"This fact furnishes a valuable illustration of the passage of Scripture before us, which hitherto has been but ill understood. Sheth was the name of the territory of Moab and Ammon. The meaning of the prophecy of Balaam is therefore perfectly obvious; and it received its accomplishment in the subjugation of both these nations by David. The Shethites, then, by whose formidable armaments of horse and foot the eastern frontier of Egypt was constantly threatened during the reigns of Sethos and Sesostris, were the children of Moab and Ammon. The proof of this point amounts to absolute certainty."p. 137.

The eastern origin of the Egyptians is most curiously illustrated by Mr. Osburn, from their very singular notions as to the state of the soul after death.* Heliopolis, or On, appears to have unquestionably been the first colony of the emigrants, and it is to this ancient city that reference is made in the rolls of papyri which contain what has been called THE GREAT RITUAL, or the Book of the Dead. Of this we will extract the following interesting account. It consists of two parts:

"The first part contains the adventures of the body, and the second those of the soul after death. This last commences with a scene representing the bark of Athom, the setting sun, in the twelfth hour of the day, in which the soul has just embarked for the purpose of being conveyed in it to the nether world. The first character of the hieroglyphic name of Heliopolis appears near the boat, denoting that the scene is laid there. After this descent, the soul met with many adventures in the regions of the dead. It had to contend with many enemies, and to appease many divinities, before it arrived at the great hall of truth or judgment, where all its actions while incarnate in the body were weighed in the balance, and its future destinies depended on the result of the ordeal. The presiding judge at this assize is sometimes Osiris and sometimes Athom, in the many repetitions of the judgment scene that occur on monuments of every description. It will be found, on attentively examining this part of the book of the dead, that the soul was supposed to accompany the sun in the whole of his progress through the lower hemisphere, from his setting to his rising."-pp. 17, 18.

We will not follow our author in his account of the very curious ideas of the diurnal revolution of the sun entertained by the Egyptians. Having come to Egypt from the east, their knowledge of the country was bounded on the west by the Natron Lakes. Into those marshes they imagined the sun to sink. In the construction of the legend respecting this unknown abyss, the supposed receptacle of both the Nile and the sun, they embodied two primitive traditions ;-" that the separate spirit goes under the earth, and that the soul will be judged hereafter for the deeds done in the body." At Abydos, which is near the southern boundary of Upper Egypt, they imagined both the Nile

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* "The Egyptians," says Herodotus, are the first of mankind who have defended the immortality of the soul. They believe that on the dissolution of the body the soul immediately enters some other animal, and that after using as vehicles every species of terrestrial, aquatic, and winged creatures, it finally enters a second time into a human body. They affirm that it undergoes all these changes in the space of 3,000 years."-Herod. ii. 123. Beloe's Transl. Is there not some idea of a resurrection involved in the return to corporeity?

and the sun to reappear, and here was supposed to be the world's end. But there seems no trace in these notions of the rising again of the body, and its reunion with the soul.

In addition to the information already indicated, Mr. Osburn has given in his work some interesting details of the arts practised among the Egyptians, illustrating, both by pictorial embellishments, and by interpretation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, the service of the tabernacle, and the musical instruments in use among the Jewish people, many of which are alluded to in the Hebrew Scriptures, and especially in the Psalms. This, however, is a field already explored by Kitto, Taylor, and especially by Hengstenberg in his Egypt and the Books of Moses."

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Our readers who may be disposed to carry their investigations further will derive great assistance from the work of Mr. Osburn, which abounds not only with the meaning of the inscriptions, but with the hieroglyphics themselves. To students in biblical criticism, the Onomasticon he has given, containing the verifications of many names occurring in the Bible, is of great service and value. His researches and elucidations are worthy of the highest commendation. They afford the most conclusive evidence of the veracity of the author of the Pentateuch, and place beyond question the great antiquity of those inspired documents. We cannot doubt that a continuation of such researches will confirm yet further the facts of the Mosaic history.

V. THE RESURRECTION.

Ir is a matter of no slight moment that the ministry of the word should in all respects accomplish the end of its institution, and by a full display of the mysteries of God make every man perfect in the faith of Christ Jesus. Its ordination of God is for the purpose of perfecting the saint," and for the edifying of the body of Christ."

That this end was especially accomplished by the preaching of the Apostles none will doubt. Nor will it be generally questioned, that both the form and relative proportions of the truths as exhibited in their instructions, will ever be in the highest probable degree the best form and proportion in which to lay them before men. If, then, it be found that in this, or any other age, the ministry of the word does not present the same truths in something like a similar prominence, but ceases to mention some, or gives a disproportionate attention to others, it may fairly be concluded that to that degree the harmony of gospel truth will be made discordant. Instead of perfection in the growth of the body of Christ, defects and distortions will arise, which can only

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be healed by a return to the perfect example of the inspired messengers of God. Truth must ever be harmonious in its proportions: it suffers by increase or diminution of its parts. failure to maintain that harmony will inevitably result, as it has often done, in dissensions, strifes, and heresies. Let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith.

The ministry of the Apostles embraced two great truths as the main features of the "great salvation" they announced-the death, and the resurrection, of Christ. These stand side by side in their bold and noble testimony to the love and glory of their Lord. Does Peter on the day of Pentecost preach a Christ crucified, he adds thereto as the counterpart of the glad tidings, Whom God hath raised up, being loosed from the bands of death; because it was not possible that He should be holden of it. In the temple, after the miraculous cure of the lame man at the gate Beautiful, he reiterates the same blessed facts in conjunction with each other:-Ye killed the Prince of Life, whom God hath raised from the dead. This testimony was not given without the most happy results: for with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Thus everywhere they proclaimed Jesus and the resurrection. On Mars' Hill, in Corinth, in Philippi, their theme was the same. It was a fact of universal interest and application, calculated to give joy to all of every nation, people, and tongue.

