ywhere at home in the hospitable mansions of
the everlasting Father, this is the experience to which Christ
calls his followers; and any eschatology inconsistent with such a
conception is not his.

There are two general methods of interpretation respectively
applied to the words of Christ, the literal, or mechanical, and
the spiritual, or vital. The former leads to a belief in his
second visible advent with an army of angels from heaven, a bodily
resurrection of the dead, a universal judgment, the burning up of
the world, eternal tortures of the wicked in an abyss of infernal
fire, a heaven located on the arch of the Hebrew firmament. The
latter gives us a group of the profoundest moral truths clustered
about the illuminating and emphasizing mission of Christ, sealed
with Divine sanctions, truths of universal obligation and of all
redeeming power. The former method is still adopted by the great
body of Christendom, who are landed by it in a system of doctrines
well nigh identical with those of the Pharisees, against which
Christ so emphatically warned his followers, a system of
traditional dogmas not having the slightest support in philosophy,
nor the least contact with the realities of experience, nor the
faintest color of inherent or historical probability. In this age
they are absolutely incredible to unhampered and studious minds.
On the other hand, the latter method is pursued by the growing
body of rational Christians, and it guides them to a consistent
array of indestructible moral truths, simple, fundamental, and
exhaustive, an array of spiritual principles commanding universal
and implicit homage, robed in their own brightness, accredited by
their own fitness, armed with the loveliness and terror of their
own rewarding and avenging divinity, flashing in mutual lights and
sounding in consonant echoes alike from the law of nature and from
the soul of man, as the Son of God, with miraculous voice, speaks
between.

CHAPTER VII.

RESURRECTION OF CHRIST.

OF all the single events that ever were supposed to have occurred
in the world, perhaps the most august in its moral associations
and the most stupendous in its lineal effects, both on the outward
fortunes and on the inward experience of mankind, is the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If, therefore, there
is one theme in all the range of thought worthy of candid
consideration, it is this. There are two ways of examining it. We
may, as unquestioni