Revelation 22

5. No night there.** In the eternal summer there is nothing that is doomed to die. All things live unfadingly that breathe in unbroken communion the breath of life; and now for these immortal ones, as to the Lord himself, a thousand years are as one day, but a day to which there comes no night. The whole history of the kingdom of nature, of humanity, of the kingdom of God, is an eternal alternation of light and shade. The earthly Jerusalem, moreover, expired in clouds and darkness; but behold, the heavenly city bathes itself in eternal sunbeams, and never does the approach of evening dim the joy of its inhabitants. Van O.

What need now for the lighting up of the golden candlesticks, or for the radiance of the stars which Christ now holds in his right hand, when the darkness of the night is past, and the Sun of Righteousness himself is shining? What need now for temples, for ministrations, or for intercessions, for the lessons of sages or prophets, for the sweet psalms first struck on David’s lyre, or for the magnificent visions of men who spoke even as they were moved by the Holy Ghost? What need of these when Christ himself is there, the end of the law, the sum of the gospel, the desire of saints, the glory of heaven, whom all the hosts of the unfallen and the redeemed everlastingly worship and adore? I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it; and where these are there is the shining of an everlasting light, and the spreading of a perennial feast; there the green pastures that never wither and the quiet waters that never fail; and there the strains of golden harps blending with glad voices in the melodies of the new and everlasting song. J. A. W.

Oh, the safety, oh, the comfort, oh, the repose and the satisfaction of being for ever with the Lord, in whose blood we have already washed our robes! Then to be fed by him, then to be led by him, will be indeed the consummation of the joy of heaven. To be with him, as one cared for upon earth, sought out, rescued, emancipated, sanctified; as one carried safely through life’s dangers, soothed under life’s sorrows, supported through life’s trying and painful end; to be with him at last, as never before, face to face, and yet without ceasing to be with him heart to heart and spirit to spirit; to be always with him, and for ever; to do everything, not only for him, but in his presence, under his eye, and beneath his smile; this will be beyond mere safety, beyond mere comfort, beyond mere service, however constant and perfect; this will be a relation into which no human love ever is admitted; this will be a community of life and soul beyond the nearest and dearest of earth’s friendships; this will be the ideal to which human sympathy pointed, this the goal of which human love was but the starting-point. V.

6. AND he said unto me, These sayings are faithful and true: and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants the things which must shortly be done. 7 Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this 8 book. And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I 9 fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things. Then 10 saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the 11 prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God. And he saith 12 unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand. He 13 that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he 14 that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And, 15 behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his 16 work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. 17 Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, 18 and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and 19 whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. I 20 Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root 21 and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And 18 whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, 19 God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. 20 He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. Even so, come, Lord 21 Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

The Spirit and the bride say, Come. This remarkable gospel of invitation has a peculiar significance as a message of Jesus back to the sinners of earth, for whom “he endured the cross, despising the shame.” It comes from the throne of all power to which sixty years before he had ascended, carrying the humanity with him, and after his finished sacrifice and completed scheme of redemption had been proclaimed by his inspired apostles to the utmost limits of the known world. In full view of the scheme completed by the offering of the sacrifice once for all, of the outpouring of his Spirit, of the complete opening of the new and last era of redemption, of the dispensation of the Spirit, of the historic faith, now substituting facts actual for the types and symbols of prophecy, and of the Church of one nation, under the old covenant with Abraham, become the Church of all nations under the new covenant, he utters this last gospel as the climax of all the gospels which God had revealed through the prophets, through his Incarnate Son, and through the apostles. This, then, is the gospel according to Jesus ascended. It is the peculiar type of that gospel which, without symbol or altar or limit of nation, is to be preached till his second coming. So, also, it is significant as the last paragraph of the last chapter of the last book of God’s revealed word. For immediately upon its utterance and record, that great seal—written all over with curses against him who shall by a single word add to or subtract from the revelation here finished—closes up finally the com- munications from heaven. But Jesus has one more last word to say. In every conceivable form of as- surance and invitation he had called sinners through all the divers manner of his revelations before, yet still his love seems to stay the hand that is putting on the seal, that it may first insert one more invitation and assurance, lest some poor, dark-minded sinner should still despond and despair. “Stay,” the ascended Jesus seems to say: “Put not on the cursing seal, till there first be put in one more gospel assurance and invitation. And make it wide as human thought can possibly conceive of it; plain as human language can possibly utter it; and cordial as the heart of God alone can give it. Assure them from me, David’s Creator, and yet, as the offspring of David, their brother, partaker of flesh and blood; assure them from me, the Day-star of all their longings, now risen and enthroned in the heaven, that the fountain of life is now thrown wide open, and its streams are gushing forth in all their infinite fullness, with every barrier of approach to it absolutely taken away. Tell them that not only have they leave to come, but every lov- ing voice in heaven and earth pleads and urges them to come. My spirit whispers to the depths of their spirits, saying, ‘Come.’ My bride, the Church, in all her divinely appointed ordinances cries, ‘Come!’ ‘Come.’ Nay, more, lest it be in highways and hedges where there should be no Church ordinances to reach any one, every sinner that heareth my voice himself is authorized to say to any other sinner, ‘Come.’ Nay, more, lest there should be no such sinner to invite him, tell any soul that feels the thirst not to stand on ceremony, but, self-invited, ‘Come.’ Nay, more still, lest now some poor, sin-darkened soul should stumble at the word ‘athirst,’ and doubt if his thirst is real or great enough, say absolutely, ‘Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.’ I will be the Saviour of any that will have me for a Saviour. Only let him cry in his despair, ‘O Lamb of God I come—just as I am.’” S. R.

6-21. This epilogue to the book corresponds to its brief prologue. It enforces the authority of the book, and emphasizes the hope of the Lord’s com- ing. The order of speech in it seems to be this:

The angel, v. 6. The Lord, v. 7. The seer, v. 8 “ vs. 9-11. “ vs. 12-20. “ vs. 20, 21.

The angel of chapter 1 : 1 dwells on the faithful- ness and truth of the revelation. The Lord says, “Behold I come quickly,” and pronounces a blessing on him who keeps the sayings of this book. The seer adds his testimony, “It was I, John, who heard and saw these things.” Again the angel announces the imminence of the things revealed, and draws a deep line between the righteous and the wicked. The Lord repeats the intimation of his coming; proclaims himself the first and the last; defines who they are that will be admitted into the holy city, and who will be shut out; warns against all tampering with “the words of the book of this prophecy”; and then, for the third time, declares, “Yes, I come quickly.” The seer replies with the grand and simple prayer, “Amen. Yes, come, Lord Jesus!”

This chapter is a noble conclusion of the book, and the book a noble conclusion of the Bible. The last sweet note of a piece of music dwells in the listener’s ear. Even though in a lengthened piece there may have been many varieties of musical expression, and, among these, wild piercing strains and pealing tumults of sound, the composer and performer take care to produce the last notes round and soft, to fill, soothe, and satisfy the sense. And may not this book of prophecy be likened to a mighty oratorio in which there is one all-prevailing, oft-recurring air, “Behold! the Lord cometh”? There is a splendid burst of sound, then a sustained, difficult passage, then a gentle or a pensive melody; now a solemn recitative and then a high strain and grand chorus of sublimity, in which, from the open heavens, myriads of voices join. But, as this magnificent composition draws to a close, the notes are loving, simple, and sweet. After ecstasies that move every power of the imagination and every feeling of the heart, all is ended in a prayer that Christ would come, and a kindly benediction of all saints. So terminates, not this book only, but the Bible, the complete book of God, and therefore the book of love. The words fall with soothing cadence, and linger with us when more brilliant passages are lost: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with the saints.” D. F.

7. The prophet Malachi closes the canon of the Old Testament by a solemn appeal “to the law of Moses, and to the statutes and judgments:” “Remember them” (Mal. 4 : 4). John closes the four Gospels with a similar reference (John 20 : 31). Paul closes his Epistles with a testimony to the sufficiency and inspiration of Holy Scripture (2 Tim. 3 : 14-17). Peter in like manner closes his Epistles with similar exhortation, and with a warning against perversion of Scripture. Jude also closes the Catholic Epistles with a memento to his readers: “Remember ye the words spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 17). Lastly, John closes the Apocalypse with a promise of blessing to those who keep its sayings, and a curse on those who take from it or add to it. W.

We must all feel that the piety of our day incloses itself too much within the limits of individual life. That I should be pardoned, saved, and sanctified; that I should serve before God and be accepted in my service; that I should die in peace and rest in Christ; that I should have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his coming—these are worthy desires for an immortal being, and for these the gospel provides. But it provides for more than these; making me the member of a kingdom of Christ, and the citizen of a city of God. There ought surely to be a consciousness within me corresponding to that position; there ought to be affections which will associate me in spirit with that larger history, in which my own is included, and which will make me long that the kingdom of Christ should come and the city of God be manifested. The blessedness ascribed to him that reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy can belong only to those who read it and hear it thus. These are soberly truthful words, whose thought is far too often overlooked. T. D. B.—We ought to receive and to ponder God’s whole revelation; not its gentler and softer parts only, but those which are sadder and sterner too; not those verses or chapters only which tell of unconditional forgiveness and illimitable mercy, but those also which ring the knell of sin and disclose to an incredulous world the future punishment of the wicked. It is not because it is a joyful message, but because it is God’s message, that the revelation is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to him who loves God. It is the being spoken to at all by him which is the joy and the glory. It is the being in communication at all with the source of light, with the fountain-head of truth; it is the being fed out of the heavenly store, and dealt with as one cared for by him who is life and love; it is this which the faithful servant, it is this which the reverent son regards as above price, and accepts in every part with adoring gratitude. V.

11. It is not that there are not many mansions in heaven; it is not that men or angels prevent their entrance; it is not that the election or reprobation of God bars the door against them; it is not that means, many and great, are not employed to introduce them into the presence of the Lord; but it is because men are unholy that they do not enter in. The unholy are, in the eternal state, unholy still; and hence they never see the Lord. They continue to sin, and they reap the wages of sin, which is death. R. T.—“He that believeth not,” saith Christ, “is condemned already, and the wrath of God abideth on him.” On the other hand, “He that believeth hath everlasting life”; the estate of heaven is already begun in his soul. Every man carries within him here the germs of his heaven or hell. The grace of God nurtures the one, keeping it alive to the day of deliverance; the mercy of God restrains the other from bursting forth until the day of doom. The gospel theory leaves really no place for the cavils against the injustice of punishing a man eternally for the sin of a few days on earth. For, according to this theory, the sinner, remaining unchanged by the grace of God, and without the new life, goes on into eternity just as he is, to sin on, and therefore to suffer on for ever. S. R.—The general impression of the Bible, as a whole, is that of two classes of people—the godly and the wicked; of a God, boundless in his love, mercy, and patience toward all; offering pardon to all, without respect of persons or conditions; treating with tender fatherliness all who accept his overtures, and with righteous retribution all who finally reject them; of two destinations corresponding to each sort of character, popularly known as heaven and hell—it is a matter of indifference by what names these localities are known, for character is the essential thing—that these two states are conscious states of being; the wicked know themselves as punished and miserable for cause—the righteous know themselves as blessed for cause; and that these states are then final and eternal. With this general impression that the Bible leaves correspond the last chapters of Revelation and the finality which sounds out with dreadful emphasis: “The time is at hand. He that is unjust let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous let him be righteous still; and he that is holy let him be holy still.” With this aspect of finality harmonizes the intense earnestness of the Saviour and the apostles in pressing upon men the claims of God, and urging their acceptance this day, this hour, as if it were now or never. Also the clearly revealed fact that, after the judgment, the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom sinful men have access to God, will give up his mediatorial office—an emphatic intimation that the work of redemption is finished. Haydn.

13. The one solemn proclamation begins in the first and ends in the last chapter, as though it were the key-note of the entire: “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last!” marking the sameness of his eternal being and agency through the long succession of revolutions the book records, and, in this brief expression of the divine omnipotence of the Messiah, drawing, as it were, the moral of it all. W. A. B.

17. The tone of this verse, considered in view of its place amid the scenes of this book, is wonderfully rich and impressive. Think of the real author’s standpoint and of the grand objects that lie within his range and ours. The “river of the water of life” is flowing before the eye; the joys of the redeemed have come down in their voices of song and alleluia of praise and triumph. Over against these there have been visions of the lost, the smoke of their torment arising for ever and ever; and, not least, we have the grand issue of the great moral conflict of earth—victory for Zion and magnificent success to the gospel in subduing the world to Jesus—all significant of the grand truth that “the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head,” and Satan be not only foiled but infinitely cursed for his antagonism to God and goodness, and all his followers with him. And now, all these sublime realities standing embodied before us in speaking symbols, the voice from heaven is heard, “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely!” Provided for all; offered to all; welcome to all; none shall fail but those who dash the brimming cup from their own lips; none but those who hate Jesus and love death! H. C.

THE RIVER OF LIFE WILL ROLL ON FOR EVER. Its pure waters, clear as crystal, shall for ever gladden and refresh the inhabitants of heaven. But on the banks of that river you may never recline. Far away from that pure stream—far away from all the bliss of heaven—far away from the redeemed and happy throng assembled there, may be your eternal abode, where never again shall you hear the invitation, “Whosoever will, let him come and take the water of life freely.” To-day, all the universe invites you. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit say, “Come.” The Church on earth and the Church redeemed say, “Come.” The friend that has gone to the skies and the friend on earth say, “Come.” The tender father; the affectionate mother; the pastor; the brother; the sister—all say, “Come.” Your own nature; your conviction of the truth; your sense of sin; your dread of death; your inextinguishable desire of immortality; your conviction that “this world can never give the bliss for which you sigh”—all say, “Come.” To-morrow, how changed may be the scene! Death’s cold fingers may have felt after the strings of life, and chilled them, and your soul may be beyond hope and heaven. Not a voice from all the universe will EVER say to you again, “Come, take the water of life freely.” A. B.—The next word which we shall hear from the world’s Redeemer will decide and divulge what treatment we have bestowed on his great salvation. Which shall it be, COME, or DEPART? What an epitaph that would be for a ruined soul for which Christ died, “Ye would not come unto me, that you might have life!” W. A.

The wide commission of Christ at the very close of Revelation, “Let him that heareth say, Come!” was successfully carried out in the earliest days of Christianity. All who learned the story of the cross felt and obeyed the impulse to tell it. And this great lay commission abides in full force to-day. It is addressed to every disciple. B.—Man, the moment he is made a Christian, becomes a missionary; the unction of the saint is thus expended in the duties and sacrifices of the servant. And it is the feature, the grand, ennobling feature, of the gospel, that he who drinks deepest of its living water thirsts most to diffuse it. Cumming.

