From the above observation we infer that, the resurrection is the only gospel faith and hope of a future, happy conscious state of being.  When our minds are enlightened to see the mighty changes, that we mortals are represented, in the scriptures of truth, as destined to experience by being raised in a holy and deathless constitution, we are then led to consider the resurrection of embracing all those realities that we are called upon by Jesus Christ and his apostles to embrace by faith and enjoy in this life.  So great and sublime is the gift of God, and so far surpassing thought does it magnify the perfections of the divine character, and in so amiable a light does it manifest his love to the children of men, that a living faith in its reality cannot but obtain a salutary influence on our life and conversation.  So much stress did the apostles lay upon its importance, that they went every where preaching the resurrection of the dead, as the gospel of Christ.

There is one point we will here notice.  All denominations acknowledge that for any man by faith to pass from death to life is a change for the better.  If so, then the reality, namely to pass from the sleep of death to an immortal existence, must be a change for the better.  Because it is by believing that future reality we are said to have passed from death to life here.  The conclusion is unavoidable that the reality must correspond with its antepast by faith.  To understand this let us reverse it.  Suppose it should be an established law in the nature and constitution of things that all mankind should pass from death to immortal misery in the future world.  Let this be revealed and proclaimed as an unchanging truth.  As many as believed it would of course pass from death to immortal misery in faith, which would lead them to curse the being who made them, and destined them to this unhappy end.  It would be a change for the worse.

Our subject is now so far plain (according to our views) that the phrase “kingdom of God” will be readily understood.  Though it has, by different writers, been made to bear many different significations, yet we shall take the liberty to contend that it simply means as follows—­1.  First an immortal existence beyond the grave brought to light by the resurrection of Christ;—­and 2.  Second a belief in that reality is the kingdom of God we here enter and enjoy by faith.  Into this kingdom, infants, idiots and heathen and unbelievers do not enter, because faith is the only condition.  This is the kingdom of heaven that men, blind leaders of the blind, shut up.  They neither enter themselves, nor suffer those that would enter to go in.  They keep the evidence of the reality out of sight so that men cannot look beyond the vail to its brighter glories and enjoy its peaceful reign in their hearts by faith.  When faith is lost in certainty, then this kingdom will be delivered up, and to know shall be life eternal.