the lawlessness of the lawless one, the antichrist, the man of sin. 'The Church is in ruins” (p. 9) is the key-note of the book, and the inference from this is that J. N. D. is the man to build another structure upon these ecclesiastical heaps. The epistles to the Corinthians and to Timothy are obsolete, for "the Church is in ruins." Strauss, Bunsen, and Colenso have not taken greater liberties with the Word of God than this writer has. It may seem a small thing to him to deny the perpetual authority of these epistles in the Church, but to one who "trembles at the Word," it is profanity quite as awful as that of German rationalism. The intense bitterness that pervades the book is peculiar. The words "false" and "falsification are again and again hurled against the translators of our Bible with an unaccountable heartiness. Possibly they are wrong in some of their renderings, but how a Christian man could have so adopted the world's coarse vocabulary in speaking thus of these venerable worthies, we are at a loss to explain. The meekness and gentleness of Christ are not to be found in these pages. It is another mind than that of Christ's that pervades them. It is the mind of one aiming at pre-eminence, and who stands in awe of nothing (not even of an inspired apostle) that stands in his way. Self-will comes out in each paragraph. It is not in the world merely, but in the Church, that we are to look, in the last days, for the illustration of Satan's earliest temptation, "Ye shall be as gods."

We have heard that no less than thirty-three sects have sprung from "Brethrenism." And we can well believe it. "The Church is in ruins," and these thirty-three sects attest it. The debris is a sad spectacle, and

a fearful warning. But what can be expected of men who are so far gone in Socinianism as to deny Christ's atoning death upon the cross, the imputation of His righteousness, and the vicarious character of His life on earth. "Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived."

Apocalyptic History. By S. A. London: Partridge & Co. 1871.

We give, as a specimen of this little book, the following pages regarding the first resurrection :

"This is evidently a resurrection distinct from the general resurrection in verses 11, 12, 13; this being before the thousand years of glory; and that ajter. And the only question is, What does it mean?

"Is it a resurrection, or is it no resurrection? If it is not, then what is it? If the word resurrection' does not mean resurrection, what does it mean? Who is to say it does not mean resurrection?

"If the word 'resurrection' here does not mean resurrection, then where

does it mean resurrection? If you deny that it means resurrection here, what is to prevent your neighbour from denying that it means resurrection anywhere? And what will become of the statements of the Bible on such principles as those?

"But it is difficult.' What is difficult? To have one resurrection at one time, and another at another time.' It is not more difficult than it is to have any resurrection at all. The difficulty is not in believing in two resurrections, but believing in any resurrection. Once admit that God shall raise the dead,and then you will easily admit that He may raise them whenever He pleases. And when there is a distinct statement that God shall raise at least some of the righteous dead at the commencement of a period of 1000 years, and the remainder of the dead at the close of that period of 1000 years, then the most reasonable plan seems to me to be to take it as it stands, to believe it, and to leave all the rest to Him, who orders all things according to His own will. But I go further.

"Take 1 Cor. xv. 23, Christ the first-fruits: afterward they that are Christ's at His coming.' Who was the first-fruits? Christ. And who shall rise at His coming?' They that are Christ's.' Not they that are not Christ's, but they that are Christ's.' This is important. Every man shall rise in his own order.' And the 'order' here seems to be, 1st, Christ; 2d, they that are Christ's; 3d, 'then cometh the end.' The only difficulty is as to whether there shall be an interval of 1000 years between the resurrection of those that are Christ's,' and the end,' when He shall deliver up the kingdom to God even the Father.' St John says there will be.

"See also 1 Thess. iv. 16, The dead in Christ shall rise first.' Then 'we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them (i.e., the dead who have been raised) in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air." Here the Lord shall descend from heaven with great pomp and panoply. At His descending the 'dead in Christ shall rise first.' Then we that are alive and remain shall be caught up together with the 'dead in Christ,' to meet Him in the air. There is not a word here respecting the resurrection of the wicked. They do not rise.

"Once more: Philippians iii. 11, 'If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.' What does St Paul mean here? Was there any doubt about his attaining unto the resurrection of the dead? Is not the resurrection certain for every man? What does St Paul mean here in this argument-in verses 8, 9, 10, 11?

“But take a literal translation of the apostle's words: If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection from among the dead,' and we have a clear and distinct meaning. At His coming those that are Christ's' will rise. 'The dead in Christ will rise first.' This will be the first resurrection.' And this will evidently be a resurrection not of all the dead, but from among the dead. Hence St Paul desires to give every diligence and to make every exertion, that, when that day comes, he may share in its glory; that he may have part in the first resurrection;' that he may be of those who are Christ's; and that so he may attain unto the resurrection 'from among the dead.'

"It is questionable whether there is any reference at all in 1 Cor. xv. to the resurrection of the wicked. It is a joyful and triumphant argument, very comforting to the saints of the Lord. But does it embrace the resurrection of the lost? Are such glorious terms used of the wicked? Does it not refer exclusively to those that are Christ's '-to the dead in Christ' to the 'first resurrection'-to the resurrection of the saints? At any rate, it is evident from the texts we have quoted that the lost will not rise exactly at the same time with the saved. Does not the Millennium come between the two events?"