18,19. The Bible as an inspired record is an infallible, and it is the final, authority for faith and life. Its inspiration involves its infallibility. Interpreted, as all works must be, by its real spirit, it gives us truth without error. Light and life come from the ministry of the word. Its hallowed sayings are our stay, when all other support fails; our rock amid the billows; the songs of our pilgrimage; the pledge of our final rest. Such implicit faith may be stigmatized as bibliolatry; but where else can we go to find the words of eternal life? Bibliolatry clings to the letter; spirituality in the letter finds the spirit, and dares not disown the letter which guided to the spirit. For the enduring wants of the soul, for the problems of sin, salvation and eternity, we here find an unwavering authority, and rest in faith and joy upon the last assurance of the highest testimony, Thus saith the Lord. And, as it is an infallible, so is it a final authority. No man may add unto, or take away from, the words of this book. “Here is the judge that ends the strife.” Like its divine author, it has full oft been called before human tribunals, been reviled, spit upon, yea buried, that it might rise again with new power and bless even its persecutors. Of controversy, as history testifies, it has ever been the arbiter; of opposing systems, the invariable conqueror: every scheme of men has become wan and shriveled at its touch. Beyond its revelations and its prophecies thought can not reach; it contains as well the oldest of records as the most living of prophecies. New assailants in the flush of self-consciousness call it antiquated, and its antiquity is as that of God himself; it is older than the stars and the earth, and awaits their dissolution, that all its revelations may be fulfilled. But it is also ever new, as well as ever old, the most progressive as it is the most conservative of influences, the counterpart of the wisdom of God: all literature has drawn deep and precious draughts from this unfailing fountain; its orient pearls are scattered through all lands; philosophy has there found the test of its errors and the lordliest of its truths; for four thousand years its words have been inspiration and life, comforting the downcast, and breaking the oppressor’s rod; pledging peace to the penitent, and opening to all the very gates of endless life; subduing with imperial might all other words, speaking in such tones of authority as you read in no other books; and in the very name of the Lord proclaiming a kingdom, which has been ever advancing yet never subdued; and thus like a living power has it been doing a living and abiding work among the children of men, in every clime, in every language, and now wider than ever before are its words rehearsed—its lines have gone out through all the earth and its words to the end of the world. H. B. S.

20. That disciple who had been favored in a peculiar degree with the gift of intuition and profound contemplation; who was admitted to the special confidence of the Head of the Church; and who, as the patriarch of the apostolic Church, experienced most of its conflicts and sufferings, its victories and hopes—that disciple was best fitted of all the apostles to be the organ of these revelations of the future and the final completion of the Church, and to seal her sacred records. The mystic John was by his sanctified natural gifts, as well as by his position and experience, predestinated, so to speak, to unveil the deep foundations of the Church’s life and the ultimate issue of her history; so that in the Apocalypse the apostle simply placed the majestic dome upon the wonderful structure of his gospel, with the golden inscription of holy longing: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” P. S.

“Come, Lord Jesus,” is the epitome of all the prayers that the believer is called upon to offer. It is a prayer for the overthrow of Satan’s kingdom; for the extinction of sorrows, the cessation of pain, the wiping away of tears; for the descent of the New Jerusalem; for the sanctification and perfection of saints; for the creating anew of all things; in a word, for the new heaven and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Let this prayer never die on our lips while we have breath: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.” G. B.

Christ the Center of Christian Theology

THE central idea of Christianity, as a distinct system, can only be found in him of whom prophets did testify, evangelists write, and apostles preach; whose life was the crowning glory of humanity, as his death was its redemption; and from whose death and from whose life influences and blessings have streamed forth, constant and inestimable; in him, whose nature, more wonderful than any other, unites the extremes of humanity and divinity; whose work, more glorious and needed than any other, reconciles heaven to earth and earth to heaven; and whose dominion is as intimate in its efficiency as it is eminent in its claims and beneficent in its results. He is the center of God’s revelation and of man’s redemption; of Christian doctrine and of Christian history, of conflicting sects, and of each believer’s faith, yea, of the very history of this our earth, Jesus Christ is the full, the radiant, the only center—fitted to be such because he is the God-man and the Redeemer; Christ—Christ, he is the center of the Christian system, and the doctrine respecting Christ is the heart of Christian theology.

And with that glorious Person all the other truths of our faith are inherently connected. The distinct personality of Christ is the starting point from which to infer the reality of the distinctions in the Godhead; atonement and justification center in him; our very spiritual life is hid with Christ in God; if we believe in him we are born of God; we are to be changed into the image of Christ; the sacraments of the Church testify of him until he come. And a theology which finds its center in such a being, can not be a barren, abstract system; but it gives us a direct and personal object for our faith and love. Thus, and thus only, does Christian theology express the Christian faith in its perfect form.

Let us come to have a deeper sense of the grand realities of our faith. To come to these is our safety, our defense. To see and feel and know what Christianity really is in its inward and distinctive character; to study those central truths which lie at its foundation; here is our strength. Let us come unto Jesus. When Christ is to us more than a doctrine, and the atonement more than a plan; when the Incarnation assumes as high a place in revealed, as creation does in natural theology; when the Trinity is viewed not as a formula, but as a vital truth, underlying and interwoven with the whole Christian system; when from this foundation the whole edifice rises up majestically, grand in its proportions, sublime in its aims, filled with God in all its parts; when we feel its inherent force streaming out from its living centers; then, then are we saved from those extreme tendencies which are the most significant and alarming sign of our times; then, then are we elevated above those lesser controversies which have narrowed our minds and divided our hearts. Here also we have a real inward experience as well as an objective reality; for the best and fullest inward experience is that which centers in Christ; and the center of the experience is then identical with the center of the divine revelation.

Never are we so far from having any abstract ethical or metaphysical principles exercise an undue influence; never are we so far from a too fond reliance on self and never is self so full and satisfied; never are we in a better position for judging all our controversies with a righteous judgment, or nearer to the highest Christian union; never do the divine decrees shine in so mild a luster, so benign with grace, so solemn and severe in justice; never can we be more wisely delivered from the material attractions of an outward rite, or from the ideal seductions of a pantheistic system; never is doctrine so full of life, and life so richly expressed in doctrine; never does systematic theology so perfectly present the full substance of the Christian faith in a truly scientific form; and never are philosophy and faith so joined in hymeneal bonds, where they may “exult in over-measure,” as when Christ is set forth as the living center of all faith and of all theology, in whom the whole body is fitly joined together, compacted by that which every joint supplieth.

For, to Christ, as Mediator, all parts of theology equally refer. He is both God and man, and also the Redeemer. The logical antecedents of his mediation are, therefore, the doctrine respecting God, the doctrine respecting man, the fall and consequent need of redemption, as also that triune constitution of the Godhead, which alone, so far as we can conceive, makes redemption by an Incarnation to be possible. Thus we have the first division of the theological system, the antecedents of redemption, which is also first in both the logical and historical order. Its second and central portion can only be found in the person and work of Christ, his one Person uniting humanity with divinity, in the integrity of both natures, adapting him to his one superhuman work, as our prophet, priest, and king, making such satisfaction for sin that God can be just and justify every one that believeth; and this second division of the system follows the first in both the logical and historical order, giving the peculiar office of the second person of the Godhead, the purchase of redemption, the Christology of theology. And in like manner the same mediatorial idea passes over into the third and last division of the system which treats, in proper logical and historical order, of the application of the redemption that is in Christ, to the individual, to the Church, and to the history and final supremacy of the kingdom of God both in time and eternity. Union with Christ through the Holy Spirit is here the dominant fact; his union with the individual, whence justification, regeneration, and sanctification, for our life is hid with Christ in God; his union with the Church, which is his body, here, as Gerhard says, “like Christ subjected to the cross that it may in the future life with him be glorified.”

And this scheme of divine realities, and not of mere abstract doctrine, is ultimately to be referred to the counsel of him, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. It gives us the true end of God in creation, which can only be, in any profound philosophical, not to say theological aspect, the making the essential glory of the triune God to be extant and manifest in space and time, in a system which subordinates happiness to holiness and man to God.

In redemption prepared, purchased, and applied, we have the whole of Christian theology. H. B. Smith.

The Priesthood of Christ.

WHILE the Scriptures insist with peculiar emphasis upon the mediation of Christ, and represent the functions which are discharged in it as essential to salvation, it is not sufficiently considered that these functions themselves are not necessarily sacerdotal—that they might have been discharged by one who was not a priest in the common acceptance of the term. All that seems to be indispensable to salvation is the obedience of a substitute voluntarily assuming our guilt and able to endure the curse of the law. The Epistle to the Romans discusses the principles of the gospel in their general relations to the moral government of God, and demonstrates, as well as asserts upon authority, the absolute necessity of legal substitution in order to life. But if the disclosures of revelation stopped here, we might look upon the death of the Redeemer as the result simply of the operation of justice—a death inflicted by the law, exclusively penal in its nature and relations, exacted of him in the same sense in which it would otherwise have been exacted of the sinner. We might regard pardon as resulting from faith in that death as a satisfaction to justice, and access to God as immediate and direct in consequence of this historical fact as a past reality. The principles here discussed would resolve the security of our state into the covenant faithfulness of God without the least insight into the manner in which it is actually made available to the saints. All that we could say would be that our debt has been paid, that justice no longer demands our lives, that God has promised in consequence of the Redeemer’s death to receive us into favor, and upon the ground of that death we might approach him ourselves and sue for mercy. This is all that could be certainly collected from the general discussion of this Epistle. But when we turn to the Epistle to the Hebrews we find indeed a substitute, and the substitute demanded by the Epistle to the Romans, but that substitute is embodied in a priest; we find a death, a penal death, a death which is commensurate with the curse of the law, but it is a death which is also a sacrifice—at once the result of the operation of justice and of a free-will offering to God. We find justification and pardon resolved ultimately into the obedience and death of Christ as past historical facts, but immediately due to relations sustained to him as a living person and Redeemer; and access to God ascribed, not so much to faith in his past achievements as to his present appearance for us in the holiest of all; and the covenant faithfulness of God is seen to be maintained through the agency of him who ever liveth to make intercessions for us.

The Epistle to the Hebrews may be regarded as a detailed account of the method in which the great law of substitution has been actually applied in the redemption of our race. While that to the Romans shows what must needs be done in order to our salvation, the Epistle to the Hebrews shows how it has been done; and where the arrangements have gone beyond the strict requisitions of necessity, they are demonstrated to be the dictates at once of mercy and wisdom. Priesthood is the perfection of mediation. There is not a single circumstance which distinguishes a priest from a general substitute which is not significant, a proof of goodness, a fresh illustration of the adaptation of redemption to the condition of its objects; not a single circumstance which distinguishes a sacrifice from the ordinary forms of death that does not enhance the preciousness of the Saviour’s work. The full effect of this truth is lost upon most Christian minds through inattention to the distinctions in question. They admire the goodness and adore the wisdom of God in providing a substitute for the guilty, able to reconcile the conflicting claims of justice and of grace; but apart from the adaptation of his person to the mighty work they see nothing upon which they are accustomed to dwell as peculiarly indicative of the divine goodness. They overlook the adaptation of his office; they forget that the manner in which he has accomplished the work is as glorious as the matter—the how as sublime as the what. The work as done, the person by whom, exhaust their topics of admiration and of praise, and they fail to enter into those other motives of faith, devotion and thanksgiving, which are derived from the contemplation of the office in its essential and distinguishing features. They use the terms Priest and High Priest, and have a habitual reference to the appearance of the Saviour in the presence of God; but their High Priest is, after all, but little more than an all-sufficient sponsor, and his intercessions are regarded rather as acts of royalty than sacerdotal pleas. It is amazing how little and seldom we enter into those views of the death of the Redeemer which spring from the consideration of it as a real and proper sacrifice—how little we discriminate betwixt a legal representative and a consecrated priest, betwixt Christ glorious in his kingdom and equally glorious in the holiest of all, betwixt even his triumphant ascension as a King and his passage as intercessor, not without blood, into the presence of God. As these distinctions are evidently important, and the benefits of that peculiar form of mediation to which the Saviour was appointed are clearly explained by the apostle, it may be well to show how much we have gained and how pre-eminently God is glorified by this whole arrangement.

A priest is a solemn minister of religion—the channel through which all worship is conducted—the organ of all communications betwixt God and the people. This august agency none can assume without the authority of God. So awful and momentous is this office, which really collects the prayers and praises and thanksgivings of a world into a single person, which centers the hopes of mankind upon the conduct of a single individual throughout all ages—so tremendous is this responsibility and so sublime this honor, that it would be the climax of presumption on the part of any one to propose that it should be conceded to him. It belongs to God, and to God alone, to designate a priest. The idea of a mediatorial worship conducted by a permanent and glorious minister, and so conducted as to strengthen the ties of personal obligation, is an idea which could only originate in the mind of the Deity; and there was an evident fitness and propriety in the solemnity and grandeur attached to the appointment of Jesus to this office when he was consecrated not without an oath. A scheme which contemplates an arrangement of this sort bears stamped upon it the strongest impress of grace. It sprang from the bosom of God; it was mercy, which conceived the purpose of salvation; mercy, which accepted the substitute; and mercy upon mercy, the exuberance of grace, which made that substitute a priest.

The very nature of the priesthood demands that the spirit of sublime devotion to God and heroic self-sacrifice to man, which first secured his consent to the enterprise, should animate him at every step in his history, and sanctify every function of his office. He is not to be the passive recipient of ill. As a priest he must act—there are things to be done even in the endurance of the curse—and his whole heart must burn with piety and compassion while he bears the sins of the world in his own body on the tree. The lofty and godlike motives which induced the Redeemer, in the counsels of eternity, before the morning stars had yet sung together or the sons of God shouted for joy, to become the Lamb to be slain, must have continued to operate with undiminished intensity, or the prerogatives and glory of his office had been forfeited. The priestly spirit must have continued to dwell and to reign in his heart, or the priestly robes would have been taken from his shoulders. He must have been as free, as cordial, as delighted, when he uttered the cry of lamentation and woe upon the cross, which shook the earth and startled the dead, as when at the glorious suggestion of the scheme he uttered the language, Lo, I come. As the work of a priest, it is stamped upon the whole process of redemption that the substitute gave his consent; that his self-devotion was spontaneous and free—the execution of a settled purpose to which he was impelled by no constraining influence of the divine will, by no transitory fervors of enthusiasm, no martyr impulse of the moment; that he delighted in the work—it was his meat and drink; he felt it to be an honor and not a hardship, its successful achievement a crown of glory, and not a triumph over cruelty. This single consideration, that it displays so conspicuously the freeness of the Saviour’s mediation, is itself a sufficient vindication of the wisdom and fitness of a priesthood. It shows that our felicity has not been purchased at the expense of the rights of another; and, though there was an immense cost of suffering and of blood, it was never for a moment begrudged. The joy of the Mediator in the work, therefore, and the vindication of God from all suspicion of cruelty, injustice, or severity, is complete and triumphant when the Saviour’s death is made a sacrifice—a free-will offering to God.

Furthermore, when Jesus is seen to be a priest, and his death a sacrifice, the whole transaction becomes an august and glorious act of worship. And there is something, to our minds, inexpressibly sublime when we contemplate the scheme of redemption as accomplished by an act of worship—when we look upon Jesus not as a passive recipient of woes, the unresisting victim of law, but as a minister of religion, conducting its services in the presence of angels and men, upon an emergency which seemed to cover the earth with darkness. Our world becomes the outer court of the sanctuary, where a sacrifice is to be offered in which the Priest and the Victim are alike the wonder of the universe—in which the worship which is rendered leaves it doubtful whether the Deity is more glorious in his justice or his grace. In this aspect the satisfaction of Jesus is not merely the ground upon which others are at liberty to approach and adore the divine perfections; it is itself a prayer uttered by the lips of one whose deeds were words—a hymn of praise chanted by him whose songs were the inspiration of holiness and truth. Every proud imagination is rebuked, every insinuation against the character of God is felt to be a shame to us, every disposition to cavil or condemn is consigned to infamy, when we remember that the whole work of Jesus was a solemn service of religion, as well that by which he descended into the grave as that by which he passed through the heavens into the holiest of all. He was a priest in his death, a priest in his resurrection, a priest in his ascension. He worshiped God in laying his life upon the altar, he worshiped him in taking it again, and it was an act of worship by which he entered with his blood into the very presence of the highest to intercede for the saints. It was religion in Jesus to die, to rise, to reign, as it is religion in us to believe in these great events of his history.

