more honest the people are, the promises themselves become more good or golden. Discount is the measure of uncertainty, dishonesty, distance, or other inconvenience.

No other substance but gold can minister thus. Diamonds are too rare, and destructive of value in division. Silver is too abundant, and silver kings if they could would swamp the treasuries of the world, and make them bankrupt in the moral and spiritual arts of purchase. And mere notes endorsed by men or companies with no answerable gold behind them, would require universal honesty; nor only that, but universal wisdom, to undertake no works that will be found ruinous and unjustifiable; and a foresight that would amount to a supernatural prevision.

So gold, like a merciless and merciful ruler comes to the front by its divine right; and calls us up, as no other hungry divinity can, to show our property in it as the gauge of our existence in the body and in society. Have not our good Jews a relation to this precious gold, this love of theirs, something like what they have to the Old Testament? They are perchance the bottom and basis of an insistance upon gold as ultimate value. So-called Christians indeed love the same metal well, but they believe in paper longer than the Jew does; and would carry on larger business in it alone were it not for the Rothschilds and others to whom gold is the ultima ratio of transactions, and the key to the kingdom of solvency.

LXIX. THE DIVINE CYCLE.

'Our Saviour Jesus Christ," says Paul to Timothy, "has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." This opens up, in strict connection with the subjects now treated of, the question of immortality; for question is made of it by many of the learned. The Lord brought it to light, for it was not in light when He came. He gave it life;

for His life was the light of men. and the life.

He is the resurrection

Had the world then been without the belief in a life after death before His coming? It is an opinion in the Church that the Jewish Scriptures contain no recognition of the immortality of man before the Babylonish Captivity, and that the Jews brought the notion of it from Babylon. It may indeed be that the Jews themselves read nothing of a future state in their inspired writings, but applied them wholly to this world; but to the Christian reader in the light of the gospel there are thousands of passages in the Psalms and the Prophets which transparently announce the perpetuity of the life of man, and the existence of a heaven and a hell. Judaism in the Church can indeed degrade them into promises of prosperity, and threatenings of adversity, limited to the world and the body; but they can fairly be read quite otherwise.

There is however a meaning in the presumption that the Jews brought the idea of a future life from Babylon. All the ancient nations had a greater purview of some immortal condition than the children of Israel, to whom the present life with its good things was the summum bonum. The genius of this people above all the world was secularreligious. That genius marked them out for obedience to ritual, in barter for length of days, inheritance in Canaan for all generations, plentiful harvests, election as God's peculiar people, and in the end universal Messianic dominion. Such satisfaction with the blessings as they held them of the present life, closed their perceptions against spiritual things which became nothing to them, and made the deathbeds of Patriarchs more into last wills and testaments to their descendants who were gathered round them, than into pious voices from the first steps of the ladder which reaches from earth to heaven. For the Jews were secularists plus a secular Jehovah. With the other nations it was not so, but with all their later idolatries they had a

belief in the life to come dependent upon the life man leads here, and it is impossible that that belief, self-made and unverifiable as it was, did not influence them to something of good. The Egyptians had explicit ideas of this mortal life weighed in the balances of divine justice, and doom according to the state and preponderance of virtue: no arbitrary judgment, but a portion allotted according to acquired character. Osiris did not judge the man, but the man's life judged itself. (Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii. p. 256.) This fact stands out even through the confusion of metempsychosis, which also has a spiritual side to it. The other nations known to the Jews, perhaps excepting Babylon, from which the Jews were least likely to bring the notion of a future state, had survivals of belief differently from the Jews, who also, until they had finally secularized themselves, were incapable of being made the vehicle and subject of the mere ritual of a church. Abraham, as we shall see presently, had to pass clean through idolatry, and to accept Jehovah as a local and national god, one, and the most mighty, of many, before he stood as the chieftain of the Jewish Dispensation. Jehovah for him was his warrior, in successful conflict with the gods of the Canaanitish nations.

The view held by learned biblicists, and accredited generally to Bishop Warburton, that the Jews first heard tell of immortality from beyond the pale of their own religion, is in evidence that that creed existed in the world before their time; and the question occurs, how did it take its rise? We have seen that the condition of the world from Adam to Moses was no bare theism or monotheism in which the Father and Creator had left man to acknowledge a god as an abstraction of his own mind; but that a series of Revelations and consequent vessels or Churches extended through those ages, and were the connections of God with man. Also that all the nations after Noah or the Flood were branches of the Ancient or Spiritual Church, which succeeded the destroyed Adam or Celestial Church.

The

most ancient tradition and the new organ, conscience, worked together to impart and confirm a belief in personal immortality in opposition to the sensual fact of the mortality of the individual and the race. From these two sources of real information, each regenerate man knew in his best hours, and acknowledged always, that his life here was a natural preparation for a spiritual life; that mortality, or birth at the bottom of the scale, must precede immortality. The Greek axiom, that whatever has a beginning must have an end, was with him a godly and not a physical, scientific or logical truth. The end the beginning has is its purpose, of serving as a basis for the never-ending stages or imperfections of an unending life. This, not in the beasts, but in all souls that have the capacity of knowing the Creator. Immortality lies therein both for those who are in good, and for those who are in evil.

"It was usual with the ancients to say when anyone died, that he was gathered to his fathers, or to his people, and they meant thereby that he actually came to his parents, to his relations and kinsfolk in the other life. They got this form of expression from the most ancient people who were celestial men, and who during their abode on earth, were at the same time with the angels in heaven, and thus knew how the real case was. They knew that all who were in the same good meet and are together in the other life, and likewise all who are in the same truth. Of the former they said that they were gathered to their fathers; but of the latter that they were gathered to their people; for father with them signified good, and people signified truth" (Arcana, n. 3255).

But in the Most Ancient Church, Heaven present was a perceived fact. The ministry of angels, open vision and every-day seership, were implanted in the natural life. There were not two worlds in the sense of disconnection, but in the sense of order necessary for promotion. Communion between the two was as between parent and child, the Lord being the parent in and through all in the higher

degree, and the child in and through all in the lower. The sense of death was eliminated, save as a putting off one state in order to be clothed upon with another. This primeval state of revelation, communion and personal inspiration, is the root of all that was known and thought of a future state until the coming of the Lord. The Ancient Church inherited the memory of it from the Most Ancient; and the ancient nations, so long as they had any human remains, carried it down as a fading tradition. In Greece it was an argument and a decoration of discourse. In Rome a governmental, political, and oratorical copy.

The belief however was kept casually alive and latent by dreams and visions, whether productions of literary imagination, or of real experience; Homer and Virgil both took their heroes to the shades, and reported of destinies there. And Cicero, in the Somnium Scipionis, has given a noble view of the destiny of patriotism in the skies. Moreover the ghostly experiences of all races in all ages, superstitions as they are called, and facts as they are, have kept belief in that other life from which the phantoms hail, alive in the fears and awe of all people, savage and civilized.

At the beginning therefore Revelation was the only source of the knowledge of a spiritual world; namely, by that world actually revealed as a current fact, and factor for life, and for the conduct of life. The race was then known not to be naturally but conditionally immortal. It was saved from its own suicide by the raising up of successive Churches by which a new life was given from on high. So futile is the modern thought that the individuals can all die, and the race survive. Both would perish if there were not a Saviour foreseen from the first for both. And the race here would probably expire first before the so-called ghosts above.

Revelation in Christ is again the source of all our faith, charity and knowledge touching a future state. Apart from His revelation no man can have any certainty of his own survival after death. He can balance the sides of his advocacy