credulity with a burden too monstrous for even them to bear? They must, from the nature of their connection with him, have put the most unlimited confidence in him, and could not thus devotedly have given themselves up to a man whom they believed or suspected to be constantly uttering to them a falsehood so extravagant and improbable. They must, then, have put some meaning on it, different from that which our clearer light enables us to see in it; and that meaning, no doubt, they honestly and firmly believed, until the progress of events showed them the power of the prophecy in its wonderful and literal fulfilment. They may have misunderstood it in his life time, in this way: the universal character of the language of the children of Shem, seems to be a remarkable proneness to figurative expressions, and the more abstract the ideas which the speaker wishes to convey, the more strikingly material are the figures he uses, and the more poetical the language in which he conveys them. Teachers of morals and religion, most especially, have, among those nations of the east, been always distinguished for their highly figurative expressions, and none abound more richly in them than the writers of the Old and New Testament. So peculiarly effective, for his great purposes, did Jesus Christ, in particular, find this variety of eloquence, that it is distinctly said of him, that he seldom or never spoke to the people without a parable, which he was often obliged to expound more in detail, to his chosen followers, when apart with them. This style of esoteric and exoteric instruction, had early taught his disciples to look into his most ordinary expressions for a hidden meaning; and what can be more likely than that often, when left to their own conjectures, they, for a time, at least, overleaped the simple literal truth, into a fog of figurative interpretations, as too many of their very modern successors have often done, to their own and others’ misfortune. We certainly know that, in regard to those very expressions about raising the dead, there was a very earnest inquiry among the three chief apostles, some time after, as will be mentioned in place, showing that it never seemed possible to them that their Lord, mighty as he had showed himself, could ever mean to say to them, that, when his bitter foes had crowned his life of toil and cares with a bloody and cruel exit, he――even HE, could dare to promise them, that he would break through that iron seal, which, when once set upon the energies of man, neither goodness, nor valor, nor knowledge, nor love, had ever loosened, but which, since the first dead yielded his breath, not the mightiest prophet, nor the most inspired, could ever break through for himself. The figure of death and resurrection, has often been made a striking image of many moral changes;――of some one of which, the hearers of Jesus probably first interpreted it. In connection with