Here, then, is an incalculable advantage of priesthood. While it makes the passion of the Redeemer a full and perfect satisfaction of divine justice, and so lays an adequate foundation of pardon, it vindicates the divine glory in every step of the proceeding by making every step an act of adoration and praise. It makes the Saviour adore the Father in his death, makes that very death an offering of praise, redemption itself a mighty prayer, and throws the sanctities and solemnities of worship—and worship on the part of one who knew what was the proper ground of worship—around all the stages in the development of the economy of grace. This seems to us to be the very climax of wisdom. It was glorious to have provided a substitute who should be able to bear our sins in his own body upon the tree, to have devised a scheme by which the conflicting claims of mercy and justice should be adjusted and harmonized—by which God could be just and at the same time the justifier of those who believe in Jesus; but it was the very perfection of wisdom to have executed this scheme so that the intensest sufferings should have produced only a deeper impression of the divine glory and of the excellence and value of the divine law. Surely in this arrangement the law is magnified and made honorable.

Another immense advantage of a priesthood is that it quickens and stimulates the devotion of the Church by the assurance it inspires that all true worship, however imperfect or inadequate, shall infallibly be accepted and rewarded. There must be a mediator of prayer and praise, of all the exercises of religious worship, as well as a mediator to purchase our pardon. This is accomplished by a priesthood. There is no direct and immediate approach to God. We come before him only in the name of our priest, who attracts us by community of nature, and who presents all our worship for us before the eternal throne. Our prayers are not heard and received as ours, but as the prayers of Jesus; our praises are not accepted as ours, but as the praises of Jesus. The imperfection which attaches to our performances, our pollution and weakness and unbelief, stop with the High Priest; his intercession and atonement cover all defects, and we are faultless and complete in him. The prayer which reaches the ear of the Almighty is from him, and not from us, and must be as prevalent as his worth. Here is our confidence, not only that Jesus died, but that Jesus lives—that he is our intercessor in the heavenly sanctuary, and there presents, enforces, and sanctifies the religious worship of earth; here is our confidence that in the whole process of salvation God regards the Redeemer and not us, and deals out blessings according to his estimate of Christ; here is our confidence that if any man sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. What an encouragement to prayer and praise! And what thanks shall we render unto God for adapting the marvelous scheme of his grace with such consummate wisdom to the wants and weaknesses of men!

It deserves, finally, to be added that a mediation of priesthood is the form in which consolation is most effectually administered to the children of men. It is necessary to any substitute that he should be a kinsman of our race, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. But besides the possession of our nature free from the stain and impurities of sin, nothing more is required for the purposes of vicarious righteousness and penal expiation than the consent of the substitute to undertake the task. If he can die the death to which we are doomed, and is willing to suffer in our stead, he is a competent redeemer. But though this is all which is absolutely essential to a legal substitution, it is not all which the state and condition of men evince to be desirable. We want a redeemer with a brother’s heart as well as a brother’s nature. Though not indispensable to our safety, it is indispensable to our comfort that our substitute should be touched with a feeling of our infirmities, that he should be able to bear our sorrows and carry our griefs. Now this exquisite sympathy, which is one of the most powerful incentives to faith and love, is essential to a priest. Every high priest ordained for men must not only be a participant of their nature, but must have compassion on the ignorant and on them that are out of the way. He must enter with sympathetic tenderness into all their temptations and calamities, their fears and apprehensions, their cares and sorrows. He must be prepared to pity and encourage the weak, to comfort the weeper in the house of mourning, to wipe the widow’s tears, to hear the orphan’s cries, to lie down with the beggar upon his pallet of straw, and to watch with those to whom wearisome nights are appointed. He must be a friend in all those emergencies in which friendship is our richest boon. This qualification is found preeminently in Jesus. And those who have felt his presence in their trials can appreciate the priceless value of his sympathy. He has gone before us through every path of sorrow, and we can not utter a groan nor heave a sigh which does not go to his heart. His pity for the guilty is as tender as his sympathy with the saints. No language can express the intensity of his compassion for those who in ignorance and folly disregard the day of their merciful visitation, and are heaping up wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God. He has no pleasure in their death. The sublimest example of compassion which the world has ever beheld was furnished by the Saviour in that memorable prayer in which—when “the clouds of wrath from heaven and from earth, pregnant with materials which nothing but a divine hand could have collected, were about to discharge themselves on him in a deluge of agony and blood,” when insulted by men, abandoned by his friends, mocked by his enemies, jeered by devils and deserted by God, he was about to expire in solitude and darkness—he could still, for a moment in the plenitude of his pity forgetting these unspeakable calamities, sue for the forgiveness of the remorseless agents of his death. This was compassion like a God. And what an exquisite spectacle of tenderness was that when Jesus, on the cross, just before the consummation of the last event that should fulfill the predictions of ancient prophecy, consigned his mother to the care of the beloved disciple! Surely such a High Priest became us. In our waywardness and folly, in our sins and temptations, in our murmurs and impatience, we should alienate any other friend but him that sticketh closer than a brother. J. H. Thornwell.

Christ the Center and Solution of Human History.

An old Jewish proverb runs that “The secret of man is the secret of the Messiah.” Man knows what he is, and is to be, only as he knows the Son of God. In him the enigma of human destiny is resolved. And this is the testimony of history, as well as the pledge of revelation. For eighteen hundred years millions of living and believing hearts have hailed Jesus of Nazareth as the Head and Redeemer of the race, the incarnation of divinity. Ancient history converged to his cross; modern history has received from him its organizing law. In him human thought, too, has found the solution of the problem of human life, the disclosure of the divine theodicy, the reconciliation between God and man, the center of the whole drama of history, even to its consummation in a kingkingdom which shall know no sin, and have no end. The facts of Christ’s life, testimony, death, resurrection, ascension and regal dominion, are the substance of the faith of the Church; without them Christianity itself has no vital power or independent being.

This historic supremacy of Jesus is incontrovertible. It is as real as religious life and faith. Christ can no more be expelled from the course of history than the sun from the circle of the sky. Skepticism about Christ is also skepticism about history itself; unbelief in him is unbelief in the controlling ideas by which men have been inspired, and in the chief objects for which men have hitherto lived. And such is the mysterious fascination which still issues from his transcendent person, that even the incredulous are drawn to him against their very will. He has power over them. To take the veil from his form is dimly felt to be like taking the veil from the master of our fate, and reading the profoundest meaning of our earthly life. Here is the urn of destiny, and that urn holds no dead ashes. His power over men is still the power of a living personality. To every thoughtful mind, believing or unbelieving, he is the ideal of humanity, the Son of man, and, as no other, the very Son of God. The vehemence with which his claims are denied implies a covert apprehension that they may still be real. When faith is lost reverence is cherished. Not to bow before his matchless worth is to be faithless to humanity if not to divinity itself. His influence is the marvel of history. This, to say the least, is a wonderful spectacle, and puzzling to the skeptic. All the logic, the criticism, and the philosophy of naturalism, and of pantheism, can not suppress this spontaneous homage to the unrivaled spiritual excellence of him who is supernaturalism itself in the midst of human history. And the problem infidelity has to solve is this: How can the recorded facts, attesting his character and work, be explained, or explained away, and still leave room for reverence? Not in the miracles alone, but in the whole life of Jesus, supernaturalism has its stronghold. Here, and here alone, all is to be won, or all lost. If Christ’s whole life can be interpreted on the basis of naturalism, and he still remain the hero of humanity; if such faith in him can be retained while prophecy and miracle are annulled, then the battle of infidelity is substantially gained.

Naturalism must find Christ inexplicable and paradoxical. It can neither explain his nature, nor his acts, nor his words, nor his historic position and influence. But in the faith of the Church, the ideal and real are blended, the earlier and later words of Jesus are harmonized, his profoundest teachings made luminous, his mysterious death seems to be necessary to his divine office, while his resurrection and ascension complete his work and explain his historic triumphs. The universe is no longer, as in the theory of Renan, on its dark side, an “abyss,” and on its side of light the phantom life of transient human beings; but the infinite One and the finite world are united and reconciled in one complete system, whose center is found in the person and work of an incarnate Deity. Nothing in all literature and all philosophy equals this sublime and radiant idea, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is written in the open page of the divine oracles, it is impressed upon the soul of the believer, it is drawn out in the theologies of the Church, it is hymned in penitential and jubilant psalms, in its substantial lineaments it is omnipresent in the history of the world, it unites time with eternity, and it explains the controlling power of the Son of God in the annals of our race, whose highest destiny is to be found in coming to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

The Jesus of the Gospels, the Epistles, and of the Church, is human and divine, is king and priest in an eternal kingdom, is the Saviour of the world, is the lord of life. And this is the essence of supernaturalism. And naturalism must expel Christ from the heart and the Church, from the conscience and the life, before it can expel supernaturalism from human history. H. B. Smith.

Christianity—as History, as Truth, and as Life.

1. As HISTORY.—Christianity begins as history, the history of the most extraordinary man, by common consent, in character, career, and influence, who ever lived upon the earth, or influenced the course of human affairs. He appears at first as a teacher and reformer. He gathers disciples, impressing himself by some uncommon fascination, wherever he goes, upon one and another whom he attaches to his person and his cause, in spite of the severity of the service and the frankness with which he explains it. He speaks to the public doctrines that are strange for their searching character, and almost revolutionary for their boldness, but always with the air of authority, as one divinely commissioned to proclaim the truth and exact obedience. His deeds attract attention and enforce awe at the mysterious power which lay in his hand and his voice. He uttered mysterious words respecting his person, his origin, his future destiny, and the triumph of his kingdom—words which, as they grew more explicit, were more and more perplexing for their marvelous import and their astounding audacity—words at which his most confiding followers were more and more amazed, though they believed he could not deceive them; while his bitterest enemies were more exasperated, though they could not satisfy even themselves that “he had a devil, or was mad.” Once or twice, extraordinary manifestations were made to a select number of his most trusted friends of something as yet unexplained in his person, which overwhelmed them with amazement and exalted them with reverent delight.

As we follow this new historic force to the death of its Author, it is all gathered within the person and the life of this one Being. All its energy and capacity to endure are in him; all its power to gain or hold the convictions or the confidence of others is his personal force. He dies in shame and agony: he is buried; and in his tomb are buried with him the hopes of those who had looked for his coming and kingdom. But he lives again: he remains alive some forty days, and is then removed for ever from the earth. But first he bequeaths to his followers the simple duty of proclaiming the history of his life. And at the first recorded assembly of those who received this trust, they show that they are mindful of it by taking measures to give it effect.

Christianity thenceforward was propagated as history. At the bold proclamation of this completed life, the cause, that was apparently lost, gains as it never had gained before. In the story of the dead Christ who had risen, there was power to shake the nations. A new adherent also appears among the boldest advocates of the cause which he had persecuted—not convinced, indeed, by the testimony of the other witnesses, but by the direct manifestation of the Master himself, from whom he received, not only his commission to teach, but the matter of the gospel which he was to proclaim. But Paul, like the rest, propagated Christianity as a history, telling the one story of the facts of Christ’s life, superadding and emphasizing Christ’s appearance and communications to himself. In his writings, largely doctrinal as they are, the well-known history is repeatedly assumed and affirmed to be true.

The history proclaimed and accepted was, very largely, a history of supernatural events. The very kernel and interest of this history, as well as its attractiveness and force, lay in what was believed to have been wrought by divine power, and to have been incapable of being effected by any inferior agent or agency, whether of knowledge or skill. This was what Paul believed; this was what Paul’s disciples were taught in Thessalonica and Corinth, in the provinces of Galatia, and in Rome—all within some sixteen or twenty years after the Christian story was complete.

The Christian history is still believed to be a true history by the great mass of men over whom Christianity is a controlling power. The majority of those who call themselves Christian worshipers, every time they assemble renew the profession of their faith in the leading facts which this history records. And no examples of human duty and perfection have ever yet been furnished which are at once so instructive and so moving as those which this history records. No stories of human duty and self-sacrifice are more instructive and more animating than the stories which Christ taught in parable and precept, and himself enacted in this life.

Every man who lives in Christendom can not but live in a temple where the history of Christ and the Christ of history are felt in ten thousand influences. The earth to him is far more green and beautiful, the heavens are more benign, the spring more full of hope, the summer more joyful, the autumn more sage, the winter more serene, man is more interesting, life is more sacred, death is more significant, the universe is more full of moral import, because Christ is believed to have visited the earth, and to have dwelt among men, and to have gone before to prepare a place for them in better dwellings.

2. CHRISTIANITY AS TRUTH OR DOCTRINE.—Christianity is more than a history: it is also a system of truths. Every event which its history records either is a truth, or suggests a truth, or expresses a truth, which man needs to assent to or to put into practice. Wherever we begin—with the person of Christ, the work of Christ, or the promises of Christ—we find some truth suggested, confirmed, or enforced. If we begin with his person, we are led into authorized inferences or unauthorized speculations concerning God, and Christ’s relation to God before, during, and after his appearance upon the earth. If we consider his work—whether in his life or death, or both—we are beset by inquiries, which we are forced to attempt to answer, concerning man’s need; and these open the Christian truth concerning sin, and man’s deliverance; and this unfolds to us the truth concerning redemption. If we reflect on the promises of Christ, the doctrines of the purifying Spirit, of perfected holiness, and of eternal life, claim our attention.

Christianity is a series of truths upon which its power and dignity depend—truths which it implies, enforces, or reveals. It implies the being and holiness of a personal God; it manifests and impresses him as a forgiving Father, who sympathizes with and seeks to reclaim his wandering children; it implies and enforces the fact and the evil of personal guilt, which, if persisted in, must separate the guilty creature from the equitable and guiltless Creator; it manifests Christ as the Saviour from sin with all its evils. Among these evils, none is more prominent than its self-propagating and progressive power, involving discouragement and despair. Against this it provides the promised aid and help of a divine agency that encourages and assists the human spirit to confidence and victory. It enforces and reveals all these truths by the constant manifestation of the supernatural as an agency above the laws and above the forces of mere Nature, but which neither disturbs nor interrupts the harmony or order of a universe in which a personal God and impersonal law can never be in conflict. And its truths are taught and enacted for practical effect alone. If God is revealed as a Spirit, it is that we may worship him in spirit and in truth; not that the speculations of mere curiosity respecting the possibility of an Infinite Spirit, and of his relations to the finite, may be excited or put to rest. If men are convinced of guilt and danger, it is not that they may speculate about either, but that they may repent, and be reformed. If Christ is set forth to them as a Deliverer, it is not that they may perfect a science respecting his person or his work, but that they may believe and obey him.

