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is the desire of all nations. The soberest man in the ancient heathen world had a deep and a very strong conviction that death is not the normal state of man; that it is something introduced since the creation of man; and that he was not originally made to die: and hence, amid all the traditions of heathendom that have floated down the stream of time, there was kept constantly afloat, never submerged, the beautiful recollection that once there was a golden age when there was no death; and still the strong and ineradicable hope that man would cleave to with his last gasp, that there should be a golden age again, when sickness, and sorrow, and death should for ever flee away. Even in heathen times man would not accept the grave as his only and his ultimate home; he could not believe it possible that this exquisite mechanism of ours, when dissolved in dust, was to be the end of us. Cicero-who stood upon the loftiest pinnacle, and seems with Socrates and Plato to have caught from afar, it may be refracted and reflected, the first beams of the Son of Righteousness-owned, “I cannot demonstrate logically the immortality of the soul; but such is my conviction that it is true, that though I cannot prove it, I will never let it go, but hold it fast as I believe it is true." When he said so, he only expressed what we all well know, that there are instincts in our hearts truer than logic — that there are conclusions that spring from the depths of man's soul far juster than mathematics can prove-and that God has left in

us these lingering lights, these inextinguishable recollections of our pristine glory, that are to us, in the depths of our ruin, prophecies that the glory will return again. So the heathen felt that death could not be the end of them. They could not see a light in the valley of the shadow of death; they could not see the other end of the long, dark, and dreary tunnel; but they believed, nevertheless, that there was an end to it; and whether they believed it from the instincts of their nature, or from some of the unspent echoes that still reverberated through the dark and dreary wastes of the world of God's first truth proclaimed in Paradise, we know not; but they held fast this-that death was unnatural, that man was not meant to die. They believed the matter would yet be put right; and that at all events, if the body must be resolved into its parent dust, that the soul would escape from the body as lightning parts from the cloud, and not rest till it was in joy in the presence of God. Now, what they guessed, and hoped, and yearned, and longed for, as their deepest, their universal desire, we know: "Unto you is born the Prince of Life; he that believeth on me hath life; I am the resurrection and the life." "All that are in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of man, and shall come forth; they that have done good to the resurrection of everlasting life.”

Christ is "the Desire of all nations," inasmuch as he is the Restorer of the world. I mentioned that the heathen longed for the restoration of all

things. They believed that the golden age would again return. They did not know how it was to return, or by what power it was to be brought back again; but still they would not give up hope. When nations cease to hope, they wither down to their very roots; and if humanity had ever ceased to hope for something better than it had, it would have committed universal suicide. But there seem to have been left in man's will hopes that could not, and that would not, be extinguished; and both Jew and Gentile in ancient times, and the most savage heathen in modern times, have a recollection that the world was once in a better state, and a strong ineradicable belief, that the world will be restored to a better state still. And, very singular, the names given to the earth by both Greeks and Romans, both either commemorate its being once pure, or are prophecies or promises that it will be pure again. For instance, the Greeks called the world cosmos. The meaning of the word cosmos, from which comes our word "cosmetic," is what is beautiful or perfect. And the Romans, as if the same idea had overspread all heathendom, called the world mundus, which means that which is clean, pure, perfect, undefiled. In either case, two names so singular-the one not borrowed from the other, one not the translation of the other-words which sprung into human speech as the embodiment of human anticipations-were to heathendom the only shreds of a Gospel that they had, the phecy that the earth should again be cosmos —

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beautiful; again be mundus-pure; and all things restored to their pristine loveliness, glory, and perfection. The Apostle tells us, in words that we know to be true, that their hope in this matter was right. "The whole creation," says the Apostle, "groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now;" what intensity of expression! But it does so; "waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body." The Apostle represents the earth as a stricken creature, mourning and complaining to its God; and longing, and hoping, and praying, that one day it may be delivered from its burden, purified of its pollution, disinfected of its poison, and made again the earth, the happy mother of a happy family, reigning and rejoicing upon it. And the Apostle tells us it will be so; that all things wait for this, when the earth will be restored, all creation's deserts rejoice and blossom as the rose; when its most desecrated spots will be consecrated, its most barren spots fertilised, and the Paradise that shall end the world be more glorious, beautiful, and fair, than the Paradise with which the world began.

Now the poor heathen, like the Christian, (only in less measure,) longed for a better world, as the sailor for his haven, the traveller for his home, the exile for his country, humanity for its restoration, its paradise, and its peace. Christ is that Restorer. His words are, "Behold, I make all things new." And in the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of Revelation, you have the prediction that all

things will be made new, and that what the heathen hoped for, Christians know, believe, and are assured, will come to pass.

Christ is the Light of all nations, inasmuch as he is now and professed to be, when he came into our world the great Revealer of God. Far as human nature had gone from God, it never yet gave up God altogether. Those lingering tradi tions that existed in the minds of the heathen, and exist still, are in their way remarkable and indirect proofs of the original truth from which they come. Whenever you see a bad sovereign made of brass and gilt, it is the proof that there is a good sovereign: the imitation is always the evidence of an original. So all these lingering truths, recollections, dim presentiments, cherished promises, that survived and found expression in the language of the heathen, are evidences of grand original truths, of which they were the distorted refractions. Heathendom, in its greatest aberration from God, never forgot him or renounced him altogether. No nation, even the most degraded, has been found in which there has not been some impression of a God; although it is quite possible that man may be so brutalized, that the animal shall comparatively be the grave of the intellectual and the moral. As we know not what a height of glory and magnificence man may be lifted to, we know not what a depth of degradation he may also sink to. The very fact that he is capable of such elevation and such degradation, is a proof of the greatness of man as he was

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