shall come in. Who is this King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is this King of Glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory," Hallelujah!

THE RESURRECTION OF ISRAEL.

The 144,000 who were sealed by the fifth angel were not Christians at all, but they are devout Israelites who worshipped God and lived pure, clean lives, and hence they are preserved on the earth in their humanity during the tribulation and are not allowed to be slain by the plagues nor by the Antichrist.

Jesus tells us in Matt. 24:29, 30 and in Mark 13:24-27 that: "Immediately after the tribulation of those days" and after the Son of man has come in the clouds with power and great glory, that is after the resurection of all the Church and after they have all been to heaven and have come back to earth, that he will then send forth his angels to gather together his elect, that is Israel, from the four winds. This is the resurrection of Israel to the same condition as the 144,000, redeemed from the earth, are in.

Isa. 26:19, "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead."

Hos. 13:14, "I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plague; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.”

Eze. 87:11-14, "Then he said unto me, Son of man,

these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel (not to heaven). And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves and shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.

This completes the first resurrection, and the millennial reign begins.

CHAPTER XIII.

EUTOPIA.

We use the word Eutopia, (not Utopia) in its philological sense, "the good place." In describing this land of the blessed, that has been fabled in story so long, we shall not go beyond what is written. It shall not be a land of fancy and gorgeous dreams, but a land of glorious realities, every item of which we may enjoy in full fruition. If we shall bring out any new thing, it will not be because it was not in the old Bibles, but simply because we have cast aside the veil of spiritualizing, which has so effectually blinded the eyes of all who have read the Book, and taken God at his word. We believe that when he was dictating to his stenographers he knew what he wanted to say, and said what he meant, and meant what he said, and meant for us to undertstand what they wrote. Hence he put it in simple language, unornamented by flowers of rhetoric, and untrammeled by periphrastic phrases, so that we might not be turned from the truth by the clothing it wore.

But the great Deceiver got in his work by spiritualizing it all away, and has, for a time, succeeded. We will, therefore, take each statement in its most literal sense, and give it its most facial meaning. God has planted in the human heart a desire and a hope for something better than what we have here. This is not man's destiny. The goal lies beyond. Every one knows and feels that. Few have seen the goal, but all long for it, with an indefinable hope and

ideal. We are simply surprised at what is revealed of the Glory Land, and more surprised at how it has been explained away. Here we rend the veil, and throw away other people's glasses, so as to look with clear eyes, and think with our own clear brain. What is the heritage of the saints in light? We are "heirs and joint heirs with Christ." "I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my father hath appointed unto me; that ye may eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel."

PARADISE.

The word is used only three times in the whole Bible, and once in the Apocrypha, and always in the same sense. It always means Christ's millennial Kingdom. Particularly, it means Jerusalem during the millennial reign. Primarily, it meant a beautiful garden, and that is just what Jerusalem and its environs will be when Christ shall have beautified the place of his sanctuary.

The first mention of it is in the Savior's reply to the prayer of the penitent thief. The thief had, by some means, heard that Jesus was preaching the good tidings of a Kingdom yet to come, and in which he was to be the King. With that thought in his mind, as he saw the awful wonders of the crucifixion of Jesus, he was convinced that his claim was true, and that he (Jesus) would yet be King.

Probably he had heard him, a few hours before, tell Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world, and his mind grasped the thought that the golden age is when Jesus shall reign; and with all his heart he prayed, "Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." Jesus

replied, verily, I say unto thee today, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise." In other words, "I tell thee today, That I grant your request, and you shall be with me in Jerusalem when I reign in glory." In the original Greek there is no punctuation. The punctuation which we have in our Bibles is arbitrary, and may be right or wrong. In the Savior's answer to the thief, we have just placed the comma after "today" instead of before it. The Savior's teaching requires this; for he said that, "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so must the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Hence he did not go to Paradise that day; for we know that Paradise is not in the heart of the earth, as the other references positively show.

The next reference to Paradise is where Paul was caught up to Paradise, and heard things that were not tellable. He was caught up to the third heaven. He saw the gospel age, the millennial age, and the age succeeding that, (the third heaven) which was not to be revealed to us now. At any rate, Paradise was not in the heart of the earth. And we know that he had great revelations of Christ's glory and of his Kingdom, many things of which he told us.

The last mention of Paradise is an assurance to the overcomers that they shall eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God. This locates it beyond doubt or cavil; for we know that the tree of life is by the river of life, and the river of life flows out from beneath the throne in Jerusalem. Jerusalem and its environs, watered by the river of life, and innumerable gushing, artesian fountains, with the trees of life lining the banks, and with the lilies of the valley, and the roses