10 The Will

CHAPTER X. THE WILL. IN the New Testament Scriptures it is but rarely that any reference is made to the human will, but the thought of the divine will is everywhere prominent. Before then we discuss the question of " free will " it will be well to get some clear notion of what we mean by will, and this we can best do by investigating what is meant in the New Testament by God’s Will

Jesus Christ taught His disciples to pray to the Father in heaven : " Thy will be done, as in heaven so on earth (genhqhtw to qelhma sou wj en ouranwi kai epi ghj)." [St. Matthew 6:10.] He taught them that entrance into the kingdom of heaven was not for such as said to Him, Lord, Lord, but for him " that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." [St. Matthew 7:21.] And when His mother and brethren were seeking for Him and making claims which relationship seemed to them to give them a title to, He said " Who is my mother and my brethren? And looking round on them which sat round about him he saith, Behold, my mother and my brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." [St. Mark 3:33 ff.] And in St. John’s gospel Jesus speaks of Himself as seeking and doing the will of Him who sent Him. " My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." [St. John 4:34.] And again : " I can of myself (ap emautou) do nothing : as I hear, I judge : and my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." [St. John 5:30.] And similarly : " I am come down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." And this time He discloses that will : " This is the will of him that sent me, that of all that which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that every one that beholdeth the Son, and believeth on him, should have eternal life." [St. John 6:38 ff.]

We may notice in passing that Christ speaks of His own will as distinguished from that of His Father. " I am come not to do mine own will." And in the garden of Gethsemane He prayed in words, which, as reported by St. Luke, are : " Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me : nevertheless not my will, but thine be done." [St. Luke 22:42.] To this conflict of the will we must return presently when we come to speak of human will. To return now to the divine will. St. Paul in the grand opening chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, about which something was said in the preceding chapter of this essay, three times makes mention of the will of God, using the word qelhma in a different combination each time. He speaks of God " having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the good pleasure of his will (kata thn eudokian tou qelhmatoj autou)," and speaks too of " the mystery of his will (to musthrion tou qelhmatoj autou) according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him unto a dispen- sation of the fulness of the times," and then he speaks of " him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will (kata thn boulhn tou qelhmatoj autou)."

We get from these words the notion of a great purpose of God willed by Him not in time but from all eternity, a purpose long hidden but at length dis- closed (to musthrion).

Again and again in the epistles we have mention of the Will of God which Christians are to fulfil, and there is one passage in 1 Peter where the divine Will is personified and made the subject of the verb to will : " It is better if the Will of God will (ei qeloi to qelhma tou qeou) that ye suffer for well-doing, than for evil-doing." [1 Peter 3:17.]

Now it may seem strange to begin a discussion on the human will by reference to the divine will, with which it would seem it is hardly comparable. But I believe that we shall get clearer notions by so doing.

" To will " with us is to change ; it is a definite activity in time differing from previous activities. But we cannot conceive of an Eternal God thus willing. This only can we lay hold of, that according to the New Testament the creation is set forth as a great will or purpose of God, having its meaning in what God Himself is, in what we have already called His Character. The Will is inseparable in thought from the Character of Him who wills.