Not only so. The resurrection of Jesus was the promise and pledge of resurrection to his disciples. It became intimately interwoven with the spiritual and redeemed life of the Christian. If deeply anxious to be one with Christ, and stand justified before God in the righteousness of faith, Paul yet teaches him to seek by any means to attain to the resurrection of the dead. A risen and glorified body should be an object of intense desire. The fashioning of its vileness and corruption into a form of beauty, resembling that of the risen Saviour, his earnest expectation and hope. In this tabernacle the redeemed one of the Lord groaned. Its weakness, its diseases, its death, were burdens from which he laboured to be released, to exchange mortality for immortality, corruption for incorruption, death passing into life. The creature travailing in pain, sighed for deliverance from the bondage of corruption, waiting for the adoption, the redemption of the body. Resurrection, and not death, was taught to be the believer's hope. Then he should arrive at the goal of bliss. Then reach the perfection of humanity. Then sin and death, twin-brothers in man's destruction, be finally and for ever vanquished. So shall we ever be with the Lord.

Brief as is the reference to this characteristic feature of apos

tolic teaching, it will suffice to bring into clear light the prominence given to it by the first preachers of the gospel. It was the ultimate object of the ministry of reconciliation, and the bright hope that cheered them in their painful labours, their weary pilgrimage, their sufferings unto death. They looked forward to it as the glorious consummation of the Redeemer's work, the last and crowning triumph, the "death of death." But while there is no question that this doctrine continues to form an article in the creed of Christian men, is it not equally evident that it has neither that prominence in the modern pulpit nor in individual experience it once enjoyed? Jesus is preached. The Crucified One-in all the love and sorrow of his passion, is a topic, and rightly, of unceasing reference; but the resurrection-seldom or never. These two cardinal doctrines of Christianity come not forth, hand in hand, to animate and cheer the ruined hopes of man. The resurrection seems to have dropped out of sight. Christian hope is rarely excited by its presentation, nor Christian faith strengthened by its support. The Lord's resurrection is regarded as little more than an attestation of God's acceptance of his work: while that of his people, in its rich and consoling sweetness under bodily weakness and infirmity, when friend is separated from friend by the ruthless hand of death, or when the follower of the Lamb enters into conflict with his last enemy, is hardly ever the source whence comfort is sought to uphold the stricken spirit or the fainting heart. For all that relates to the future life, and to man's complete redemption from the curse, their resurrection, in the general apprehension of Christian men, may as well have no foundation in the promises of God, and its future realization be a dream.

Is there not a cause for this? How is it that one of the most prominent topics of Apostolic preaching has ceased to hold that position in modern evangelization? Where is the ministry of which it shall be said, it preaches Jesus and the Resurrection? The doctrine of the Resurrection is believed, because clearly and unmistakeably revealed: but who hears or emits the groan and the sigh for its realization? Where is the irrepressible, agonizing strife to attain unto it? Will not the simple salvation of the soul, or its entrance into heaven, satisfy the desire and the expectation of the major part of Christendom? Is not the resumption of corporeity, though spiritualized, a degrading thought to multitudes? Let us ponder the matter.

May we not have become too spiritual to entertain with pleasure the idea of a corporeal organism adapted to the higher, which is yet but a perpetuation of the present, life of humanity?

Are body and spirit so adverse to each other, as to render their union a source of depravation, a loss of dignity, to the more ethereal part of our nature? Does the Manicheistic heresy still linger in the Church? Is sinfulness so radically connected with physical organization as to render the adoption of any one of its many beauteous forms unsuited to the bright destinies of the soul? It would seem to be thought so. If, in the last age, a blank, chilling, spiritless materialism confounded the soul with the gross forms of matter, in the present a spiritual philosophy would altogether separate it from its partner in being. But although man be compounded of parts possessing qualities so contrasted as are those of body and soul, and although the one may link us on to the infinite, participating in some measure of its attributes, while the other unites us with space and time, and is marked by finiteness and change, yet both are essential to the nature of man. Their union constitutes humanity. Separated they cease, either of them, to be man, however noble and enduring the qualities of the one, or frail and perishable the nature of the other. If on the spirit be impressed the features of the divine image, after which man was made, in the moral and intellectual endowments it enjoys, not less traceable is that portrait in the skilful organisation, the wondrous life, the fair form of the human frame. It is not one part alone that bears the image of God; but the whole being of man.

Body and soul are bound together by an immutable destiny. The present and the future life differ not so much in the essentialities of being, as in the cessation of that abnormal, state in which the good man now lives, or in its perpetuation in the instance of the impenitent and guilty. Sin, and its product, death, are not original constituents of humanity. They are superinduced upon our being. Sin hath indeed disrupted the fraternal bond that once existed between body and soul, and dissolved the holy league of amity formed by the Creator. It has brought man's nature to dissolution, corruption, and death. But if they be never reunited, man for ever ceases to be man. His spirit may continue to be; it may never lose its capacity of being; but if it never be clothed again, never appropriate to itself some glorious corporeity suited to the display of its essentially human powers, then it cannot be said that man lives. The gospel announces and secures the immortality of man; not of the soul alone. But if a spiritual philosphy lowers and degrades the tabernacle of clay, speaks evil of that in which God condescended to appear, a man amongst men, then will the resurrection be regarded as a limitation of the soul's faculties, an alliance unworthy of spirit, a return to an inferior state of being. It will