Happy are they who are already sensible of the darkness, and desire to rise out of it! Happy they, who look forward to the coming time of light, and rejoice in the anticipation of it, longing for the day of HIS appearing. One of the finest poems of Henry Vaughan, was composed in that anticipation of the judgment, when the types of immortality and wrought veils of imagery in nature will be laid aside for the reality, when the night that reigns here will give place to an éternal day. Let us look to it, that we be up and dressed before the morning, lest that day come upon us as a thief. THE DAWNING. Ah! What time wilt thou come? when shall that cry, The Bridegroom's coming! fill the sky Shall it in the evening run, When our words and works are done? Or will thine all-surprising light Break at midnight, When either sleep, or some dark pleasure, Possesseth madmen without measure? Or shall these early, fragrant hours Unlock thy bowers? And with their blush of light descry Thy locks crowned with eternity? That with thy glory does best chime. Full hymns doth yield. The whole creation shakes off night, The pursy clouds disband and scatter, Not one beam triumphs, but, from far, O, at what time soever thou, Unknown to us, the heavens wilt bow, Where, if a traveller water crave, In thy free services engage. And though while here of force I must HENRY VAUGHAN. BEFORE your sight Mounts on the breeze the butterfly, and soars, Small creature as she is, from earth's bright flowers, When the fresh eagle, in the month of May, A proud communication with the sun. Low sunk beneath the horizon. WORDSWORTH. A grave. WHAT is the world itself? thy world? YOUNG. Tis but a night, a long and moonless night, We make the grave our bed, and then are gone. Leaves the wide air, and in some lonely brake BUT some one will say, how are the dead raised? and with what body do they come? Thou fool! That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And that which thou sowest thou sowest not that body which shall be; but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other kind. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. PAUL in 1st Corinthians. CHAPTER VIII. Analogies from Nature to the Resurrection. THE doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is purely a doctrine of Divine Revelation. Nevertheless, there is a foreshadowing of it in the processes of nature itself, so that it may be regarded also as a natural revelation in types and analogies, which only waited for the Word of God to receive their full interpretation and confirmation. All nature is but as the beginning or groundwork of God's revelations; a woof on which the bright and glorious figures of Divine Revelation are wrought, as flowers, landscapes, and historical tablets on a piece of tapestry. The only service of the texture and course of the natural world is to receive these superadded glories, to have them inwrought (these grand and infinite truths, unattainable by intuitive intelligence), inwrought and supported upon the very vestments of mortality, even as the sentences of God's word were threaded in the robes of the High Priest, and displayed as frontlets and fringes of their garments. The frame of Nature, yea, the universe itself, is but as a loom for the weaving and unrolling of truth revealing God; and when it shall have answered its present purpose, then it shall be laid aside, just as a loom is taken to pieces, when nothing more is to be done with it. Yea, O Lord God, said the inspired Psalmist, this |