Christianity, then, as truth, proves Chris-

Christianity to be superhuman: first, because the truths themselves are, some of them, such as man could not, and others of them are such as he would not, attain of himself; secondly, because the most important and peculiar of them, though wide-reaching and general, and capable of being expanded into a science that is profound and recondite, are presented to the race, not as doctrines, but as facts—not in the forms of science, but simply as history; and, last of all, because they are such in their nature and adaptations as to justify the acceptance of a supernatural history itself as probable and true, which would otherwise be improbable and incredible. Thus Christianity as history declares and enforces Christianity as doctrine; and Christianity as doctrine makes credible Christianity as a history. Thus whatever independent and separate claims Christianity may assert as a history are made doubly strong by the separate claims of Christianity as doctrine. The union of the two more than doubles the strength of either; the mutual dependence of the two gives to their union an organic power.

3. CHRISTIANITY IS A LIFE.—Its history is not enacted as a mysterious or attractive spectacle; its truth is not enforced in order to satisfy human curiosity, or to enlarge human knowledge in respect to the infinite and the unseen: but both history and truth look forward to the life which they will awaken and perfect in the soul of man and in every human relation. Christianity, both as history and doctrine, is given to mould the character and to serve the ends of life. The ideal of a perfect human life and a perfect human being, proposed by Christianity, is more comprehensive, more elevated, and more symmetrical than any that was distinctly conceived by man before. And every truth which Christianity declares is also a motive to the performance of some duty. What God is, and what God wills; what God is now doing, and what he will do in the future state of being; what man is in his needs and guilt, and what God has done, and how he feels in respect to his help and his pardon—are every one of them powerful reasons why man should seek after ethical perfection. Yet further, Christianity does not simply give wise and ample directions of what we are to do; but it furnishes us the moving power. It does not merely command and forbid; but it enkindles inspiration. Hence it is that Christianity is a life.

Christianity is not only life to the individual, but it gives life to human society. It refines its manners; it perfects its civilization; it renders its laws more just, and their administration more perfect; it fosters and popularizes education; it furnishes inspiration to art, and taste to its admirers. Its ethics are broad enough to meet every exigency, and minute enough to let none escape. They are progressive enough to keep pace with any advance of culture or civilization, and tolerant enough to be charitable to every offense that comes of ignorance or barbarism. Its comprehensive, final aim is the moral and spiritual perfection of the race, and all that such perfection involves in the reformation of human society and the refinement of human culture. To this, as its sole and controlling end, its history and its truth are completely subjected; from this they derive all their importance and their interest.

Christianity claims to be a supernatural product; and it enforces its claims by its superhuman excellence as a history, a doctrine, and a life. Each one of these features, considered alone, substantiates this claim; the union of these three features in the same system makes the argument stronger; the inter-dependence of the three, each giving and receiving strength from the other, unites them in an organic union, which makes the argument invincible and complete. It is indeed a threefold cord, which is not quickly broken. Noah Porter.

The Three Distinctive Features of Christianity.

1. THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN CHRIST.—If anything is clear from history, it is clear that human nature can not endure a bald spiritual theism. Man has two thoughts of God, equally normal and necessary. He thinks of God as One Infinite Spirit, wholly separated from matter, without form, or voice, or changeable affections, transcending the limitations of time and space, wise, just, and awful in his holiness. Hence the pure monotheism now recognized as lying in the background of all the better pagan mythologies. Hence, in part, the triumphs of Mohammed, whose wild voice out of the Arabian peninsula went pealing over three continents: “Your God is One God.” That there are more gods than one, or that this One God is anything else than pure Spirit, human reason in its best estate has always steadily refused to believe. The divine unity and spirituality were affirmed by Plato, looking the Greek polytheism boldly in the face, and were reaffirmed by the Neo-Platonists as essential parts of their eclectic creed. But human weakness and human sinfulness necessitate another conception of God. Across the great gulf between the finite and the infinite, between sin and holiness, the voice of man is afraid to speak. The human heart sinks discouraged and shudders with affright. A being so feeble and so defiled must have

God nearer to him. Hence the patriarchal and Hebrew theophanies, in which the ineffable Jehovah is seen wearing the human form, and is heard speaking in human tones. Hence, likewise, the pagan deification of nature and man, and all the inferior divinities of the pagan Pantheon, bridging, as best they might, the bottomless abyss which yawns betwixt the finite and the infinite, the sinful and the sinless. The idea of incarnation is thus seen to be congenial to our nature. And yet in none of the instances referred to was this idea realized. The patriarchal and Hebrew theophanies were only transient manifestations of God in the human form, a temporary expedient of merely provisional economies. They only abated a hunger which they could not feed. Still, they served what appears to have been their providential purpose: they prevented at once the worship of nature, and the multiplication of inferior divinities. Accordingly, for centuries, down even to the time of the Deluge, when wicked men shrank away from the awfulness of God, they took refuge not in polytheism, but in atheism. After the Deluge mankind, no longer able to be atheists, betook themselves to the worship of innumerable divinities. Nature in all her range was deified, from the starry hosts on high down to the mountains, the rivers, and the trees. At first, these natural objects were revered only as symbols of the Divine presence and power. At first, the carved or molten image was only a symbol; but in process of time the symbols themselves were worshiped. Even the Hebrews, in spite of their theophanies, were, till after the exile in Babylon, constantly lapsing into these idolatries. Outside of Judaism the declension was monstrous. The Creator was sunk and lost sight of in his creation. In the great hunger of the human heart for an incarnate God, polytheism became the faith of the masses, and pantheism the speculation of the schools. Human reason pronounces for unity in its conception of the Godhead; but the human heart, yearning for sympathy in its weakness, and stricken with terror in its defilement, cries out for an incarnate God.

This importunate demand of our finite and sinful nature is for the first time met, and fully met, by the incarnation of God in Christ. The theophanies were transient and provisional. They merely adumbrated the coming reality. The incarnations of the pagan world were all of a pantheistic type, involving no proper personal union between the divine and the human. In the pagan philosophies, God could enter humanity no otherwise than he entered nature. The tree and the man fared alike. But in Christ the two natures, each complete and perfect in itself, were united in a real, perfect personality. He was a man, born of the Virgin Mary, with a real human body, and a real human soul; as human, in every proper sense of the word, as any one of us. He was also God; not God the Father, but God the Word, the second person in the Trinity, whom angels worship, and who made the worlds. In one breath we may say of him that he was born and died. In the next breath we may say of him, Before Abraham began to be, he eternally and unchangeably is. And for three and thirty years this mysterious being lived and walked in Palestine. Now he sailed upon the lake, and now he smoothed its angry billows by a word. Now he was a genial guest at a marriage feast, and now he turned the water into wine. Now he wept before a sepulchre, and now he waked the dead. Now he died himself, and now, having risen from the dead, he ascended up where he was before. Such is the Christ of the New Testament. Such was the Christ of Christendom for three hundred years before the Nicene Creed echoed the speculations of Athanasius. And such has been the Christ of Christendom, by a vast preponderance of numbers, in every succeeding century. Such, too, must continue to be the Christ of Christendom, by an equally vast preponderance of numbers, through all coming time. Here at last our nature rests; here at last is the great hunger of the heart appeased. We need no less, as we can ask no more. God manifest in the flesh is the end of all our desires, the solace of all our sorrows, the conquest of all our fears. And what is more, even philosophy is now ranging herself on the side of faith. From pantheistic speculations there is no legitimate escape but in the doctrine of the word made flesh. Here, then, the sage and the savage meet, bowing together at the feet of an incarnate God. The conception of such a divine humanity is equally above them both; but, as an accomplished fact, it satisfies and renovates and saves them both.

2. THE ATONEMENT.—If, as a Roman poet has said, it be human to err, equally human is it to undergo the pangs of remorse and the fear of punishment. Dualism may, indeed, affirm an eternal independent principle of evil, and pantheism may seek to resolve all evil into good, but the conscience of the race refuses thus to be relieved of its crushing burden of guilt. In man’s own unperverted and honest judgment of himself, he is an offender, not merely against the moral order of the universe, but an offender against the moral ruler of the universe, against whom personally he has rebelled, and whose inmost moral nature has been aroused to the vindication of its righteous claims. Punishment is, of course, the instinctive apprehension of the soul that has sinned. Nature, it is observed, always punishes, never pardons, an offender. Human governments seldom pardon. Human society would lose its coherence, and human life itself become a hideous riot, were not punishment the rule for evil doers, and pardon the rare exception. How, then, can impunity for sinners be looked for under the moral government of God? But the abyss thus opened is frightful; for every human being misery, and that misery eternal. Hence a wild cry everywhere for relief. Is there no escape? Is the law to have its course? In this sphere of spirit, as in the sphere of sense, must fire always burn, and water always drown? Verily they must, says reason; there is no such thing as forgiveness. Altars and sacrifices are of no avail. From the topmost heights of the Greek philosophy, more than two thousand years ago, the verdict came that “the god are not easily propitiated.” Sorrow, O sinner! is bootless; by penance you must yourself atone for the mischief you have wrought. I will not say that human beings in their distress would never dare to dream that God might somehow succor such misery. But I must say, what no sound thinker will venture to question, that there is no safety in reasoning from mere goodness to mercy. The rude peasant, with low, confused notions of what is due to justice and law, might have imagined that somehow pardon was attainable; but philosophy would have rebuked his presumption. And yet, in spite of philosophy, men everywhere have had their altars and victims. Whence these altars and victims? Of blind, human instinct, say some, making thus the strongest possible confession of ill-desert, in the hope of averting a retribution seen to be justly impending. Of gross conceptions, say others, as though God might be wrought upon and moved to favor by such offerings. But penitent confession, how bitter soever it may be, is no atonement, says philosophy. Nor is God so coarse and savage a monster as to delight in the scent of burning flesh. Let, then, these altars and victims be swept away; they are an offense to reason. And yet the altars stand, dotting every continent, and with their huge volumes of smoke blackening the whole firmament. Whatsoever it may be that builds them, and lights their fires, these altars are evidently indestructible. Philosophy may frown, but still they smoke. And their meaning is that sin, in order to be remitted, must first be atoned for. The necessity of expiation is what they preach with their tongues of flame. But there is no real expiation in the blood of beasts and of birds. Such victims take away no sin. The whole system of bloody sacrifices is therefore vain; a dismal cheat, if it promises atonement; and pitiful at best if it be only a confession that atonement is needed. Such is the dilemma of philosophy. Here, on the one side, is the admitted universality of sacrifice, proving its connection with something imperishable within us; and, on the other side, the demonstration of its impotency.

From this dilemma Christianity offers the only possible escape. In the sufferings and death of Christ it sets before us a real atonement actually accomplished in history; an atonement eternally prepared, of course, since God himself, its author, is eternal; an atonement which began its saving work by the very cradle of our apostate race. It was no mere show of condescension and of sympathy enacted for moral effect, but a real thing. Christ actually suffered for us in his Divine humanity, enduring mysterious and immeasurable agonies, that there might be a real satisfaction to the awful justice of God. Not God’s honor only, but God’s own nature required it. This sublime work of atonement was to him, as well as of him, penetrating the very depths of his being, and answering a holy demand, which otherwise could have been answered only by the punishment of the guilty. It was not merely that he might safely pardon, but that he might pardon at all. Pardon required some other basis than that of penitence in the offender; it required a basis of satisfied justice in God’s own nature. And that basis was furnished by the sufferings and death of Christ. As for man, there was nothing for him to do, indeed there was nothing he could do, but simply accept the atonement thus accomplished for him. He had only to confess his sin, and receive forgiveness on the ground of what had been done for him by another. In this way was Adam saved, if saved at all. It mattered not that thousands of years were to roll away before the Son of man should go as it was purposed for him. The Lamb that taketh away sin was already slain, slain from before the foundation of the world, and faith had only to await the historic consummation of an eternal act. But the goal was distant, and the way was rough. And so the altar was built, and the victim brought, not of human impulse or invention, but by divine appointment; not for the taking away of sin, but only to typify the real sacrifice. That this was too crude a ritualism, beneath the dignity of its alleged original, let no one say who has ever heard of the holy walk of Enoch, who has ever heard of the tithes paid to Melchisedek as the representative of an economy older and wider than that of Abraham. We who have never used, nor had need to use, these types, must be careful how we sit in judgment upon the pious men of the elder ages, whose faith embraced not an ascended but only a coming Saviour. To them these types were eloquent. The gleaming knife which slew the shrinking victim pierced their own hearts. The flame which leaped from the altar pointed its red finger toward the throne at once of justice and of grace. And so these men were saved, as all men might have been. The system had certainly its limitations and its perils. There was always danger that type would usurp the place of antitype. There was always danger that atonement would be sought for in the sign, rather than in the thing signified. When thus emptied of its great meaning, the whole sacrificial system of course miscarried. No wonder the Greek philosophy made such havoc of the Greek religion. No wonder the time arrived when the masses thought all religions equally true, and philosophers thought them all equally false. Even among the Hebrews, faith withered into formalism. Indignant prophets accordingly denounced their temple service as an abomination. The lamb of the priest had ceased to be suggestive of the Lamb of God. But the world has now a temple, an altar, and an offering not liable to such abuse. The sensuous types are all withdrawn. The real victim has been slain. The atonement has become an historic fact. And so faith marches out from among the shadows, to lay hold upon the substance. Philosophy, which derided the former, cannot deride the latter. Human nature remains unchanged in its corruption, unchanged in its fears, unchanged in its craving for atonement; and there is no solid peace for the troubled conscience but in the blood of Christ.

3. REGENERATION.—As already intimated, confession of sin is not confined to Christendom, and is no new thing in history. Universal sacrifice, of which we have just spoken, is itself a universal confession of sin. It stands confessed likewise in all literatures; even in that of China, the coldest and poorest of all. In the better literatures, as of Greece and Rome, this confession strikes down deep, pronouncing the very nature of man depraved. “It is clear,” says Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics,” “that not one of the moral virtues springs up in us by nature.” “We all have sinned,” says Seneca; “some more, others less.” Accordingly, when Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, says of all men that they are “by nature the children of wrath,” he says no more than philosophy had said before.

In regard, however, to the genesis of this confessed depravity, the ancient philosophers were greatly at fault. Assuming a better original state of man, they explained his present character by supposing a gradual degeneracy. As Coleridge has justly observed, they “had no notion of a fall of man.” Only this they knew, that the golden age of the race had been followed by the ages of silver, of brass, and of iron. Of course they knew of no adequate remedy. And yet near the conclusion of Plato’s dialogue “Respecting Virtue,” there is the remarkable assertion, that virtue is neither natural nor acquirable by study, but comes, if it come at all, by a Divine fate, without any purpose of our own. Here at length is a finger pointing in the right direction; from the helplessness of man, to the mighty power of God.

Christianity begins its curative work by a better diagnosis of the disease. It sets in a clear light the original rectitude of man, reveals the Tempter, and reports the Fall. As by one man sin is said to have entered into the world, and that one man was the first man, and father of all men, it is seen that the poison is in our very blood. And it follows, of course, that a damage so radical can be repaired only by the hand that fashioned us. These two points had doubtless been emphasized in the very morning of history, along with the promise of redemption and the appointment of sacrifice. If Adam and Eve repented of their sin, we may be sure that their repentance was born of faith, and that their faith was begotten of God. But in process of time these points became obscured. The disease ran on, but its origin was forgotten, and the only infallible prescription for it lost. Hence the mistaken and fruitless attempts of heathen moralists to retrieve by culture a loss which could be retrieved only by regeneration.