If the Gospel of Creation be true, God’s Character is absolute and perfect self-communicating Love. His Will then must perfectly correspond. But our character is only in process of formation ; we have a certain character which is, however, liable to change, and must change if we are to make pro- gress. Consequently our wills are not constant but liable to change. Our characters have been partly formed for us by the cosmic process, and we have made them what they are by our response or non-response to the demands of our conscience. We are not wholly spiritual. There is still in us the self-asserting element, the carnal mind. There is a dualism in our nature. This is that of which St. Paul spoke in those classical words of his which we must here quote : " We know that the law is spiritual (pneumatikoj) : but I am carnal (sarkinoj), sold under sin. For that which I work (katergazomai) I know not: for not what I would (o qelw) that do I practise ; but what I hate, that I do. But if what I would not, that I do, I consent unto the law that it is good (kaloj). So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. For I know that in me, that is in my flesh (en th sarki mou) dwelleth no good thing (agaqon) ; for to will (to qelein) is present with me, but to work that which is good (to kalon) is not. For the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practise. But if what I would not that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. I find then the law that to me who would do good, evil is present. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man (kata ton esw anqrwpon): but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind (tw vomw tou nooj mou), and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me out of this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself with the mind serve the law of God : but with the flesh the law of sin." [Romans 7:14 ff.] This is profoundly true to experience, this conflict of the cosmic with the spiritual ; and the cosmic with us is not pure cosmic, for through spiritual disobedience of those from whom we have inherited ourselves as well as through our own disobedience, there is much of the law or principle of sin. There is in us original as well as actual sin. The cosmic is not sinful save when it opposes itself to the spiritual. While the cosmic is ignorant of the spiritual it is free from sin ; but the law, the spiritual law, by its advent makes sin possible, and the neglect of the cosmic to respond to the demands of the spiritual is sin. On the other hand the response of the cosmic to the spiritual is spiritual growth, a spiritualising of the cosmic. The cosmic then is only sinful when it refuses to be spiritualised. Sin apart from moral reason is an impossibility. Consequently we do not speak of animals not endowed with moral reason as having sin ; but every man whose moral reason is enlightened knows himself to have failed to respond to the demands of conscience, knows that he has sinned and that he has sin.

There is a distinction between these two. The one expresses a past act, the other a present state. Every action we perform influences the character for good or for evil. The character is the man, and you cannot separate the will from the character. A man will act according to his character. Given the character and the circumstances in which the man finds himself, and his conduct is determined.

It will be said that this is determinism and not free will. If so, I must acknowledge that I am a determinist, and I think St. Paul was a determinist. But it must not be supposed that determinism is inconsistent with responsibility. I hold that every being with moral reason is responsible, that is to say, he has a potentiality of response to the demands of conscience, but not necessarily an ability to respond. St. Paul said : " The good which I would I do not : but the evil which I would not, that I practise." This was his state before he found himself set free by Christ, for it is to Him he attributes the freedom of the will, freedom, that is, to do what he saw to be good. And this is strictly in accord with Christ’s own teaching as recorded in St. John’s gospel. Let a quotation be here made in proof of this.

" Jesus therefore said to those Jews which had believed him, If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly my disciples ; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered him, We be Abraham’s seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man : how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin. And the bondservant abideth not in the house for ever: the son abideth for ever. If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." [St. John 8:31-36.]

Christ then taught clearly that men were not free until they knew the truth ; and the truth as He spoke of it, was the truth of God Himself. " This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." And Christ said of Himself in words whose truth the whole world will come to recognise : " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life : no one cometh unto the Father but by me."

It must be a familiar experience with us all that when we are going to act deliberately we seem to ourselves free to act in any way we choose. But afterwards when we come to reflect on what we have O done we feel sure that we could not have acted differently. Yet we hate ourselves if we have done wrong, done that which was contrary to the prompting of our consciences. And even if we have been able to do what was right, we do not feel that credit is due to us. We are thankful to have been kept from a fall into sin. This seems to me to be the true attitude of mind for a Christian. But that we are not responsible I could not for one moment allow. Responsibility comes from the discernment between right and wrong; knowing that we ought to do this and ought to refrain from that. Responsibility is that in us which answers back to the dictates of conscience : The law is holy, and just, and good.

