to doubt whether more is meant than the destruction of the earth as the place of human habitation. In the deluge, to which it is compared , “the world that then was perished;” yet its continuity with the present no one doubts. Fire, though the instrument of a more penetrating judgment, yet does not annihilate the material upon which it fastens. The melting even of elements implies rather the reverse, and dissolution is not (in this sense) destruction. Yet the heavens and the earth pass away,—that is,