But although Christianity, in its essence, is thus as old as the promise in the garden, the coming of Christ in the flesh inaugurated a new economy of the Spirit. From the day of Pentecost there dates a more pungent conviction of sin, with a far greater energy of renovating grace. From that time onward, wherever the Gospel went, it darted a new light down into the depths of sin, and offered man the very intervention of which Plato had only vaguely dreamed. It sounded a new call to repentance, rendered more urgent by what was disclosed of the origin and malignity of the evil; and accompanied this new call to repentance with the offer of certain deliverance. Christ himself touched the very heart of the matter, when he told Nicodemus that he must be born again.

But the new birth is not merely a doctrine of Christianity; it is a work of the Spirit, pledged to attend the faithful proclamation of the gospel in every age and in every land. Persuasion to virtue was the task and function of the pagan moralist. The offer of God’s renewing grace is the task and function of the Christian evangelist. And there is that in man which can be satisfied with nothing less than what is thus offered in the gospel. He knows that he has sinned. He knows that his nature is depraved. And he knows that he has no power to restore himself to the image and favor of God. It only remains for him to be told that the hand which first framed now offers to renew him. This, and this only, meets his case. Made as we are, deliverance from the consequences merely of sin is not enough for us; we must be delivered also from the sin itself. It matters not what difference there may be of race, of language, of rank, of culture, of outward morality; it is enough that we all are human. The first Adam is for ever repeating himself in his offspring. And the one imperative necessity of every child of Adam is to be born again.

Such is Christianity in its grand distinctive features of Incarnation, Atonement, and Regeneration. These three features are all in the line of human reason, as is seen by reference to pagan philosophies and false religions; and yet are infinitely beyond and above human reason, as is proved by the fact, so palpable to every candid inquirer, that no pagan philosophy or religion was ever able to grasp them. Christianity thus stands absolutely and sublimely alone, transcending every other religion by all the difference there is between a line which reaches only to the clouds, and a line which reaches to the very throne and bosom of the King eternal, immortal, and invisible. And not only so, but it fully meets every want of our finite and fallen nature. Precisely those things which are peculiar to it as a system are precisely the things we need. The conclusion is irresistible, that a system at once so unique and so essential must be of God. And if it be of God, then, as Gamaliel told the Sanhedrim, it can not be overthrown. So long as man is man, and God is God, so long must this religion stand, working its miracles of grace. R. D. Hitchcock.

Christianity a Religion of Facts.

We use the term in its plain historic sense. Christianity touches the affections, and binds the consciences of men, on no other plea than that of its being a declaration of facts; and these, either long past, or now passing, or certainly anticipated as yet impending. The facts of Christianity are in themselves of boundless range, and our personal concernment with them is of incalculable moment. When admitted as true, they are of a kind to excite, and to maintain in activity, the warmest and the most profound emotions of which men are susceptible, according to the individual constitution of their minds. Yet is Christianity a religion of sobriety and reason. And it is so because its seat is in the moral faculties, which are never profoundly moved but when they are moved tranquilly. The characteristic of the affections is depth, not visible agitation. It is on this very ground that Christianity triumphs, as compared with every other religious system, ancient or modern, which has powerfully affected the human mind. These systems, so far as they have been powerful at all, have been religions of agitation. Christianity, on the contrary, so far as it is effectual for its own purposes, is a religion of affection and habit, not of passionate commotion. Every powerful religion, Christianity excepted, has been either wild or sullen: and the same is true of every corruption of Christianity itself, in all the wide circuit of delusions, commencing with the ascetic frenzy, and ending in the base superstition of the middle ages. If asceticism be tranquil, it is tranquil by apathy: if superstition be tranquil, it is tranquil by the constraint of dread; but Christianity is at once tranquil and happy. It is a religion of sobriety, and a religion of self-control, because it is a religion of LOVE, intense and deep. I. Taylor.

Christianity is not founded in creeds or dogmas. To a certain extent Hume’s sarcasm is true: “That Christianity is not founded in argument.” The facts of our faith antedate its dogmas; the dogmas do not make, but express the facts. All the human creeds that were ever framed are but partial, fragmentary expressions of the great original—reflected and broken lights of that one light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The living reality is in historic facts which have shaped every syllable of the records and every formula of Christian doctrine.

Christianity—would that we could see and grasp this vital point!—Christianity is not a creed, not a dogma, not a system of theology, but it is essentially historic fact—a sublime, incarnated spiritual reality—the most real historic power, which, for centuries (in its element from the very beginning), has controlled the grandest evolution upon the earth—the historic development of the human race. It is as unrivaled and unique in human history, as is the sacred Person of its head and center; it is, as the faith of the Church declares, the living presence of that Person in history itself. The living Person stands first and central, and then his apostles, and then the Church, and then the simple creed, and then the canon, and then the conflicts, and then the dogmas, and then the systems of theology, and so on through the centuries; and in and through all, a living, spiritual power, comparable only to the light of nature. And this Christianity, so sublime as an objective fact, becomes subjectively a renovating power—the life of God in the soul of man—the mysterious consciousness of an unearthly presence in the soul—God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself—the highest form of spiritual life. Vast material forces, guided by divine power and wisdom, control the development of the earth; equally vast spiritual forces guide and guard the course of history and the destiny of Christianity. H. B. Smith.

Three Opponents of Primitive Christianity and their Overthrow.

1. JUDAISM.—Into collision and controversy with Judaism, Christianity came at the very beginning; since the more essentially harmonious it was with the ancient religion truly interpreted, the more positive and vehement was the contest urged against it by that arrogant system which now clothed itself in the robes and occupied the place of Moses and the prophets—a system not content to be recognized and honored as divine in its sphere, yet introductory to a higher, but claiming for itself to be final and universal. Unconscious of imperfection, and intolerant of change, this bred a temper domineering and defiant in those who adhered to it toward all other faiths, but most of all toward the faith which adored a crucified Nazarene. It is one of the most significant illustrations of the drift of human nature—this character of Judaism in the day of the Apostle Paul, and the position it assumed toward the doctrines he proclaimed. Ennobled and vitalized as it had been at the beginning by the supreme truth of the being of God, eternal and holy, almighty and wise, the creator, moral governor, and judge of the universe; receiving a yet mightier practical impressiveness from the discoveries which it made of his presence and providence and of his perfect law; becoming pervaded through and through with a divine glory, as it showed to men something of his heavenly empire, rehearsed the history of his dealings with mankind, and even unfolded, through prophecy and psalm, the scope and splendor of his purposes of love; bringing all these manifold elements of power into contact with men through a mechanism of worship unequaled in its majesty and its fitness to its end: the religion of the Hebrews was intrinsically adapted, not only above all other religions, but to the highest degree then possible, to educate the mind, to stimulate the conscience, to implant and develop the holiest affections, and to make the nation which had its oracles for their constant possession the purest, noblest, and most devout on the earth. No other result of it could have been anticipated by those who should have assumed as an axiom the moral integrity or the moral indifference of the nature of man. And doubtless such effects, through the grace of the Spirit, were realized in many whose faces now glow in the vision of Christ.

Yet from this religion the nation had early and persistently swung away into grossest idolatries, reproducing in gold the Egyptian Apis beneath the very pavement of sapphire on which the feet of God were treading above the mount; in their subsequent history polluting the hills which looked out upon Jerusalem with the fury and lust of sacrilegious observances. And when they had at length been driven out of these by the stern words of preachers and the sterner strokes of providential visitation—when Assyrian oppressions, fulfilling God’s plans, had forced them to a new recognition of him, and made them loathe at last the idolatries whose cruel craft had so torn and despoiled them—they only turned their religion to an occasion of pride, and nurtured beneath it the very arrogance and ambition which it was especially designed to subdue. Its mystic, high, and moving truths, the venerable associations it derived from antiquity, the precious and kindling memories of the fathers by whom it was consecrated, the wonderful interventions of God in providence by which so often it had been vindicated or rescued, the unique impressiveness of the ceremonies and offices by which it had been conveyed through the ages, the resplendent array of miracles which it wore as the breast-plate of gems and the golden mitre on the front of its records, the very endurance and faith of the martyrs who had died beneath the hands of rulers or people in allegiance to it—all were together perverted by the Jews to minister more abundantly to their national pride, and to make them less willing to receive the Messiah whom from the beginning their religion had foreshadowed, unless he should come as a conquering Prince, reigning visibly at Jerusalem, and carrying his ensigns with squadrons and navies to the ends of the earth.

This influence had now for many generations been working in the nation; and, as we know, it had reached its climax when Paul was proclaiming Christianity in the world. The very political calamities of the Jews, stinging and irritating their unsubmissive minds, had only intensified their fanatical expectation of victory through their ritual and law; had only exasperated their scorn of a Messiah who should seek to rule by the truth and by love. The partial successes which they had realized—in establishing synagogues in many of the cities to which their restless enterprise had impelled them, in gaining numerous proselytes from the heathen, in compelling the admiration of some of the higher philosophical minds for the grand simplicity in which their faith contrasted the mythologies, in adapting through the Alexandrian school their doctrines and rules to the language, and even in some degree to the spirit, of the Greeks—these had still further invigorated the tendency. And so they stood, divided among themselves in many particulars, yet unanimous in a fierce hostility to the Gospel: the Sadducees denying angels and the resurrection, and almost it would seem the existence of the soul, as independent of the body, while still holding among them the office of high priest, and some posts of chief influence in the national council; the Pharisees superadding their traditions to the law, and austerely exacting the most rigorous and literal observance of both, in disregard, often, of the obvious principles of equity and of charity; the Essenes delighting in pietistic seclusion and remote meditations; the Herodians affecting foreign manners and maintaining the supreme authority of the civil ruler in matters of religion—yet all agreed and unitedly zealous in expecting the propagation, by conquest of arms, of their ancient faith, and all contemning the religion of Jesus. It was to them not only a radical heresy and schism in their national church; it involved what seemed to them a national suicide, the final extinction of hopes they had cherished until they had come to be part of their life.

So Judaism confronted Paul; a perverted system, whose ancient glory now only gave energy to its ambitious plans, and its hatred and defiance of the Gospel he preached. Error and verity were so intermingled in its practical frame, piety and pride were so combined beneath its influence, the lust of conquest had blended so intimately with religious veneration, that resistance to Christ seemed now to the Jew a matter of conscience, and his fiercest passions had the sanction of his religion. Inevitably, therefore, by the essential contrariety of its tendency and temper, this was the first antagonist of the Gospel; its first, and also, in some respects, its most effective and dangerous. It surrounded Paul in the synagogues. It even entered the churches. Peter himself, and many of the Christians, yielded at intervals to its vast influence; and, with an extraordinary tenacity of life, where it seemed altogether subdued and obliterated, it still persistently reappeared. So stubborn in its spirit, so thorough in its discipline, so fanatical in its zeal, and so fortressed with strength on every side, it was only the prescience of an inspired apostle, and only the utmost courage of a will inspired as was Paul’s in the will of the Most High, that could have predicted its absolute overthrow.

2. HEATHENISM.—In some form this was the common law and the common life of the inhabited world. First, it is to be recognized that the heathenism which withstood Christianity was not an altogether artificial system in any nation; that it grew out of real and even deep motions in the general mind. Its answer was a vain one, but it sought to give an answer, to questions which never since the exile from Eden have ceased profoundly to agitate the race. Unconscious prophecies of better things lurked in many of its forms, and in some of its traditions. There were thoughts in it that had drifted down, as has been said, as “planks from the wreck of Paradise.” Its sacrifices were efforts to staunch the flow from bleeding hearts. And while the popular mind acknowledged chiefly the hold of its ceremonies and shows, the thoughtful found also some solace or stimulus in its sublimated legends.

Further, it must be noticed that as existing in any nation it took the form most germane to that people, to its genius and spirit, to its circumstances and habits; and that everywhere it allied itself with whatever was strongest, whatever most impressed and attracted men’s minds. Thus in Greece, from the first, it enshrined itself in art; made eloquence its advocate; was indebted for the memorable form which it assumed to the noble poetry in which its mythologies were melodiously uttered. It was there at the same time a philosophy for the studious, a cloister for the religious, a splendid spectacle and continual entertainment for the excitable populace. In Egypt, on the other hand, it folded around it the solemn gloom of those austere and mystic legends which told of the destruction of Osiris by Typhon, or traced in long unfolding terrors, on the walls of the sealed and unsunned tomb, the path of the spirit from its birth to its judgment. In Rome, the same power allied itself with politics, became a military force, selected and blessed the standards of the army, added sanctions to the laws, and apotheosized the Emperor. While eastward in Assyria, it subsided to a sluggish and luxurious development, as it touched the plains whose wealth fed empires, and whose teeming tilth gave license to indolence. Everywhere, with spontaneous flexibility and precision, the special form of the heathenism which prevailed was fitted to the needs and the temper of the people.

Still further we must remember that in no land was this recent; in none was it devoid of that dignity and authority which were derived from a high antiquity; while to all the peoples, in proportion to their advancement, it was associated with whatever was to them most renowned and inspiring in their history. Their early benefactors and eminent chieftains had been deified by it. It bridged the interval between their times and the Golden Age. It was signalized by connection with all their inspiring national successes. It was under the benediction, as he fondly believed, of his ancestral gods that the Greek had fought at Marathon and Platæa. From the brazen spoils of the former of these victories the colossal statue of Minerva had been wrought, which, flashing afar from the summit of the Acropolis, seemed to keep perpetual ward over the consecrated city and scene. It was the god Pan who, in the terrible clash of Platæa, overwhelming the Persians with sudden fright as his voice of thunder broke on them from the air, had delivered the nation in the crisis of its peril, and made the word “panic” thenceforth an inheritance of the speech of mankind. So with all that was majestic and delightful in the past—and we must not forget that the nations of the old world looked back into the past far more fondly than we do, whose eyes, by Christianity, have been turned with a higher expectation toward the future—with all that was charming and inspiring in their past, their religion was identified. It came to them consecrated by the memories most precious. It was dear to them as the bond which connected their life with heroic ages; which knit them to those great fathers of the State who had learned from the gods their secrets of power as they walked with them familiarly in the morning of time.

And yet, further, we must remember that diverse as were the forms of heathenism which severally obtained among the nations, no one of them was essentially isolated from or discordant with the others around it; that the Greek might find much which to him was familiar in the worships of the East; that the Roman had no difficulty in opening his Pantheon to any god of all the tribes, in giving, as Gibbon says, “the freedom of the city” to all divinities; that, as matter of fact, the interchanges of commerce were continually bringing the different idolatries to blend with each other; and that when Alexander, in his rapid conquests, carried the Hellenic arts and influence over the East, the Western and Oriental heathenisms commingled, with ready affinities, to a singular extent. Thus all became modified, expanded, invigorated; and each, without losing its local prestige, derived a fresh access of strength from the others. In the temple of Diana at Ephesus, while the shrine was in all its conception Greek, and in all its execution of the loveliest of Greek styles, the image within was not the statue which a student of Phidias or Praxiteles would have chiseled of her who hunted with flying nymphs on Arcadian hills, instinct with a vivid, virginal authority; it was a crude, rough image of wood, like those still seen in Eastern temples—below, a simple-pointed block covered with mystic animal figures, above, a mass of many breasts.

