N01184:78
A dissertation concerning the future conversion of the Jewish Nation. Answering the objections of…
A dissertation concerning the future conversion of the Jewish Nation. Answering the objections of the Reverend and learned Mr. Baxter, Dr. Lightfoot, and others. : With an enquiry into the first resurrection. / By Increase Mather, president of Harvard-College, at Cambridge, in New-England. ; [Three lines from Jeremiah]A dissertation concerning the future conversion of the Jewish Nation. Answering the objections of the Reverend and learned Mr. Baxter, Dr. Lightfoot, and others. : With an enquiry into the first resurrection. / By Increase Mather, president of Harvard-Colledge, at Cambridge, in New-England. ; [Three lines from Jeremiah]
London: printed by R. Tookey for Nath. Hillier, 1709
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
1. It is a known, received Maxim among Divines, that in the Interpretation of Scripture we may not depart from the Literal Sense, if it will stand with the Analogy of Faith. For Men to make Allegories where there are none, is to obtrude their own Imaginations instead of Scripture. Now saith Mr. Mede (Fol. 943.) The 20th of Apocalypse, of all the Narrations in that Book, seems to be the most plain and simple, most free of Allegory, and of the Involution of Prophetical Figures. How can a Man then take a Passage of so plain, and ordinarily expressed Words as those about the First Resurrection are, in any other Sense than the usual and Literal.
2. It is evident by the Law of Opposites. The First and Second Resurrection must needs be of the same Kind, otherwise the Discourse would be Illogical, which may not be supposed. Piscator speaks like a Logician as well as a Divine when he says, In omni Legitim• distribution membra inter s• opponuntur sub eodem genere. In every Rational Distribution the opposite Parts are of the same Kind. Here is a Distribution or Distinction of dead Men living again, some at the Beginning of the Thousand Years, the rest not until the Thousand Years were finished. But those that live again after the Thousand Years, live as to their Bodies. That the Second Resurrection is not Metaphorical but real, and to be taken in a Literal Sense is clear and indisputable. For then the dead, small and great, shall stand before God and be judged according to what is written in the Books, and the Sea gave up the dead which were in it, Ver. 12.13. This is the Second Resurrection which comes after the Thousand Years; and it is certainly a Resurrection of the Body. And thus does Mr. Mede argue, It would (says he) be a most harsh and violent Interpretation to say that [Dead] and consequently [living again from the dead] should not, •trobique, be taken in the same Meaning. For such a Speech in ordinary Construction implies, that as some of the dead lived again in the Beginning of the Thousand Years, in that Sense the rest of the dead should live again at the End of the Thousand Years, and é contra, in what Manner the rest of the dead should live again at the End of the Thousand Years, in that Manner those that were beheaded for Jesus, lived again in the Beginning of the Thousand Years; which living again of those some, is called the First Resurrection.