And therefore do depend, that I shall not be taken hence in the midst of my days, before I have done all my heart's desire. But when that is done, I know no business I have with the dead, and therefore do as much depend that I shall not go hence by 'returning to the dust', which is the sentence of that law from which I claim a discharge: but that I shall make my 'exit' by way of translation, which I claim as a dignity belonging to that degree in the science of eternal life, of which I profess myself a graduate, according to the true intent and meaning of the covenant of eternal life revealed in the Scriptures. A man so [Greek: kat exochaen] clear-headed, so remarkable for the perspicuity of his sentences, and the luminous orderliness of his arrangement,--in short, so consummate an artist in the statement of his case, and in the inferences from his 'data', as John Asgill must be allowed by all competent judges to have been,--was he in earnest or in jest from p. 75 to the end of this treatise?--My belief is, that he himself did not know. He was a thorough humorist: and so much of will, with a spice of the wilful, goes to the making up of a humorist's creed, that it is no easy matter to determine, how far such a man might not have a pleasure in 'humming' his own mind, and believing, in order to enjoy a dry laugh at himself for the belief. But let us look at it in another way. That Asgill's belief, professed and maintained in this tract, is unwise and odd, I can more readily grant, than that it is altogether irrational and absurd. I am even strongly inclined to conjecture, that so early as St. Paul's apostolate there were persons (whether sufficiently numerous to form a sect or party, I cannot say), who held the same tenet as Asgill's, and in a more intolerant and exclusive sense; and that it is to such persons that St. Paul refers in the justly admired fifteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians; and that the inadvertence to this has led a numerous class of divines to a misconception of the Apostle's reasoning, and a misinterpretation of his words, in behoof of the Socinian notion, that the resurrection of Christ is the only argument of proof for the belief of a future state, and that this was the great end and purpose of this event. Now this assumption is so destitute of support from the other writers of the New Testament, and so discordant with the whole spirit and gist of St. Paul's views and reasoning every where else, that it is 'a priori' probable, that the apparent exception in this chapter is only apparent. And this the hypothesis, I have here advanced, would enable one to shew, and to exhibit the true bearing of the texts. Asgill contents himself with maintaining that translation without death is one, and the best, mode of passing to the heavenly state. 'Hinc itur ad astra'. But his earliest predecessors contended that it was the only mode, and to this St.