So it was then, in part, that heathenism had power and supremacy on earth in the day of Paul; a power incomparable by that which it now has among any people; a supremacy almost literally unquestioned. It covered the earth, embosomed in its influence all ranks and vocations, molded every institution, infiltrated its forces into everything human. Springing out of the heart and mind of mankind, it had in turn, from its place of power, wrought these to its likeness, and toned them to an absolute sympathy with itself. It touched every class, and had its appeal for every person; from the Sybarite to the Stoic; from the profligate Aleibiades to Socrates, who seemed almost a forerunner of the Lord. The philosopher might sneer at it, but even he infused into it an esoteric significance which dignified and endeared it to himself and his pupils. The popular mind absorbed it greedily, and was pervaded in every fiber by its impression. Its infinite complication of fancies and myths was to those who lived under it a spiritual system, as real as life, as vast as the skies, yet as near their souls as friendship or hope. Through it the living forces of nature, personified and familiarized, seemed to leap forth to greet the shepherd or the sailor. Through it the spirits of their dead ancestors seemed to the citizens invisibly but really to brood over and assist their troubled minds and periled tortures. Above all, through it the vast Unknown, the something Infinite and Enduring, of which the heavens gave them witness, which inarticulately encircled their life, shedding on it at once a shadow and a gleam—the Unspeakable Power which, as Paul saw at Athens when looking on their pathetic altars, they “ignorantly worshiped,” and to which the Romans were wont formally to pray when the shuddering undulations of the earthquake surprised them—THIS seemed to them brought nearer their souls, and almost made palpable to their imaginations.

Heathenism to many had thus the sacredness of a faith. It was felt a real infidelity to deny it; a kind of atheism, from which sensitive men shrank then as now, as from a denial of man’s great birthright, a piercing confession of spiritual orphanage. And the religion which thus grappled and held them by manifold ties, which engaged to itself on every side their affections and passions, and intermingled its subtle influence with all their letters, laws, and thoughts, had become the very life of their life to all the nations; till it was in fact attempting to remold their nature to disturb it.

3. IMPERIAL ROME.—The opponent most powerful of all, the most dangerous to assail, to human view the most inaccessible to change or decay, supreme over every force that could touch it, and comparing with them all as the Mediterranean with the restless streams which sought and sank into it, was the authority and power of Imperial Rome. Immense in extent, immeasurable in energy, this was also so completely subordinated to heathenism, so entirely impregnated and energized by its spirit, that the Gospel could no more advance to dominion without its conversion or without its destruction, than light can break through seven-fold walls, or the brook can leap the mountain-chain. It was hardly as yet at its uttermost height, this imperial power; for scores of years still slowly passed before that age of Trajan and the Antonines which marked its consummate might and splendor; while it was later even than this that Severus carried his victorious arms to Ctesiphon and Seleucia, transferred the entire legislative power from the Senate to himself, and scattered the profuse memorials of his reign over Africa and the East. But already had Julius Cæsar, first of generals and foremost of statesmen, by natural force the leading man of all his world, laid the first courses of that immense structure in which others after him were to perpetuate his name, and without his genius to outrun his plans. Already had Augustus, with marvelous tact, dissimulation, and ability, overcoming all obstacles and destroying all rivals, raised himself by sure steps to the empire of the world. While retaining artfully some forms of the Republic, he had centralized all authority in his will, being recognized successively as General, Emperor, Supreme Pontiff, and Censor. He had adorned with the spoils of every land, and had almost rebuilt the imperial city; had added other regions and peoples to the empire; had disciplined the troops, tranquillized the provinces, and given to the world an unaccustomed peace; and he had fostered the brilliant literature which is the superb and imperishable crown of that whole age which bears his name. He had been enthroned for forty-five years on the Palatine hill; had been worshiped during life in some cities of the empire; and, after his death, had been raised by the solemn decree of the Senate to the rank of a God. The “dark and unrelenting” Tiberius who followed him, Caligula, Claudius, and now at last Nero, had successively inherited and abused his prerogatives; and their absolute power had been only confirmed by time and use. Nay, even their unspeakable cruelty and lust, by continually exciting the fears of the people, and as continually debasing their character, had but cemented into more solid strength the fabric of that unparalleled domination whose foundations had been laid by a genius so rare, a sagacity so sure, and a courage so complete.

And so was this empire now exhibited to Paul, encircling the sea which was the center of his thoughts, from Carthage to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Ephesus, and on to the very pillars of Hercules; with no sign of weakness and with no shade of fear on all its frame; full, on the other hand, of the most intense and commanding vitality: the vigor of youth blending in its life with the disciplined craft which was the slow growth of ages; its organization the most perfect of time; its wealth the most ample; its military system the most exact and effective; its renown the most various; its ambition as unbounded as if conquest were a novelty, and the stream of the Rubicon still was its limit. Its name was a terror to the wildest barbarians, while scholars rejoiced in the letters which it cherished. The armies, to which it had given a name that signified of itself their constant practice and incessant activity, were arrayed over the earth at each point of command, from the Indus to the Tweed, from the shores of Scandinavia to the Libyan sands. Their helmets flashed in the streets of each city. Their iron-beaked galleys, from Misenum or Ravenna, were ready at a word to dart to the onset against every foe. The British woods and the Assyrian plains were equally familiar with their triumphing standards.

The hundred millions of inhabitants of the empire, from whom these armies were evermore reinforced, though not indeed pervaded by any strong principle of inward unity, were yet by no means merely encircled by a brazen ring of military force. Their obedience was in large part voluntary and stable. They were actually and strongly bound to the metropolis; by admiration of its splendor, as well as awe of its power; by the tolerance in each province of the local religion, and to some extent of the local law; by the Roman colonies, which were pushed in all directions after the arms which had opened the way for them; by the admission to citizenship of those provincials who most desired and most had deserved it; by the comparative immunity which certainly was given them from the yet more capricious and unendurable tyranny of the smaller despots whom Rome displaced.

The great roads that radiated in every direction from the golden milestone within the forum—crossing or even piercing the hills, and bridging the ravines, with an imperial disregard of all natural obstacles—were arteries along which flowed constant circulation from the heart to the extremities. The characteristic productions of each region became gradually dispersed and domesticated in others. And commerce, religion, letters, law, wove each its strand into that immense and magnificent girdle with which the earth was well-nigh encircled.

Considering its history, considering its growth, it seemed hardly so much a construction of man, this empire of Rome, as one of the pre-ordained elements of nature; reaching in its exhaustive roots to the centers of history, and draining the earth to give it nutriment; increasing with a steadiness, and an immeasurable might, which no mere art or generalship could have given; in its production therefore resistible by no agencies, and in the result as indestructible by assault as Lebanon or the Apennines. Nay, it seemed hardly so much a power terrestrial, in its amazing and terrific augmentation—to the imaginative student contemplating its wonders, it still sometimes presents itself in history, hardly so much a power terrestrial—as a drear and vast fate; impersonal, immense; long-slumbering and inert, but expending itself rapidly from portentous beginnings as Christianity came near; spreading over the heavens, infolding the earth, locking liberty in paralysis, while giving an almost demoniac power to its auxiliary minds; combining all conquering passions and powers in one ultimate aggregate, and descending beyond help on the overwhelmed nations!

So it stood before Paul, as everywhere he met it, as he knew and felt it environing the earth. And so long as it remained undestroyed, unchanged, with its muscles unrelaxed and its heart unsubdued, the supremacy of the gospel could not be realized. It was absolutely arrested and forbidden. For in essential and immovable antagonism this fronted the gospel. Its kingdom, and law, and life were different. Its spirit was one of the most malign selfishness; its ambitions were fierce, its passions implacable, and its whole aim earthly. As soon, therefore, as the doctrine which Paul was proclaiming should emerge from the shelter of its early insignificance, and begin to declare itself a world-mastering principle, this mightiest empire of Time was its enemy, nay more, its most terrific and consuming assailant. All the powers that pertained to it, so prodigious and omnipresent, as swayed by one will, inspired by one aim, and pushed to their purpose with relentless ferocity, were to converge at once on the work of arresting and then of eradicating ing the hated Christianity. The sharpness of swords and the darkness of prisons would be its swift and certain answer to every appeal which invoked for the gospel the tolerance that it showed toward all other religions. And Paul knew that this as well, this mightiest establishment of government on the earth, this impregnable despotism which was touched by no fear, against which human power seemed vain, and to strike which was like trying to startle the stars—that this should also, in God’s own time, be broken and wrecked, and “brought to nought.”

4. AGENCIES FOR THEIR OVERTHROW.—By what agencies should each of these prophesied victories, over Judaism, heathenism, and the terrible iron-limbed empire of Rome, be brought to pass? The truths which had been taught the apostles, and afterward recalled to them and unfolded more fully by the witness of the Spirit, and which were to be enshrined in evangelical narratives, not one of which had yet been written, which were to be expounded in a series of letters by the apostles to the churches, of which only those by Paul himself to Thessalonica had thus far been prepared—these were the primary instruments to be used, with the oral proclamation of their principles and laws, for the spread of God’s kingdom, and the overthrow of whatever withstood its advance.

The living energy of Christianity in the world, through the souls into which its truths should be transferred, throughout whose affections its charity should be shed, whose hopes should be kindled and their courage inspired by its high promises—this personal force of Christianity in the world, realizing the principles which epistles were to teach, and incarnating the spirit with which gospels were to glow: this was the second of the agencies to be used for the triumph of God’s kingdom over all which withstood it.

These were the very agencies—these “Things which were not” in every sense—which were not regarded, and which hitherto existed only in germ, these gospels and epistles which were still to be written, these teachings and preachings which had scarcely commenced, these Christian forces in life and character which hardly thus far had appeared on the earth, which were not self-conscious enough to be formed as yet into separate communities, which could not be spoken of as one of the fathers afterward spoke of them as “verdant islets amid raging oceans,” but which now were only as scattered flowers casually dispersed on the surface of a sea that at any moment might swell with tempests—these were the forces which God had chosen to bring to nought the “things that were”: the ancient, immense, and impregnable institutions, that stood in all their august might and tremendous effectiveness fronting the gospel. And through them, by his might, it did come to pass in the due time, as Paul had known and declared that it should, that the gospel which seemed so slight a force when he was proclaiming it in the school of Tyrannus, and the agencies for which looked so frail and so few, did triumph illustriously and dominate for all time over the colossal institutions and influences which resisted its march. Judaism was surpassed, absorbed, and terminated, in a higher religion, more adequate to man’s wants, more illustrative of God’s glory. Heathenism was not only broken down and exterminated on the scenes in which so long it had reigned, but it was made, thenceforth and for ever, the veriest outcast of civilization. The Roman empire was as finally extinguished as if the crust of the globe had been opened to swallow it up. And all was wrought—this change at which the world still wonders, and which no other change recorded in history ever has paralleled—all was wrought, within a few centuries, by what at the outset had appeared so unreal or so ineffectual. God’s might had crowned with an absolute victory what mankind had despised; and weakness, as used by Omnipotence, was supreme. The vanishing shadow, as it looked to men’s eyes, had shaken and dissolved the earth-centered mountain. Doctrine and suffering had discomfited despotism. The market-places vocal, and the catacombs crowded, had been mightier than armies. The Mamertine prison had conquered the Capitol!

“The city of God is built,” it has been said, “at the confluence of three great civilizations.” It is built as well, let it never be forgotten, on the ruins of three prodigious, ambitious, and defiant establishments; a perverted Judaism, deriving vast strength from the truths it denied; an ancient, haughty, and universal heathenism; a military empire that encompassed the earth. And the forces which brought all these to nought were not astute combinations of statesmen, the eloquence of scholars, or the strategy of soldiers; they were forces which Paul could only describe, even in his day, a score of years after Christ had ascended, as “THINGS WHICH ARE NOT!” R. S. Storrs.

The Spread and Achievements of Christianity.

BEFORE thirty years had elapsed from the death of Christ, his Church had spread from Palestine throughout Syria; through almost all the numerous districts of Lesser Asia; through Greece and the islands of the Ægean Sea, the seacoast of Africa, and even into Italy and Rome. The number of converts in the several cities respectively is described by the expressions, “a great number,” “great multitudes,” “much people.” In the thirtieth year after the beginning of the work, the terrible persecution under Nero kindled its fires; then Christians had become so numerous at Rome that, by the testimony of Tacitus, a “great multitude” were seized. In forty years more, we are told, in a celebrated letter from

Pliny, the Roman governor of Pontus and Bythinia, Christianity had long subsisted in these provinces, though so remote from Judea. Many of all ages and of every rank, of both sexes likewise, were accused to Pliny of being Christians. What he calls the contagion of this superstition (thus forcibly describing the irresistible and rapid progress of Christianity) had seized, not cities only, but the lesser towns also, and the open country, so that the heathen temples “were almost forsaken,” few victims were purchased for sacrifice, and a long intermission of the sacred solemnities had taken place. Justin Martyr, who wrote about thirty years after Pliny, and one hundred after the gospel was first preached to the Gentiles, thus describes the extent of Christianity in his time: “There is not a nation, either Greek or barbarian, or of any other name, even those who wander in tribes and live in tents, among whom prayers and thanksgivings are not offered to the Father and Creator of the universe by the name of the crucified Jesus.” Clemens Alexandrinus, a few years after, thus writes: “The philosophers were confined to Greece, and to their particular retainers; but the doctrine of the Master of Christianity did not remain in Judea, but is spread throughout the whole world, in every nation, and village, and city, converting both whole houses and separate individuals, having already brought over to the truth not a few of the philosophers themselves. If the Greek philosophy be prohibited, it immediately vanishes; whereas, from the first preaching of our doctrine, kings and tyrants, governors and presidents, with their whole train, and with the populace on their side, have endeavored with their whole might to exterminate it, yet doth it flourish more and more.” M. H.

Tertullian, writing about the beginning of the third century in vindication of the new religion, says to the Roman authorities: “Though we are strangers of no long standing, yet we have filled all places of your dominions, cities, islands, corporations, councils, armies, tribes, the senate, the palace, the courts of judicature. If the Christians had a mind to revenge themselves, their numbers are abundant, for they have a party, not in this or that province only, but in all quarters of the world. Nay, if they were to combine and forsake the Roman empire, how vast would be the loss! The world would be amazed at the solitude which would ensue.” In an appeal to the persecuting governor of Africa, he says: “If you persevere in your persecution, what will you do with these many thousands, both men and women, of every rank and every age, who will promptly offer themselves? Carthage itself must be decimated.” And again, enumerating the nations who have believed in Christ, he declares that the gospel has penetrated to regions which were inaccessible even to the eagles of imperial Rome, and that the Church had already spread itself more widely than the four great monarchies. “Excellent governors,” says Tertullian, “you may torment, afflict, and vex us; your wickedness puts our meekness to the test; but your cruelty is of no avail. It is but a stronger invitation to bring others to our persuasion. The more we are mowed down, the more we spring up again. THE BLOOD OF THE CHRISTIANS IS SEED.” J. W. A.

All religions that have taken place in the world’s history have been established by moral and by material agency; all appealed from their very commencement as much to force as to persuasion, as much to the arm as to the tongue. Christianity alone lived and grew during three centuries by its own single native virtue, without any other appeal than that made to truth, without any other aid than that of faith. During those three centuries the dogmas, the precepts, and the miracles of its Author constituted its only weapons, and weapons which have prevailed against all other arms. Those dogmas, those precepts, and those miracles effected the conquest of man’s mind and of human society in spite of the resistance of Greek philosophy, Roman power, and all the poetical or mystical mythologies of antiquity marshaled against them. The victory has not, it is true, put an end to all struggle of man’s intelligence: neither has the light from Christ dissipated all darkness nor satisfied all minds; the explanation and commentaries of man have obscured the doctrines of Christ; human prejudices have mistaken his precepts; and legends have been grafted upon his miracles. But the fact does not the less exist that the dogmas, the precepts, and the miracles of Christ, without any aid from human sources, sufficed to found and insure the triumph of the Christian religion: this is a fact primitive and supreme. And from this single result shines forth the divine character of the Christian religion, for its triumph without the miraculous agency of God would be of all miracles the most impossible to receive. Guizot.