Responsible but not free, this is the terrible dualism of which every moral being knows something. It is that which called forth the cry, " O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me out of this body of death? " But it will be well to enquire more closely what we mean by ’ character.’ The divine character is that which God is. We cannot conceive of God be- coming ; indeed that were impious. But our human characters are what we have become, what we are now. These characters we have partly inherited, partly had made for us, and partly have made ourselves. "Every day experience," said Huxley, [Ecolution and Ethics, p. 61.] " familiarises us with the facts which are grouped under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relation- ships. More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a particular way, which we call ’ character,’ is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this character this moral and intellectual essence of a man does veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate from generation to generation. In the new-born infant the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these become actualities, from childhood to age they manifest themselves in dulness or brightness, weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness ; and with each feature modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing else, the character passes on to its incarnation in new bodies." The character is the man, all that he has become; his thoughts, his instincts, his beliefs, his reason, all are a part of him and influence his conduct. His beliefs may be crude, his reason undeveloped; the character will display itself in corresponding action. The character is affected by the man’s surroundings, what he sees, what he hears, what he reads, and by what he does. It is truly a complex thing this human character, but we know what it is from personal experience. To know ourselves is to know our characters. The character is not fixed, immutable. On the contrary, it is being moulded and fashioned every day. It is partly cosmic and partly moral or spiritual; partly, that is, self-asserting and partly self-sacrifi- cing.

It is when the character is such that conduct does not accord with the demands of the moral reason made through the conscience that we suffer from the contradiction of our nature. We are not free and we know it. But it will be said that if the will is not free then it cannot be reasonable for governments to punish offenders. But it must be borne in mind that no government worthy of the name punishes offenders except for such offences as are seen by the offenders to be offences. At the same time it must be acknowledged that the punishment of offenders belongs rather to the cosmic process than to the ways of spiritual training. Communities protect their own interests by punishing those who are dangerous to them. They are in this way self-asserting, for they act more for their own interest than for the good of the offender whom they punish. This self-assertion may seem an advance on individual self-assertion, yet self-assertion it is, and, in so far as it is this, it belongs to the cosmic and not to the spiritual.

It is reasonable, I think, to hope that the day is not far distant when it will be the aim of Christian communities not to punish offenders by way’ of making them an example to others, that these may be deterred from like conduct, but to devise a punishment which shall be disciplinary and corrective, so that the ’ good ’ of the community and the ’ good ’ of the individual shall be in no way opposed. This hope may to some seem visionary.

It is not to be denied that the Christian Church which is professedly a spiritual society has yet in her much of the. cosmic, which it should be her aim to remove. The Church should be the great builder up of character by spiritual methods, and not become identified with the cosmic process. It is her function to substitute in her members the spiritual for the cosmic, or rather to spiritualise the cosmic. It is not to undo what the pure cosmic has done, namely, the building up of a self, but to teach it sacrifice, to find a higher self free from self-assertion.

It was the error of the monothelite heresy that it denied Christ’s human will. A little reflection will shew that, if what has here been stated about the will as determined by the character be correct, then the human will of Jesus is perfectly intelligible. For it is essential to the true humanity of Christ that He should have developed a human character, the character depending on the fact that Christ came into what we a iv calling the cosmic. He was truly man, having taken human nature by being conceived in the Virgin’s womb. Some have objected to the virgin birth on the ground that it is miraculous and therefore impossible, and some have thought that it was only invented as the result of false ideas on the relation of the sexes. It has been urged that there is nothing sinful in the natural conception of a child. But such reasoning is erroneous in more ways than one. Had Christ come into the cosmic in such a way as without a miraculous conception, it is impossible to see how He could have been different from other men. He would have been only the product of the generations that were past. His perfect human life which is generally acknowledged would be unaccounted for. And indeed there would be a greater miracle to be explained than if the virgin birth be assumed.

