"I take this opportunity for expressing my approval of the arrangement of the New Lectionary, by which chapters of the Book of Revelation are now read more frequently than formerly before the people, this portion of Scripture being indispensable for communicating to them the doctrine of Jesus Christ in all its integrity. "Cambridge, January 12,1878." The difficulty experienced in the present day of rightly apprehending the doctrine taught by our Lord in Matt. xxv. 46, and in like passages, arises, according to the arguments contained in the Essay and in the foregoing letters, from the little attention that is paid in the Christian doctrine now generally accepted to what the Scriptures reveal respecting "the age to come" (_aion ho mellon_) as distinguished from "the present age" (_aion outos, aion ho paron_). The designation "age" applied in common to both, indicates that each has a beginning and an ending. The future age begins at the termination of the present age, the separation between them being the epoch of a resurrection of the dead--not, however, of all the dead, but "a resurrection of the just," that is, of those who have been prepared and sealed by faith, and suffering, and good works, in the present life, for immediate entrance into a new state of life. It is said of these that "they cannot {133} die any more, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection" (Luke xx. 36). These are they who "have part in the first resurrection," of whom it is further said that "they _lived_ and reigned with Christ a thousand years," whereas of "the rest of the dead" it is said that "they _lived_ not till the thousand years were finished" (see Rev. xx. 4, 6). It is plain, therefore, that there will be a time of _separation_ of the one class from the other--the time of _threshing_, when the tares are separated from the wheat; and that whilst the elect at that time enter into the _[oe]onian_ life (that is, the life of the age to come), the rest of the dead when they live again enter into a state in which they undergo "[oe]onian punishment" (that is, punishment that pertains to the age to come), ending eventually in the second death, which, however, in common with all divine punishment, is inflicted for producing a certain effect foreordained in the counsels of the Almighty. (Respecting this effect, see what I have said in the Essay and at the end of the first of the foregoing letters.)