Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/360

 lish. Hence it is plain that there were some principles of information in the first dispensation recorded in the Word, which connect it with the last, in which the objects of both are to be fully realized.

So also with regard to the Noetic Covenant and the Israelitish economy. With the former God set His bow in the cloud, that is, He provided a new condition in man's obscurity through which he was to be regenerated. This was the token by which God was to remember His everlasting covenant, because it was to be the medium through which He would, in all future time, effect conjunction with His people. This peculiarity, which had its commencement with the Noetic dispensation, has been continued to the Christian period; consequently, it possessed a principle by which to project something of its existence into the future and final Church. Every one knows that the Israelitish economy was the shadow and type of Christian realities. All that is essentially excellent and true, which belonged to any of the extinct dispensations, will be revived and become permanent in that one against which the gates of hell will not prevail. To suppose otherwise would be to imagine it defective; for how could Christianity be a perfect institution, if it were deprived of any of the teachings which were essential to the existence of those Churches which have passed away?

This view of reviving, in the last dispensation, those things which were proper to its predecessors, in order that the last may exist as a finished excellence, is conformable to a law observable in nature, which is, that first principles through the last, return to the first again, and, consequently, the last contains within it the first and all the intermediates. For instance, the seed, which is the first principle of a tree, when sown into the ground, grows into stems, producing