It is most plainly set forth that Christ’s human nature was pure, that He was perfectly free from the stain of sin, that He was cwrij amartiaj. The cosmic in Him was wholly free from what we may call the despiritualising of it which had come about in consequence of sin. The cosmic so long as it is non- spiritual is good, but when it is handed over to the spiritual without response on the part of the spiritual, sin is the result. The teaching of the Christian Church from the first on the human nature of Christ is that it was perfectly real and perfectly free from sin. Being real there must have been the development of a human character with all its emotions and instincts. Christ in becoming man became a moral being, with a human will and character. The cosmic in Him was never allowed to predominate over the spiritual. Self-assertion was absent from first to last. But temptation to it there was, as the gospel story plainly tells. His character, perfect at each stage, responded perfectly to the demands of the spiritual. He perfectly fulfilled the Divine Will, and learnt obedience by the things which He suffered. The agony in the garden shews that there was a temptation to assert the human will, but that this was overcome, and He submitted to the indignities and cruelties of men and set forth a perfect example of self-sacrifice. The human character shrank from the suffering, but the perfect love overpowered all opposition and He fulfilled the Divine Will. And we must ever remember that the love of Christ was not the love of gratitude as if He were a finite being ; it was the love of God. It was exactly because He was God and not only man that His love could fulfil the Divine Will. [For the perfecting of Christ’s human character see Hebrews 5:7-9. Note the word teleiwqeij.]

Before passing on to speak of the scriptural doc- trine of predestination, it will be well to summarise the chief points here insisted on with regard to the will.

First we observe that it is the possession of moral reason that gives meaning to will. We do not think of the brutes as possessed of will, nor do we attribute to them responsibility. They fulfil the law of their being by their obedience to their instincts. They do what they desire because they desire it. But with man the case is different. On account of his endowment of moral reason, he knows what is good, and has a distinction made for him between right and wrong. Some of his actions are instinctively performed, there being no opposition of reason thereto. But other actions are dictated by reason, and the motive for their fulfilment is the instinct of virtue. To say that man has will is to say that he has an endowment of reason which dictates his conduct, and that he has or II can have appropriate instincts for translating the demands of reason into actual conduct. The will then is not properly free unless the instinct to do that which is good is supreme. Will may then be regarded as purpose, and the fulfilment of purpose. In so far as it is purpose, it "is purpose made possible by the demands of moral reason. In so far as the purpose finds fulfilment, it is an instinct of virtue that makes this possible.

We cannot argue that, because a man recognises . that he deserves to suffer for doing what he knew to be wrong, he was therefore free to do what was right and good. Reason demands that suffering undergone as punishment should be disciplinary and not vindictive. It should be such as will purge out self- assertion and bring in a better mind.

Man’s moral reason gives him the knowledge of the worth of character and shews him how far he himself falls short of it. For my own part I hold rather that there is the possibility of the freedom of the will, than that it is actually free. We are all of us to some extent in bondage to selfishness and sin ; and this is the cause of our unhappiness.

I hold too that man cannot attain to that for which he is intended except by the freedom of his will. God is in His love rescuing us from sin, and inviting our co-operation in this. The truth which needs to be emphasised is that of human responsibility the truth, that is, that human conduct is intended to proceed from the knowledge of what is good, and that what is good can be done because it is good, God enabling us to do it.

Salvation, as I understand it, is deliverance from selfishness. Nor will any man’s perfection be reached until all selfishness and self-assertion is completely purged away. No man can be saved so long as he refuses to respond to the demands of conscience, nor can anyone make this response without the divine grace enabling him. It is God who makes us both to will and to do what is good.

Something must now be said about predestination. A great deal has been said and written and taught on this subject, that anything that is here set forth must necessarily seem brief and inadequate. But it is my purpose here only to say so much on the subject as will shew the consistency of the Gospel of Creation with what the Scriptures teach of predestination and election. The classical passage on this subject is Romans 9:1-33:-xi., and there are other references of which we shall have to take account.

Now I believe that all that the Scriptures have to say about predestination and election can be understood and put together into one harmonious whole if we will but grasp the grand thought that every page of history is written by God Himself. The whole universe is under law, and that not a law apart from God, but a law expressive of the perfect divine will, never to be dissociated from infinite love.

