Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/339

 *ject. Let us hear what was the impression made upon his mind by their report of the teaching of Jesus. "We do not wish you to be ignorant, brethren"—so he writes to the Thessalonians—"that you may not grieve like the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, thus also will God bring those who sleep through Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord" (Paul therefore is speaking with all the authority of his apostolic commission), "that we who are alive and are left for the coming of the Lord shall not take precedence of those who are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with the word of command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and are left shall be snatched with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord" (1 Thess. iv. 13-17). Clearer than this it is difficult to be. There can be no question whatever, unless we put an arbitrary significance on these words, that Paul looked for the second coming of Christ and the final judgment long before the existing generation had passed away. Some will fall asleep before that day, but he fully expects that he himself and many of those whom he is addressing will be alive to witness it. So confident is he of this, that he even describes the order in which the faithful will proceed to join their Lord, the dead taking a higher rank than the living. He differs from Jesus, and probably from the other apostles, in placing the kingdom of heaven somewhere in the clouds, and not on earth. But he entirely agrees with them as to the date of the revolution. Quite consistent with the above passage is another (of which, however, the correct reading is doubtful): "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed."

Filled with the like hope, he prays that the spirit, mind, and body of the Thessalonians may be preserved blameless to the coming of Christ (1 Thess. v. 23). And he comforts them in a subsequent letter by the promise that they who are troubled shall have "rest with us in the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power (2 Thess. i. 7). While, in writing to the Corinthians, he speaks of the existing generation as those "upon whom the ends of the ages have come."