nessed the first existence of life; the calling into being of that animated part of the creation most nearly allied to man in nature, and most closely connected with him in its destinies. And so, with the mystical day, began, if we may so say, the dispensation most immediately connected with our Lord, the dispensation in which He was, indeed, to appear and live. The glory of the first temple came to the full in the reign of Solomon, and with the throne of his successors, it passed away. The dispensation to which it ministered, though pervaded by many beams of the glories of that which was to follow it, was still, in the main, of the earth, earthy; the great framework of the system under which Israel then lived was raised on temporal promises, and the history of the kings is, in the main, a history of God's dealings with men in the shape of temporal punishments and

temporal rewards. But with the captivity this state of things came to a close. The second temple was reared under the promise that its glory should be greater than the first. The desire of all nations was to visit it; no intermediate break or organic change in the constitution of Israel was to be looked for; but the eye of faith, like the language of prophecy, was now immediately directed to Him who should come, and that suddenly, to His temple.

And with regard to the sixth day, what has been above said, will render unnecessary any further exposition of its correspondence with the period which, commencing with our Lord's Advent, is to continue till the end of this visible creation, the reign of the Man, with the Church, His mystical Bride, over the symbolical "beasts and cattle and fourfooted things" of the earth. In that

mystical sixth day, then, it is that our own life-times fall; it is our day of trial, our day of grace, our day, rightly used, of salvation. God give us grace so to husband and employ the hours or minutes of it entrusted to our respective stewardships, that with Daniel, the man greatly beloved, we may joyfully "stand in our lot at the end of the days."

Holy men have also traced a harmony with the six days, and the six periods, in the successive stages of each individual man's life, each man's history being in little what that of the world is at large. The first period, certainly, is an apt representative of man's first age, infancy; divided, beyond all others, from the rest, and washed out, as it were, in the flood of oblivion at its close. And a considerate and humble mind may follow out the thought with regard to the subsequent stages of youth, manhood, and the like,

till it come to contemplate, in the sixth and last, the holy, happy state of that old age whose hoary hairs are a crown of glory; when man, the reason, in happy union with woman, the affections, and guiding and controlling her in all things, asserts a rightful supremacy over the passions, typified by the irrational brute creation a day, which, as the shades of evening gather around it, gives a cheerful promise of the morning which is to follow, and to which no evening shall ever again succeed.

CHAP. II.

1. THUS THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH WERE FINISHED, AND ALL THE HOST OF THEM.

WITH the evening of the sixth day the great work of creation was accomplished. We are not here told that "God said, it is finished," but we are so told in a far subsequent page of holy writ, and the omission of the phrase here, almost naturally, carries on our contemplations to that perfection of the great design, for which the visible frame of things was called into existence, which took place on Calvary. There, on the evening of the sixth day of the week, God the Son, expiring on the cross, said "It is finished; and bowed His head, and gave up the Ghost." Before that, He had said, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work ;'