“No man can comprehend the heights and depths of the Gospel at his first entrance into it; and in point of order, ‘the last enemy to be destroyed is Death.’ The first essay of Faith is against Hell, that though we die we may not be damned; and the full assurance of this is more than most men attain to before Death overtakes them, which makes Death a terror to men. But they who attain it can sing a requiem ‘Lord now lettest thou thy Servant depart in peace!’ and if God takes them at their word, they lie down in the faith of the Resurrection of the Just. But whenever he pleases to continue them, after that attainment, much longer above ground, that time seems to them an interval of perfect leisure, till at last espying Death itself, they fall upon it as an enemy that must be conquered, one time or other, through faith in Christ. This is the reason why it seems intended that a respite of time should be allotted to believers after the first Resurrection and before the dissolution of the World, for perfecting that faith which they began before their death but could not attain to in the first reach of life: for Death being but a discontinuance of Life, wherever men leave off at their death, they must begin at their resurrection. Nor shall they ascend after their resurrection, till they have attained to this faith of translation, and by that very faith they shall be then convinced that they need not have died. “When Elijah courted death under the juniper tree in the wilderness, and ‘said—now Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers,’ that request shews that he was not educated in this faith of translation, but attained it afterwards by study. Paul tells ‘we shall not all die but we shall all be changed;’ yet though he delivered this to be his faith in general, he did not attain to such a particular knowledge of the way and manner of it as to prevent his own death: he tells us he had not yet attained the Resurrection of the dead, but was pressing after it. He had but a late conversion, and was detained in the study of another part of divinity, the confirming the New Testament by the Old and making them answer one another,—a point previous to the faith of translation, and which must be learned before it—in order to it. But this his pressing (though he did not attain,) hath much encouraged me,” says Asgill, “to make this enquiry, being well assured that he would not have thus pursued it, had he not apprehended more in it than the vulgar opinion.