sin, and yet lived after it for a time, so the faithful Christian hath recovered eternal life by Christ’s passion, though he die a natural death, and remain dead for a time, namely, till the resurrection. For as death is reckoned from the condemnation of Adam, not from the execution; so life is reckoned from the absolution, not from the resurrection of them that are elected in Christ. [Sidenote: Ascension into heaven.] That the place wherein men are to live eternally, after the resurrection, is the heavens, (meaning by heaven, those parts of the world, which are the most remote from earth, as where the stars are, or above the stars, in another higher heaven, called _cœlum empyreum_, whereof there is no mention in Scripture, nor ground in reason), is not easily to be drawn from any text that I can find. By the Kingdom of Heaven, is meant the kingdom of the King that dwelleth in heaven; and his kingdom was the people of Israel, whom he ruled by the prophets, his lieutenants; first Moses, and after him Eleazar, and the sovereign priests, till in the days of Samuel they rebelled, and would have a mortal man for their king, after the manner of other nations. And when our Saviour Christ, by the preaching of his ministers, shall have persuaded the Jews to return, and called the Gentiles to his obedience, then shall there be a new kingdom of heaven; because our king shall then be God, whose _throne_ is heaven: without any necessity evident in the Scripture, that man shall ascend to his happiness any higher than God’s _footstool_ the earth. On the contrary, we find written (_John_ iii. 13) that _no man hath ascended into heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the son of man, that is in heaven_. Where I observe by the way, that these words are not, as those which go immediately before, the words of our Saviour, but of St. John himself; for Christ was then not in heaven, but upon the earth. The like is said of David (_Acts_ ii. 34) where St. Peter, to prove the ascension of Christ, using the words of the Psalmist (_Psalm_ xvi. 10), _Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thine holy one to see corruption_, saith, they were spoken, not of David, but of Christ; and to prove it, addeth this reason, _For David is not ascended into heaven_. But to this a man may easily answer, and say, that though their bodies were not to ascend till the general day of judgment, yet their souls were in heaven as soon as they were departed from their bodies; which also seemeth to be confirmed by the words of our Saviour (_Luke_ xx. 37, 38), who proving the resurrection out of the words of Moses, saith thus, _That the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for they all live to him._ But if these words be to be understood only of the immortality of the soul, they prove not