radiant than the morning, the faithful who had died "in the Lord," would ascend; the living would exchange their terrestrial bodies for bodies celestial, and thus "changed," "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," would mount upward to join them, and all together would "meet the Lord in the air." For the believers the grave had no victory and death no sting. In all this the Christians were strictly within the circle of Jewish thought. The belief in the resurrection wore different aspects in different minds; the vision of the hereafter floated many-hued before the imaginations of men. The fiery zealots who "took the kingdom of heaven by violence," dreamed of the resurrection of the body, and of tangible privileges of dominion in the terrestrial millennium. The milder enthusiasts, who could not believe that flesh and blood could inherit the kingdom of God, were constrained to invent a "spiritual world" for the accommodation of spiritual bodies. Some conjectured that the etherial forms would mount to their native seat, only at the termination of the thousand years reign; the spiritual world being brought in at the end, as a device of eschatology to dispose finally of the saints who could neither die nor remain longer on earth. Others surmised that the spiritual world would claim its own at once, there being no place on earth where the risen could live and no occupations in which they could engage. The cruder faith was the earlier. The fanatics, as described in the second Book of Maccabees, an apocryphal writing of the second century before Christ, hoped for a corporeal resurrection and a visible supremacy. Of seven sons, who, with their mother, were barbarously executed because they refused to deny their religion by eating swines' flesh, one declares: "The King of the world shall raise us up who have died for his laws, into everlasting life;" another, holding forth his hands (to be cut off), said courageously, "These I had from heaven, and for his laws I despise them, and from him I hope to receive them again." The next shouts: "It is good being put to death by men, to look for hope from God, to be raised up again by him; as for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life." Finally, when all the seven have died heroically, with words of similar import on their lips, the mother is put to death, having exhorted her youngest born to faithfulness with the exhortation: "Doubtless the Creator of the world who formed the generation of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also, of his own mercy, give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake." The same book records the suicide of Razis: "One of the elders of Jerusalem, a lover of his countrymen, and a man of very good report, who for his kindness was called a Father of the Jews, for in former times he had been accused of Judaism, and did boldly jeopard his body and life with all vehemency for the religion of the Jews;" "choosing rather to