First let it be remarked that the word " predestination " has disappeared from the Revised translation of the New Testament and that we have now, instead of the old rendering ’ predestinate ’ for tpoorizein, the rendering ’ to foreordain.’ Nor, let it be further remarked, is there much said in Scripture of this foreordination. There are only three passages in the Pauline epistles where the word is used (in two of these it is twice used) and there is one passage in the Acts of the Apostles. The Pauline passages are :

1. "And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose (toij kata proqesin klhtoij ousin). For whom he foreknew (proegnw) he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren, (prowrisen summorfouj thj eikonoj tou uiou autoueij to einai auton prwtotokon en polloij adelfoij) and whom he foreordained, them he also called : and whom he called, them he also justified : and whom he justified, them he also glorified." Romans 8:28-30.

2. " But we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory (hn prowrisen o qeoj pro twn aiwvwn eij doxan hmwn) : which none of the rulers of this world knoweth : for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." 1 Corinthians 2:7; 1 Corinthians 2:8.

3. " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ : even as he chose us (exelexato) in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love : having foreordained us (proorisaj hmaj)unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace (eij epainon dozhjthj caritj autou)."Ephesians 1:3-6. And again in the eleventh verse : " In whom also we were made a heritage (eklhrwqhmen), having been foreordained according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will ; to the end that we should be unto the praise of his glory (eij epainon doxhj autou)" The passage in the Acts in which foreordination is spoken of is :

"For of a truth in this city against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel (h ceir sou kai h boulh) foreordained to come to pass." Acts 4:27; Acts 4:28.

It is to be noticed that in the three Pauline passages there is nothing at all harsh about the thought of foreordination, but that on the contrary it is one of love unto glory. What is implied in the mention of ’ glory ’ or ’ glorifying ’ in all the three passages will be considered later on. In the passage from the Acts, while there is no foreordination of any one to glory spoken of, the foreordination is not one to doom or destruction. It is a foreordination of the sufferings of Christ, who is elsewhere spoken of as " the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world [Re5:13:8.] (apo katabolhj kosmou)." Nor is there in the notion of the divine purpose (proqesij) which is described as being according to election (eklogh) any thought anywhere of doom. If there is ’ election ’ it is election to grace and favour, election to shew forth the divine glory and to bring into the kosmoj the divine character. For the kosmoj unspiritualised manifests the divine wisdom but not the divine character of holiness seen to be synonymous with love. That is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, and what we call the dispensation of the Holy Spirit has for its end the forming of Christ in the sons of men, in a great world-wide society the Church of the living God, the Body of Christ. To this subject a separate chapter must be devoted. But we must now turn our attention to what seem the sterner aspects of God’s ways. The purpose of God according to election, exemplified in the preference of the younger son Jacob to the elder Esau, suggests the question which St. Paul asks, in order to answer it : "Is there then unrighteousness with God?" God forbid. (Dismiss the thought and try to understand the divine ways of infinite love and wisdom.) "For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that hath mercy (tou elewntoj qeou). For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might shew in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth (ara oun on qelei eleei on de qelei sklhrunei)." [Romans 9:15-18.] This seems a hard saying, but its apparent hardness arises from man’s inability to get hold of the right notion of the divine will, the exercise of which is set forth in the word qelei. There is nothing arbitrary in the divine will. All is according to law, having its root in the divine character of infinite love and holiness. I fear I repeat myself. But this seems to me to be the key to the whole mystery.

We are too ready to say, reading our own arbitrariness into revelations of the divine will : " Why doth he still find fault? For who withstandeth his will?" " Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus? Or hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour? What if God willing (qelwn) to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction : and that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared unto glory [we note the continued references to ’ glory ’] even us, whom he also called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles." But it will be said that we cannot help asking, Why has God made us thus? God has put into our hearts a sense of "justice," which we cannot eradicate, nor would we wish to. But is not the difficulty re- moved when we remember that the kosmoj is the work of God’s wisdom and that out of it, according to His laws and patient working, the Divine Spirit is bringing forth the divine glory?

