state of waiting for it,--at that fixed time the Lord, that is,
Christ, shall appear in the sky, visible to men in His glorified body;
and His coming shall be announced to men by a mighty call, a signal
cry, and by the trumpet of God.

Now let me at once say that as to such expressions as this, when we
are told that they cannot bear their literal meaning, but are only
used in condescension to our human ways of speaking, and thus an
attempt is made to deprive them in fact of all meaning, I do not
recognise any such rule of interpretation. If the _words_ are used to
suit our human ways of thinking, I can see no reason why the _things
signified_ by those words may not also be used to affect our senses,
which will be still human, when the great day comes. As to the sound
being heard by all, or as to the Lord being seen by all, I can with
safety leave that to Him who made the eye and the ear, and believe
that if He says so, He will find the way for it to be so.

Now let us follow on with the description. With the Lord Jesus,
accompanying Him, though unseen to those below on the earth, will be
the myriads of spirits of the blessed dead, And notice,--for it is an
important point, since Holy Scripture is consistent with itself in
another place on this matter,--that at this coming none are with the
Lord, no spirits of the departed, I mean, except those of the blessed
dead. In other words, this is not the general coming to judgment, when
the whole of the dead shall stand before God, but it is that first
resurrection of which the Evangelist speaks in the Apocalypse, when he
says, chap. xx. 5, "_The rest of the dead lived not again until_ (a
prescribed time which he mentions, whatever that may mean) _the
thousand years were finished This is the first resurrection. Blessed
and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the
second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of
Christ_."

Then, the Lord being still descending from heaven and on the way to
this world, the dead in Christ shall rise first--the first thing: the
graves shall be opened, and the bodies of the saints that sleep shall
come forth, and, for so the words surely imply, their spirits, which
have come with the Lord, shall be united to those bodies, each to his
own.

Here, again, I can see no difficulty. The same body, even to us now on
earth, does not imply that the same particles compose it. And even the
expression "the same bod