morrow, a host with banners streaming under the whole heaven, with more than mortal music burdening every breeze-with crowns and plumes, and the intense gleams of immortal panoply, kindling on every cloud, and illuminating every mountain and valley. Well might the seer, who, for gold, sought out a curse for Jacob, say: How goodly are thy tents, oh Jacob, and thy tabernacles, oh Israel!

This was a prospective view-only lifting up a little the curtain which hung over the future prospects of the church. The same thought is amplified, if not adorned, by Pollock, the pious poet, who sung his soul to sleep with such strains as these :

:

'How fair the daughter of Jerusalem, then!
How gloriously from Zion's hill she looked!
Cloth'd with the sun; and in her train the moon;
And on her head a coronet of stars;

And girding round her waist, with heavenly grace,
The bow of mercy bright; and in her hand

Immanuel's cross-her sceptre and her hope.'

But these views, rich as they are with unspeakable blessings, are taken from the earth. The church now is seen going farther on to the very place which God has prepared for her. Change and vicissitude and death invaded the territories of Jacob below; but he has a place now prepared for him; a kingdom not to be measured by human meters, not invaded by earthly woes, or battle, or change. Countless angels are throwing open the gates to this region, as immeasurably wide as it is beautiful, beyond the power of language to paint; and

trumpets and harps pouring forth the volumes of song such as earth never heard, summon the redeemed to their last, joyful resting place.

Death is now no more. Sin is shut out forever. Heaven burns with its accumulated bliss. It has now reaped the great harvest of the earth. It now, to its other songs, hath added the greater one of redeeming love. And now beyond this point, it is not permitted to penetrate farther. Here this blessed interdiction beginseye hath not seen-ear hath not heard-heart hath not conceived. All beyond is glory unsufferably bright.

BIBLICAL SUBLIMITY.

It is now a sort of standing acknowledgment in the mouths of thoughtless thousands that the sacred writings abound with sentences of matchless sublimity. But ask these amateurs of the sublime, in what passages they find the thrilling emotion which takes hold of the heart and. binds the frame in subdued wonder, they only repeat what the rhetoricians have carved out for them; they say-God came from Teman and the Holy One from Mount Paran! But however sublime may be these often quoted texts, there are yet deeper fountains of emotion, bottomless as the ocean of wisdom, which first gave birth to passion, and then rolled up the element on which it feed for ever. may

It is not our design to analyze the emotion of sublimity; the philosophers and rhetoricians have done this long centuries since. Neither shall we draw our vision of sublimity from the stupendous drama of the apocalypse, in which heaven, earth, with its far off ages, and hell with its unfathomed horrors, appear and are withdrawn like the shifting scenes of a mysterious but terribly graphic development alike important to men, demons, and heavenly ones. Neither shall we travel over the field so fully and faithfully explored by Lowth, by Michaelis and other critics on Hebrew poetry. It has been remarked by a philologist that the Hebrew language above all others is well adapted to express energetic action. It has been called an abyss of verbs and verbal derivatives. Strong and discriminating and powerful, the Hebrew phrase never slumbers over the idea it would express. It borrows its illustrations from nature, and therefore the biblical stud ent must study nature to know what inspiration means. It flashes its undimmed blaze upon a subject before hidden or dark or complicated, and does more in a word than philosophy could have done for ages.

Without reference then to criticism or philosophical inquiry, we will indulge ourselves over a few passages of inspiration as the pervading spirit of the 'book of books' would teach us.

There was a time when the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth. The clouds had never gathered upon the mountain brow; never had the solemn thunder called out from cloud to cloud the growling summons of the storm; never had the red lightning fringed the bo

som of the black tempest with rapid and hissing furnace fires, untamed and, savage and unsparing, the very bolts of vengeance launched red hot upon the watery atmosphere with the lion growl of power. What was the action of the Almighty mind in this season of drought when there was not a man to till the ground? Simply and sublimely this :-There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. The first white vapor that ever exhaled from shore and fountain and flood was seen creeping along the serpentine brooks, gathering density and shape in its progress, disclosing its heaviest columns where Pison and Gihon and Hiddekel and Euphrates rolled their waters to far separated regions. This mist hung like a bridal curtain awhilę over the earth, then went up and was dissolved in showers, and Eden bloomed afresh beneath the first tears of the affectionate heavens.

Man had perished on account of infidelity and crime beneath a deluge of waters. The whole race with the exception of a single family was extinct. This family was afloat with the frail planks of gopher-wood between them and the hungry waves, which entombed humanity and the rich memorials of ancient art and grandeur. One hundred and fifty days had this melancholy remnant of mankind heard the pattering of tremendous rains and the beating of such surges as never might have raved except on a shoreless ocean. Hope was dying within them. What now was the action of the Eternal mind? And God remembered Noah **** and God made a wind to pass over the earth and the waters assuaged.

Not a single swelling epithet is here used or needed. Memory is described as the act of the infinite God-and then at his command the wind begins to roar through the confused mass of clouds and waves. Vapor and gloom no longer rule the atmosphere. The broken up deep sinks down beneath the breath of heaven, and at last hides its awful billows in the lowest caverns of the earth. Then to hush the fears of the terrified beings who had survived the death of a world, with what a sublimity of beauty, did God upon the first dark cloud that rolled over the summit of Arrarat plant his many-colored rainbow? I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token.

A death bed was spread in Egypt and a venerable man laid him down to die; It was Jacob. He called to his sons, and said, Gather yourselves together that I may tell you what shall befall you in the last days. One by one the fathers of the tribes advanced and heard the oracular words that destined them and theirs throughout futurity. Joseph approaches. His blessing is a sentence that casts every heathen oracle into midnight shadows. A fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall ** shot at by the archers * * a garland of blessings coming down from heaven above, coming up from the deep which lieth under, twined with love and fruitfulness, and reaching unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills, on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.

The Red Sea was running on in a sort of mournful cadence, dirge-like and echoing and wasteful. It swept