Christianity comes to our times as the survivor of all systems, and, after confronting in turn every imaginable form of error, each of which has gone to its almost forgotten place in history, itself alone lives. We have before us in this history a power which, even when the most enfeebled or perverted, could lend a grandeur even to folly, and a sublimity to extravagance; which has often imparted the energies of virtue to crimes; which has never visited mankind with a scourge, without bringing up a blessing; and which now at length stands forward in no other character than as the reprover of violence, and of oppression, and of impurity; and as the guardian of whatever is most holy and happy. Its spirit and tendency, which once might seem ambiguous, are now, by universal acknowledgment, simply benign. I. Taylor.

When we remember what Christendom was when it began; the handful of fishermen and peasants that preached it; the narrow and obscure corner of the earth in which they lived; their absolute insignificance, measured by the politics or thought of the time; when we remember their persecution by their own countrymen, and that the few persons of culture who joined them sank in the eyes of the rest to the same illiterate level, yet how soon their doctrines shook and overthrew the stablest beliefs that then existed, and climbed upon thrones to rule the world; when we recall the mighty march of Christendom from east to west, and now back again from west to east, noiseless as the pillar of cloud, luminous as the pillar of fire; when we reflect on the great intellects it has seized, and how it has laid every art under tribute, claimed the homage of science, and, while impressing upon culture its own stamp, has widened it, and elevated it, and made it, instead of the badge and heritage of a few, as universal as itself; when we remember what geniuses it has molded, what wealth of eloquence and profound thought is inseparable from its teaching, in what majestic and immortal words it has poured its aspirations through the lips of the glorified dead, and how its influence has been felt far beyond those whom it may claim as its own, so that the greatest poets and historians, the greatest painters and sculptors, the foremost statesmen and orators, the solitary thinker whose “soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,” have for centuries been its debtors; when we remember the literature it has created, and, unlike all other systems, that it is creating still with unimpaired freshness and energy, and for which it uses every language under heaven; when we remember the nations it has builded, and the outcome of their national life, the commerce by which it crowds the restless sea and binds the parted lands; when we consider its liberating power, the energies and endowments it has set free for the service of the race, that it has struck the chains off the slave, and smitten the fetters of class, and proclaimed liberty to the captive mind; when we remember the unworn force of its truths, the consolations it pours into numberless stricken hearts, the braveries and heroisms with which it makes common lives illustrious, the untold peace with which it stills the trouble of conscience and the trouble of thought, the dying agonies it soothes, the streams of joy that flow from it to poor and sad and lonely lives; and that there is no sign of decay about it, of being set aside when it has served its turn; no failure to meet fresh needs, no lack of potency to rouse men to self-sacrifice, no weakness to resist assault, no want of breadth and elasticity to cope with novel conditions of society, no less spiritual grandeur than in those first days when the Spirit came down like a mighty wind—if all that might thus be fairly said could be woven by some skillful hand into one broad picture, it would surely represent a power that, for splendor and resource, is like no other of which we have any knowledge on this earth. Regal potencies are in it, unfailing, undecaying, inexhaustible, irresistible—potencies that, because they are of God, are to subdue and mold our human life. W. F. Stevenson.

Intimations of the Final Supremacy of Christianity

1. The very fact that God has established it, and that he has introduced it to human knowledge, should lead us to expect this. There is no presumption more definite or impressive, or more immediate, than that the system of truth and salvation in Christ, which God has prepared and has given to men, shall advance among them to ultimate supremacy. That God will choose to accomplish this, it seems difficult to doubt. That he is able to effect it, can not be questioned. Amid the utmost confusions of history, through simply the superintending control of providence, his purposes have come to historic reality at just the point allotted for them. The central and harmonizing line in history is that on which these plans have advanced. All history besides converges toward that, is interpreted in its radiance; and whatsoever that looked toward has been fulfilled. If such, then, is God’s control over history, and if such has been the accomplishment of his plans, we look to see Christianity successful.

Still further must we presume this, when we remember through what processes it was brought to development and to general proclamation; how vast these were, and how full of sublimity. God showed it afar, remember, to the beings who had fallen; and the beauty of his promise stamped the bow upon the cloud that hung thunderous over them. From that time his purpose came ever into plainer and larger exhibition. It was shown to the patriarchs, to the lawgiver, to the psalmists. It quickened with a celestial hope the thoughts and hearts of many elect men. It gradually worked on to realization in the actual, through the pressure and clamor of national histories. It subdued and reorganized other movements and agencies. It came into clear prospective manifestation in the ecstasy of the prophets. It was at last accomplished in the advent of Christ, his ministry and passion, his death and his ascension. Through all this course, of four thousand years, there was never a point where God was not moving to bring this system to completeness. He touched the troubled currents of national progress with the sublime baptism of his presence and guidance, that they might bear redemption forward. He shed upon lofty and purified souls the unspeakable brightness of his omniscience; he carried nations into captivity, and brought them up again with shoutings; he raised up kings, and suddenly overthrew them; he established a theocracy and a priesthood at Jerusalem; he opened the waves of the eager sea, until they stood as a wall on each hand; he made the Syrian sands brilliant beneath the march of the pillar by night; he descended upon Sinai, till it trembled and rocked, through its every granite crag, under the majesty of Infinitude—ALL, that in its time redemption might be unfolded! And when we meet the heavenly hosts singing exulting chants above Bethlehem, adorning the midnight with their sweet beauty and filling it with their rapture, we find in even that no strangeness. The history that precedes it has prepared for such a close.

It is not probable, then, that a system like this, so associated with God, so sublime in itself, introduced with such patience of purpose and of aim, along a path so brilliant with theophanies, is to fail of success. Rather, as we look on, we predict its supremacy. If the presumption does not arise to proof, it is almost because it supersedes that, that this will triumph throughout the earth.

2. The interior structure of Christianity, its fitnesses to man, the reply which it gives to his deepest demands, also promise this supremacy.

It binds his understanding with the stress of its argument; and so, sometimes, it leads him to Christ. It appeals to his inward consciousness of unrest, and offers him peace unspeakable in God. It kindles within him the sense of sin, and so of exposure and of judgment to come; and then it offers him Christ in atonement, with his fullness of expiation, with the promises of God surrounding his cross, and the gates into heaven swinging inward at his touch. Through the perfect embodiment of excellence in Jesus it appeals to that inmost susceptibility to moral beauty which almost never is dead in any heart. Through its warnings it speaks to fear. Through its revelations of God it addresses the sense of dependence in us, the capacity for veneration and the sense of the sublime, as well as the conviction of moral obligation. Through its many great and precious promises it excites and justifies ardent desire. There is not one susceptibility within us, which is innocent and appropriate as a spring of endeavor, to which the system does not appeal. It addresses each power that God has placed in us. And so at length it enters the heart. Being full of force at every point, being framed into the subtlest adaptation to man’s necessities, being accompanied by the grace and the might of God’s Spirit, it overcomes the will and wins to itself belief. How often has this been illustrated before us!

And when Christianity has thus entered the soul, it establishes and maintains its supremacy therein, through the same divine fitness to every power. It addresses the intellectual nature, and gives it the noblest truth that can be proffered; truth that more than any other attracts and rewards study. It states that truth in every variety of aspect and relation. It makes effort needful, and thoughtfulness, for its apprehension. Yet it states it most clearly. It incites to the study of it by the vast importance which is shown to pertain to it. There is not an appetency or a capacity of the human intelligence which it does not address. The understanding, the imagination, the fancy even, and the taste for the beautiful in form, to all it holds a normal relation. It contradicts no true philosophy, but anticipates and involves every principle in such. It opposes no science, but interprets each; grounds its laws and their phenomena in an eternal reality, and harmonizes them all in the wisdom of God. It is a spirit of truth that illustrates and reconciles all departments of knowledge, while with its own force it fills each capacity and quickens it anew. We may go out on the view of it to the splendor and height of the throne of the universe, to the shores of that infinitude of truth which we shall for ever be exploring in heaven, and yet we may rest upon it elsewhere as on the familiar and obvious axiom.

So it addresses the conscience and the sense of obligation. The apprehension of a Right which is immutable and universal, which binds with its authority every moral intelligence, and unites into one the vast spiritual systems—an apprehension which seems bedded indelibly in every moral being, which finds obscure expression even in heathenisms, and which gives all efficiency but of force to human government and law—this the system of Christ alone perfectly meets; revealing the law of universal love, established permanently throughout God’s system. That sense of sin, too, and of peril before this law, which leads to all manner of religious observances, to the endurance of every most terrible penance, that innocence may be reached or God propitiated, to this it ministers with entire efficiency. It does not crush it. It does not overlook it. It accepts it as just, and develops it more vividly. But it directs it to the cross, with the vicarious suffering thereon endured; a suffering which God appointed and accepted as the ground of forgiveness, before which the heavens were dark and dumb and the earth was heaved with a strange terror, yet through which God’s holiness was declared to the universe, and in which forgiveness is pledged to the penitent. The most intensely aroused conscience can conceive of no law more pure than God’s. The most thoroughly startled and trembling conscience can ask no atonement more ample than Christ’s.

So, equally, to the affectionate and emotive nature inherent in man Christianity appeals. Presenting God to us, as no other system does, in the beauty of that holiness through which love beams, in the majesty of that power which wisdom directs, in the grandeur even of that eternal glory which is all made visible and personal to us in Jesus, it offers the object for our purest affection. It brings him to us through the beautiful biographies of a human life. It appeals to our love from the level of equality, even while it shadows the heart with the mystery of God—so it addresses the sensibility to joy, to hope, to perfect repose of soul in confidence and faith. There is not one constitutional power implanted in us, there is not one moral want felt by us, which Christianity does not meet. The only influence that debars this system from an instant conquest of every heart is the love of that heart for the world and for sin. This may be overcome. The system itself brings powers for overcoming it; among them the greatest conceivable by us. When that has become accomplished, the supremacy of the system is established in the soul. And if we remember that God has framed it, that he has intentionally so fitted it to man and so endued it with power for every appeal that he has made it self-diffusive, we scarcely shall doubt that supremacy is before it.

3. The accomplishment of this final supremacy of Christianity will nobly complete the circle of history; will give unity, wholeness to the annals of the race; will show through their courses a sublime method.

It is a fearful mystery—the permission of sin with its power in the world, and the exposure of so many to its desolating influence! If it could not wisely have been prevented while the system remained, why was not the race cut off from being, its history stayed in mid-progress, and the period put to such destructions? The question recurs, and presses for an answer. The reply that seems most nearly to meet it, and to satisfy the heart that is agitated by it, is this: This sin is for a time. It is permitted for a purpose. Its course of triumph draws near the end. Christianity is to overcome it, as a system of God for human renewal, replete with quickening and sanative force. Righteousness is to follow it, to restore beauty to the earth. And the ages that are past shall be as nothing in the comparison of those that are to come; peopled with happy and pure intelligences, serene with the presence and favor of God. If this is the order of history, then that becomes explicable, and God is revealed in it. Then sin itself shall be seen to have had uses. Then shall clearly be displayed, through the vast complete process, the wisdom, the grace, and the omnipotence of Jehovah. Before that majestic spiritual system amid which he presides, with which we have connection, where faculty is powerful, emotion vivid—before that shall be shown, through the progress of our race, the saddest yet the sublimest lessons. Light shall be shed on the nature of sin; on the terrible strength of its grasp on the will; on the fearful effects which it works where obeyed. Light shall be shed on the possibility of a recovery from sin unto holiness—a fact not unfolded in the economy of heaven; on the effectiveness of truth and moral appliance in meeting and subduing this terrible power; especially on the power and grace of God’s spirit, the source of knowledge and purity to the fallen. Light shall be shed on God’s character and being; on his patience, long-suffering, and unspeakable mercy; on the wisdom that arranged and the grace that established the agencies of redemption; on the Trinity of the divine nature, that stands above these and comes to manifestation at Bethlehem and on Calvary. Light shall be shed on the beauty of holiness, as contrasted against sin, in the blessedness which it erects on the ruins of the fall; on the power of God to make that holiness permanent. Light shall be shed on each principle of truth most needful to be known by intelligent beings, and each shall be set in vivid expression. Yet through the whole great scope of history, a sum of holiness, and so of joy, immeasurable by us, shall be secured; a result shall be accomplished most worthy of God. Where sin hath abounded, grace shall much more abound; and it shall reign, through righteousness, unto life. The splendid close of human history shall overshadow with beauty the gloom of the beginning. The dissonance of sin shall be lost amid praises.

This seems to be the method of history. It commends itself to us as appropriate to God. On another hypothesis we can scarcely understand why the earth was not dissolved, or its total population destroyed by the flood, instead of being left to be ravaged by sin. Particular historic events suggest this; especially the laborious introduction of Christianity, with the agencies combined in it, and its retinue of miracles. There is something, indeed, within ourselves—an impression of moral progress and order, as realized in the system administered on the earth—a sense, if we may so express it, of the rhythm and proportion of the history which God frames—an intuitive apprehension of the possible majestic unity to which all agencies may be subordinate, and through which may be revealed the glory of the highest—which gives new impulse to the belief of this result. In such apprehension we use not fancy or desire, but the noblest intelligent and moral powers with which God has endowed us. We are spontaneously impelled to attribute to it objective reality. Through it we seem, to ourselves at least, to enter the greatness and breadth of God’s plans; to stand for the time as under the shadow of the Throne! Remembering what man was, how fearfully he has fallen, yet what powers he retains, for what stations he is fitted, the inference fills us with the sense of its justness, it appeals to the soul with an almost self-evidencing power, that such a result is designed for the race. In its attainment the history of man shall come “full-circle”; the garden and the fall being lost in the effulgence of Calvary and the Ascension; and the earth, won back from darkness, restored from sin, illumined and purified by the grace of the holiest, becoming a nobler trophy of God’s power, a more beautiful witness to his wisdom and his love, than when it first hung, blushing and glad, upon the morning skies! Christianity supreme will close with songs and harping symphonies the turbulent drama of human history. R. S. Storrs.

The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.

“All Scripture is given by Inspiration of God.” Though this passage refers most directly to the Scripture of the Old Testament, yet it distinctly declares the nature of all inspiration; it is from God, it is God-breathed (Theopneustic). This is the radical import of the term; and it implies that, if a Scripture be not from God, it is not inspired; that, if it be from God, it is inspired. The text does not assert, as some interpret it, that all inspired Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for such a construction is contrary to the grammar of the sentence; but that each and all of those Scriptures to which the apostle refers are inspired and profitable.

1. PROBABILITY OF AN INSPIRED REVELATION.—Though the finite can not comprehend the Infinite, yet the Infinite One may condescend to reveal himself to his creatures; and man, though sinful, does yet ever know the law he always violates. Human language, too, with all its imperfections, if it can convey any real truth, may also impart such knowledge of God and man as is fitted to our needs. Man’s religious wants lead him to long that an Infinite Being may impart himself to the finite, and that the Perfect One may have pity on our very sinfulness. And if such inspiration be possible, then, we add, it may be recorded; it may be given in a writing, a Scripture. Of this, again, there is no antecedent impossibility.

