After all, the best works to be obtained as helps to understand the prophetic parts of Scripture, will be found in the labors of those who, from age to age, have obeyed the gracious call of Christ,—­who have “come out from mystic Babylon,” from the Romish communion,—­from the mother and her harlot daughters, and who have associated more or less intimately with the witnesses.  Among these may be consulted with profit the works of Durham, Mason and M’Leod.  But while searching after the mind of God revealed in this part of his word, let us never exercise implicit faith in the teachings of any fallible expositor.  Let us always regard the injunction of our apostle:—­“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.”  Of course, the only infallible standard by which we can try the spirits is the whole word of God,—­“comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”

THE FIRST RESURRECTION.

Bishop Newton, among those divines distinguished in ecclesiastical history as Millenarians, may be regarded as one of the most learned, judicious and cautious.  The amount of the deductions which this class of writers draw from the scripture phrase “first resurrection,” and its context, confirmed as they suppose by many other parts of Scripture, appears to be the following:—­All the righteous shall be raised from their graves to meet our Saviour coming from heaven at the beginning of the Millennium:  he and these saints, clothed in real human bodies, are to dwell and reign together upon a renovated earth during that happy period.  Indeed, writers on this interesting subject differ so much in details, that no well-defined theory or system can be discovered among them.  The literal resurrection of the bodies of the saints, and the corporeal presence of Christ among them, seem to be the cardinal points of agreement with this class of expositors; and from this literal interpretation of the resurrection of the righteous and bodily appearance of the Saviour, they either took or received the name Millenarians.  Other Christians, however, who differ from them in the interpretation of symbols, are no less believers in a millennium than they,—­a thousand years of righteousness and peace on the earth.

Bishop Newton understands “this ‘first resurrection’ of a particular resurrection preceding the general one at least a thousand years.”  “It is to this first resurrection,” says he, “that St. Paul alludes, (1 Thess. iv. 16,) when he affirms that the ’dead in Christ shall rise first,’ and (1 Cor. xv. 23;) that every man shall be made alive in his own order, Christ the first fruits, afterwards they that are Christ’s at his coming.”  It is surprising that a person of the Bishop’s learning should so readily mistake the sound for the sense of the words which he quotes.  While the apostle is, for the “comfort” of the saints, treating