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their full final happiness; and that, upon that supposition, my whole hypo¬ 
thesis falls to the ground. 
The Lord himself, says he, shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with 
the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ 
shall rise first. 
Then we which are alive and remain shall he caught up together with 
them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air , and so shall we ever he with 
the Lord. 
To this I answer, that the apostle's meaning in this passage is, in general, 
this, that those which are alive upon earth, at the coming of Christ, those 
righteous ones I mean, shall be carried by the angels into the clouds, there 
to meet the Lord, and appear before him, and being judged worthy to 
inherit his kingdom, they shall never depart from him, but shall enjoy his 
presence for ever; that in the mean time, and, as introductory to their final 
joy and glory, they must first descend with Christ, and reign with him in 
the new Heaven and new earth, for a period of time , termed by St. Matthew 
£wv\v aitoviQV* 
And as a strong proof that the epithet umviov is no scripture term by 
which to express the idea of an eternal state, it is observable, that when the 
Apostle intimates that the consequence of the first resurrection and reign 
with Christ upon earth w&w* 1 ™ ,l0V for an age, would be a continuance with 
Christ for ever, and so shall we ewer he with the Lord; it is observable, 
that the Apostle does not say — and so we shall be 6 IS TOV CUUVCl, but vruvjoje, with 
the Lord ; there is likewise observable from the above texts, a very strong 
argument to be drawn in favour of my hypothesis, concerning a twofold and 
successive resurrection, it being therein positively declared that the dead in 
Christ shall rise first, which strengthens very sufficiently all I have said con¬ 
cerning St. John’s rest of the dead, which are, undoubtedly, such as are not 
dead in Christ, and who will not be Christ's at his coming . 
The ancients have likewise endeavoured allegorically to represent the 
resurrection by the consideration of the butterfly, for the word in Greek, 
signifies both the soul , and the butterfly ; and this proceeds from a caterpillar 
crawling upon earth—which, after an appointed time, retires to a very 
considerable depth beneath the surface of the earth (I mean the major part), 
where it divests itself of all appearance of its former state, forms a tomb, 
becomes a chrysalis, and continues buried for several months, then emerges 
from its apparently lifeless state, and rises to the surface, and commences a 
