truth.

Let us now apply this to the scriptures. Man sinned, and not only
involved himself in guilt and misery, but was sentenced to that very
death with which God threatened him--"Dust thou art and unto dust
shalt thou return." Here was the end of the first covenant, and the
termination of all the miseries of life. It is evident from revelation
as well as reason that man at death drops to a state of insensibility,
and knows no more till he is made alive in Christ, who is himself the
second covenant. The language of scripture is, the dead know not any
thing--they sleep--and the apostle (in 1 Cor. xv Chap.) reasons that
if there be no resurrection, then there will be no future existence--
that they which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished--that
preaching was vain--faith was also vain, and that the christians were
yet in their sins. On such language as this, I can put no other
construction than that the resurrection is our salvation and eternal
life, our deliverance from sin and imperfection. Under the first
covenant the resurrection in Christ was not revealed to the human
family, and they remained of course under the sentence of condemnation
with no hopes of a future existence. "By the offense of one judgment
came upon all men to condemnation." Obedience to the law was enforced
by threatenings on the one hand, and promises of temporal rewards on
the other, which were communicated to the fathers by the prophets.

But God has in these latter days spoken unto us by his Son, and
through him revealed the second covenant in which he "gave him the
heathen for an inheritance, and the utter most parts of the earth for
a possession," and declared him to be the resurrection and life of the
world. If in the divine counsels no Christ had been provided, the
human family it appears would have remained in eternal slumber. They