We have seen how frequently this word ’ glory ’ occurs in the passages that have been quoted. What is intended by it? We have got into the way of speak- ing of doing things " to the glory of God," which is I suppose an equivalent expression for a recognition on our part of the Divine Perfection and of the demands it makes upon us. I take it that this is what is meant by glorifying God. The " glory of God " in Scripture is the display of God Himself ; at one time it was conceived of as manifested in bright light, but this notion is primitive, and God’s use of the notion in the early training of Israel was, as we can see, a condescension to the imperfect ideas of the time. If we want to understand the New Testament notion of ’ glory ’ we must lay hold of what St. John meant when in the introduction to his gospel he wrote : " And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father full of grace and truth." The divine glory is the glory of character, that perfect character of holiness and love, the character of Him who has not one thought for Himself.

There is not so far as I can see any trace in the New Testament of the idea that the creation exists for God’s pleasure. The words of the song of the twenty elders in Rev. iv. which are in the Authorised Version rendered " Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created," are thus made not to give their true meaning. The word here translated ’ pleasure ’ is qelhma, and the song should run as in the Revised Version : " Worthy art thou our Lord and our God to receive the glory and the honour and the power : for thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they are and were created." God’s will is one of absolute love according to His character ; so St. Paul in Ephesians 1:5 speaks, as we have seen, of the " good pleasure of his will (thn eudokian tou qelhmatoj autou)." " Fear not, little flock," said Christ to His little band of disciples, "it is your Father’s good pleasure (eudokhsen) to give you the kingdom." The good pleasure of God’s will is to impart Himself, His glory, His character.

What has here been said will help us to understand the appropriateness of St. Paul’s mention of ’ glorifying ’ in Romans 8:30 : " Whom he foreordained, them he also called : and whom he called them he also justified (edikaiwsen): and whom he justified them he also glorified (edoxasen)." Foreordained, called, justified, glorified ; we have here an orderly sequence of thought the great purpose from all eternity, the manner of its fulfilment in time, the end of it the manifestation of the divine life in and before the sons of men. From the first God sees men, if we may say so, as having become what His will is that they should be; when then He calls them, He justifies them, does not impute sin to them, forgives them. It has been said that nature knows no forgiveness. It is the miracle, the elementary principle of grace. But the ’ forgiveness of sins ’ can have no proper meaning at all unless it includes a getting free from, an abandonment of sin, the entire renewal of the cosmic until it becomes in Scripture language " a new creation " (kainh ktisij). [GaLeviticus 6:15.] So long as ’ being glorified ’ is looked upon as a being received into the divine presence, without regard being had to the character of that presence, so long will wrong notions of getting to heaven by escaping hell find a place in men’s minds. These notions are radically wrong ; they are of the cosmic and not of the spiritual. That the fear of hell has had an important part to play in the divine economy for educating men out of the cosmic state, need not be denied. But there is need to-day, in order to satisfy the demands of educated moral reason, of a higher and nobler view of the destiny of creation. Unless the faith of Christ can meet that demand, men will say, and say truly, that it has done good things in the past, but that it is now played out.

Played out ! We are only now beginning to enter into the grandeur of creation and its glorious destiny ; and I believe that we shall come to see that the whole cosmic process is one vast purgatory of infinite love, by which out of the selfish and self-asserting God is bringing out a glorious display of Himself and His character in men.

" The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so but ourselves also which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body." [Romans 8:22; Romans 8:23.]

Such was St. Paul’s hope, and in a fuller sense it may be ours too ; and ours too may be and indeed must be, if these things are true, those words of the same Apostle : " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out ! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen." [Romans 11:33-36.]

What is needed to-day is the union of the Johannine conception of the essential character of God with the Pauline notion of the grandeur of the divine economy. Let these be interpreted by the now proved theory of evolution, which science has revealed to us, and we have a Gospel to change the world.

It is St. Paul who said that God willeth (qelei) all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. The truth must be a saving truth, with power to bring men out of themselves. Such power the truth of God has.