QUERY CONCERNING THE RIGHTEOUS.

Dear Brother:

            We have not forgotten you, nor the many occasions of intellectual enjoyment, nor the precious truths we learned while in your society, and attending your public lectures in Dundee, Illinois. They are of priceless value, and such that neither time, nor the fiendish jeers of ecclesiastical leaders of the populace can ever erase. We have kept a close and anxious watch upon your course since the time you left Illinois; and we regret that we have not patronised your publications more fully, which we would have done had it not been for our unsettled condition. But we hope we are now permanently situated in this far southern district, whence we may assist you more liberally in your great and important work of manifesting, and disentangling, the Gospel of the Kingdom from the traditions of men; and serve our Heavenly Father to the best of our ability, looking forward to the appearance of our Lord and Saviour, when he shall come again without sin unto salvation, and reign with his Ancients gloriously.

            A friend wishes us to put a question to you, which you can answer at your convenience: —‘When do the righteous live who are to be raised at the second resurrection? And are the righteous subject to death during the Christ’s thousand years’ reign in Jerusalem?’—We remain yours in the Hope.

JOHN OATMAN, Senr. And Jnr.

Bastrop, Texas.

POST-MILLENNIAL HOPE OF THE MILLENNIAL RIGHTEOUS.

            The resurrection, termed in common speech ‘the second,’ occurs at ‘the end when the Christ shall deliver up the Kingdom to God, even the Father;’ that is, one thousand years after he ascends the throne of his father David. The righteous who are raised then are they who have died during the previous thousand years—righteous, according to the law and testimony then established as the rule of faith and practice. The hope set before them during the reign, is the kingdom under its post-millennial constitution. They walk by faith of this in hope of attaining citizenship therein, as immortal subjects of ‘God even the Father,’ when sin, death, and priesthood, with its appurtenances, shall cease to be; but when Jesus and his brethren, though no longer priests to God, will continue pre-eminent as the cherubim and seraphim of terrestrial glory. The second-resurrection righteous live thenceforth on the renovated and sealess earth for ever, God being all in all of them as in Christ the Lord.

            The word ‘righteous’ is applicable to two classes of the redeemed from sin and death. The first class is composed of those believers of the gospel of the kingdom who live upon the earth at and before the coming of the King of Israel in power and great glory; the second, of those who believe and do while He reigns Vicegerent of Jehovah as High Priest upon his father David’s throne. The first class are immortalised at his coming, and are consequently no more subject to death. They, with Jesus, are the rulers, or ‘kings and priests to God’ over the nations—the dispensers of the blessedness which is to come upon them through Abraham and His Seed. —Editor.

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