Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/362

 ened minds they may appear, collectively, as one great act of Providence, designed to promote the ultimate welfare of mankind. Each is but a part of one majestic whole; the first contributes something towards the existence of the last, and the last is as a covering in which the first and all the intermediates are enfolded. Thus, the true Christian Church includes within it all the excellences of all its predecessors, and it is itself distinguished by an excellence which they had not. By this superiority it will be preserved from those assaults which broke in upon the others and brought them to an end. It may be, we expect that it will be, subject to the dangers arising from the unregenerate condition of our nature; but the gates of hell—the falsities which arise from evil loves—will not prevail against it, as they have against its predecessors. The final Church is to be a complete building, which they were not: it is to rest upon a foundation which, when they existed, had not been laid: they were without that knowledge of God which Christianity supplies: they had not the final revelation concerning Him which Christianity discloses, and by which all that was beautiful in them might be revived and preserved in perpetuity.

Each succeeding church was more external than its predecessor, and the Christian church, which is the last, is the most external of them all. The Jewish was not properly a church, but a representative dispensation. All that was peculiar to its worship and ritual was symbolical, signifying those celestial and spiritual things which had passed away with the Adamic and Noetic periods, and at the same time prefiguring the revival of those graces in their Christian successor. Thus the genuine Christian Church is to be an orderly body of internal truth and loveliness, having for its soul those celestial and spiritual principles which were