If an inspired record of Divine truth exists, it is found in the Bible, or nowhere. This is the only book which, on the basis of history and general consent, can pretend to hold such an eminent and supreme place. Here is the perfect revelation, or we have none. Here are the words of God, or we have them not in any credible form. No creed, no system, no book, in its probable claims and paramount influence, can be compared with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The contents of the Bible, taken as a whole, afford a high probability of its inspiration. It is every way unique and wonderful. Its separate portions were composed by some forty writers, during a period of fifteen hundred years, and yet they all make one book, with one consecutive tive plan, from Genesis to the final Revelation, more regular, more progressive, more stately, than any epic or drama. All in it centers in one Person—that of the Redeemer; and has respect to one object—that of the redemption of the race from sin. Its special doctrines, too, bear the marks of superhuman truth and grandeur. Nowhere does the Divine Being appear so majestic and so condescending, so holy and so loving; nowhere is man so truly portrayed in his dignity and humiliation, in both his native and his regenerate estate, and in his immortal hopes and fears. The unity of the race and of the divine government is everywhere implied and enforced. Central in this marvelous volume, its very center of unity, is the God-man, our Saviour, our Prophet, Priest, and King, the ever-living Head of a divine kingdom, which is never to pass away. Miracles attest his divine commission, and that of his prophets and apostles also; while Prophecy speaks of him in her most exalted strains, proclaiming his advent through thousands of years, and announcing the perpetuity and final victory of his kingdom in those daring promises, which only Omniscience could truly utter, which Omnipotence alone could carry into execution in a manner so indubitable and unexampled. And all this is presented in such a wondrous style and method, that human literature has nothing of stateliness or of simplicity, of poetic inspiration or prosaic fidelity, of that self-forgetfulness in the writers, which is one of the surest tests of genius, of largeness of grasp and accuracy of delineation, of fervid eloquence, touching appeal, and concentrated aim, to be compared even in fugitive analogy with these utterances of the seers of Judea and the apostles of Jesus. History and experience too add their testimony; for this Book of books has had a divine efficacy; its words are spirit and life; penitence still confesses its abasement in the language of David; faith lingers upon the rapt visions of Isaiah; with John we meditate upon the very words of Jesus; with Paul we receive the assurance of redemption in looking unto Christ; with the oldest of the prophets we still anticipate the day when the seed of the woman shall crush all the powers of sin. The human heart knows no depth of spiritual sorrow, no height of spiritual joy, no elevation of faith, no wonder of divine or human love, for which it may not here find fitting speech. And to all the perplexing and final problems of human destiny, this same volume offers a definite, a truly rational, and an authoritative solution. Beyond its revelation no scheme of human wisdom has ever reached. The most arrogant system of pantheistic infidelity only resolves the Christian faith into barren and abstract ideas.—Such is this Book; and if it be such, if such a work has been written by fallible and sinful men, then we claim that there is an antecedent probability, that it is also from God, and not from man alone; that it is given by the inspiration of the Almighty. Inspiration is possible; it may be recorded; if it be recorded, it is only in the Bible; and the very contents of the Bible are such as to give an antecedent probability that it can not be the work of man, that it may be the Word of God.

2. NATURE OF INSPIRATION.—Inspiration designates that divine influence under which prophets or apostles spake or wrote, as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Christ is the great Revealer; the Holy Spirit inspires.

God has revealed himself and his will to men in a great variety of ways: by ministering angels; in visible signs and tokens; in voices to the rapt ear; in visions of the night; in deep sleep, as to Abraham (Gen. 15 : 12); to Moses, mouth to mouth, as he beheld the similitude of the Lord (Numbers 12 : 8); in pictures of future events, spread out as on a prophetic canvas; sometimes, even, in such prophetic ecstasy that the recipient seems conscious of naught else; in words at the time but indistinctly understood, and again in words felt and known in all their fullness of wisdom and of grace. Such divine revelations, too, are progressive in the sacred annals, given as men were able to bear them, ever advancing with man’s need and preparation, and in every stage fitted to his immediate wants, as also to prepare for yet higher manifestations. Three such eras are distinctly marked in Scripture, the legal, the prophetic, and the apostolic, the last centering in the person and words of Christ the Son, by whom he at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us. He is the grand Revealer, described not as receiving but as making a revelation; he is the crown and center of these divine works; in him the revelation is final and complete.

Of inspiration, now, in distinction from revelation, the proper and Scriptural function is to declare unto the world, through divinely-commissioned prophets and apostles, either orally or by writing, under the specific influence of the Holy Spirit, whatever has been thus revealed, and also all things pertaining to the kingdom of God, which are to be a matter of permanent record and instruction. It is a special divine influence for a special purpose. Its object is the communication of truth in an infallible manner, so that, when rightly interpreted, no error is conveyed. At times the revelation and inspiration are, doubtless, inseparable; as when a prophet or apostle at once utters or records what is revealed. This definite usage of the term inspiration is authorized by the text (2 Tim. 3 : 16) which declares that all Scripture is inspired, theopneustic—using a word found nowhere else in the Bible, and here applied to written documents. The term was translated “inspirata,” in the Vulgate, whence the word “inspired.” In 2 Pet. 1 : 21, it is said that holy men of God spake as they were moved (borne along) by the Holy Ghost, in which the same fact of a specific influence in respect to the Scriptures is clearly implied, as is apparent from the preceding verse.

The same passage, from the second epistle of Peter, may be used to elucidate another fact as to the nature of inspiration; that in all the sacred writings, both divine and human elements and knowledge coöperate and concur, the divine being supreme and controlling. “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost”; they were men, holy men, retaining this character, while influenced by the Spirit. The reverend Scriptures, it has been well said from ancient times, like the adorable person of our Lord, who is their sum, are a union of the divine with the human; and the chief errors as to the nature of inspiration have been finely compared with the heresies about the person of the Redeemer; they sprang from insisting upon the one side to the exclusion or suppression of the other. In both cases we have Docetæ and Ebionites, those who demand pure divinity and those who insist upon mere humanity. But all in Scripture is both divine and human; here, too, “the God shines gracious through the man.” The very word inspiration implies that a divine influence moves men to their utterances; and it is applied to the books, or the words they utter, considered as the result of such an influence. “We are witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost,” says Peter (Acts 5 : 32). That man can thus be made the medium for the very oracles of God, gives the highest evidence of the possible capacities and dignity of human nature, and illustrates the doctrine that he was made in the image of his Maker.

That the sacred Scriptures do contain human elements, and in their human integrity, though never separated from the divine, is apparent in their very structure. They are given us in human language, in the languages and idioms of their times—which is necessary to the proof of their authenticity. If we could show, as some uninspired men have tried to do, that the New Testament was written in classic Greek, we should also prove that it could not have been written by the men whose names it bears, nor in their times. Each leading book, too, has the impress of its special author in style and sentiment; if it had not, how could we show that it was genuine? Inspiration does not annul, it elevates individuality. Prophets and apostles, too, testify as to what they have heard and seen; they come to us as witnesses; and when they speak as such, the Spirit of all truth could not and would not lead them to say what they had not seen and heard. The writers, too, make faithful use of antecedent documents containing historic facts, and, it may be, the record of more primitive revelations; and these are of value and need even to inspired men. The human elements of Scripture come out most fully in its history and biographies, where neither the errors nor sins of men are withheld or palliated. Bad men speak as well as good; the angel of darkness as well as the angel of light; Peter denies his Lord; Paul rebukes Peter to his face, because he was to be blamed; David lapses into gross sin; the majesty of Solomon is tarnished; Abraham deceives; Adam falls; and of all these facts and sins, we have an inspired record, giving us the truth. And if inspiration did not give us all these things, of what value would it be in respect to history and fact? Even the most trivial personal details may serve an important office, such as inspiration could not neglect, in verifying the authorship and proving the authenticity of Epistles and prophecies. That cloak of Paul, of which it has been said that it “has come to higher honor than even the mantle of Elijah,” that cloak which has been made the covert of so much skepticism, and the parchments, too, may help to identify the writer to the reader for all times; besides teaching, what is not directly intended, that we should be careful of clothing and manuscripts. And Paul’s dietetic advice to Timothy about the “little wine,” he must needs write, as an inspired friend, when and as he wrote. His Epistle would be hardly genuine without it; it would lack verisimilitude. Did he, then, need inspiration to write it? The inspiration of him who counteth the very hairs of our heads might extend to this, since it helps to prove the genuineness of the Epistle, to say nothing of the capital argument for temperance, incidentally conveyed.

So wonderfully do the divine and human elements commingle in the Scriptures, as do first and second causes also in all the realm of providence, that it is in vain to try to limit inspiration to doctrine and truth, excluding history from its sphere. The attempt is as unphilosophical as it is unscriptural. No analysis can detect such a line of separation; it is both invisible and not to be spiritually discerned. Historic facts contain as well as enforce truth and doctrine. The fact of the death of Christ contains the truth of the atonement; it is that truth. Genealogies instruct us in the truth of the Messiahship. Such a distinction lacks evidence, coherence, and possibility. The whole divine revelation is an historic matter; Christianity is a body of facts, and not of mere doctrines; Christ is an historic personage, and not a congeries of abstract truths; history and theology are in their inmost nature one.

Nor yet, again, is it possible to draw the line, and satisfy the conditions of the case, by the Arminian and Socinian formula, that the Bible contains a revelation, in distinction from the position that the Bible, as a whole, is an inspired book. The apparent truth in this position is due to the want of discrimination between revelation and inspiration. It is a fact that the Bible contains a revelation; it is also a fact that all that is in the Bible is not a matter of revelation, in the strict usage of the word. But these points do not help us at all about the real question, unless it be arbitrarily assumed that inspiration extends no further than revelation, which it is impossible to prove either on rational or historic grounds.

To the idea of inspiration, also, it belongs that it should be considered as plenary—that is, the divine influence, which is its source, extends to and pervades the whole contents of the Scriptures, both historical and doctrinal; it includes the whole of the strict divine revelations, and also whatever the sacred writers utter as historians and witnesses. Inspiration is the organizing principle of the whole Bible, just as the principle of life is the organizing energy in every bodily frame, extending to all its parts, even those seemingly the most insignificant. It is not confined to new truths, it rehearses the old; but of both the old and the new it makes one coherent whole. It comprises both the matter and the form of the Bible; the matter in the form in which it is conveyed and set forth. It extends even to the language, not in the mechanical sense that each word is dictated by the Holy Spirit, but in the sense that, under divine guidance, each writer spake in his own language, according to the measure of his knowledge acquired by personal experience, by the testimony of others, or by immediate divine revelation. They spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And thus is the inspiration plenary, since the Holy Spirit works in all parts of the Scripture, and makes of the many one, of terrestrial dialects a celestial tongue, out of human and divine elements one divine work, God’s book, given by men and for men.

This doctrine of plenary inspiration is not inconsistent with the acknowledged fact that different parts of the Scripture are of different grades of importance for our immediate spiritual benefit. The books of the Chronicles are of importance for the history of God’s kingdom, and to give us that history is one object of inspiration. Nor does the doctrine prevent us from recognizing the fact that the ceremonial law has passed into desuetude, for it was the historic type of him who fulfilled the law, and without inspiration it could not have had its accurate prophetic character. Nor does plenary inspiration forbid us to say that some portions of Scripture are of relatively greater and others of relatively less moment; all parts of it are needed as parts of the one whole; the head can not say to the hand, I have no need of thee, nor the eye to the foot, I have no need of thee; but yet the head is better than the hand, and the eye is quicker than the foot. There are fundamental truths, and truths not fundamental; some parts have a majestic dignity, others are lowly and obscure; but the great and the small, the necessary and the contingent, together make one whole. As it is in the material Cosmos, so is it in the fair order of the Book of God—one mind working to one end pervades the whole; and the very marvel is that such innumerable facts and details are wrought together into one plan.

Nor does the doctrine of plenary inspiration demand absolute and final perfection in each writer or in each individual statement. The whole of revealed truth is to be gathered only from the whole Scriptures; nor is all truth revealed even here, but only what is necessary to the great object of the book—the manifestation of God’s redemptive love. The statements of each writer, it is well said by Dr. Alliott, “may be partial and imperfect in point of fullness, while complete and perfect in point of truthfulness.” We need all the gospels to get at the entire life of our Saviour; each is to be harmonized with the others; the four gospels combined together realize that beautiful comparison, which of old was made of them, to the cherubim, one living spirit, yet a fourfold form. The whole doctrine of the New Testament is to be gathered, not from Paul alone, nor from John, nor from Peter, nor from James, but from James, Peter, John, and Paul together. The harmonizing of different historical statements and the analogy of faith are as necessary in the interpretation of the Scriptures as of any other writings; and only a very mechanical and human notion of inspiration has ever led to a different conception.

Much less does plenary inspiration demand that the sacred Scriptures shall contain all truth on all subjects, or the scientific form of truth on the matters to which it incidentally refers, but about which it does not pretend to teach. Its popular statements in natural science are to be received as popular; they do not claim to be anything more. If we have entire truth on the subjects for which the Scriptures were written, and no error on other incidental matters, it is all that can be needed. And one of the most wonderful indirect testimonies to the Bible is found in the fact that science has not been able to establish conclusions inconsistent with the narration of the creation, or overthrowing the unity of the race. One of the ablest naturalists of Germany, Wagner, the successor of Blumenbach, at Göttingen, maintains, as did Blumenbach, “that the latest results of scientific investigation leave the Biblical account of the descent of mankind from one pair wholly unmolested.”

As to the nature of inspiration, then, we conclude that it is to be distinguished from direct revelation, that it involves a combination of human and divine elements with the constant supremacy of the divine, and that it is best described as plenary, extending to all parts of the sacred record, giving us in the whole Scripture all needful truth in respect to the history and doctrines of the kingdom of God.

3. PROOF OF THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE.—The direct proof is derived from a variety of sources and not from a few isolated texts alone, yet it ultimately centers in the credibility of our Saviour and of his apostles. He testifies to the authority of the Old Testament as the Word of God, and he promises the Spirit who was to guide and inspire the apostles—so that the proof of inspiration stands or falls with the authority of Christ.

Of such inspiration there may be said to be an anterior probability, on the general ground, which we here take for granted, that God has made a revelation to man. If he would make a revelation, it is natural to infer that he would secure the record of it from error. With the fact of a revelation we naturally connect the idea of an authoritative and final Scripture, valid for all times. He who gave the greater would not withhold the less. He who proposed to redeem mankind would not leave them without sufficient and authentic witness of his gracious will.

The Scriptures of the Old Testament are pervaded by the most frequent claims of divine authority. The law given by Moses was to be kept by the side of the Ark of the Covenant (Deut. 31) within the Holy of Holies; it was to be read before all the people every seven years; it was to be copied by the kings of Israel (Deut. 17: 18); the subsequent writings were added to it; individual writers testify that they had a divine command to write, as Moses (Exod. 34: 27; Deut. 31: 19), Isaiah (1: 2; 8: 1), Jeremiah (1: 2; 36: 2). Daniel says, “The spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue.” But the chief and crowning proof is from the testimony of Christ and the apostles. They refer to these writings, and to these alone, as having divine origin and authority; they call them the Scripture, and apply this term in this sense to naught else.

While the apostles thus testify to the inspired authority of the older Scriptures, they also claim that their own writings are the Word of God, and are to be received as having at least an equal divine authority (1 Thes. 2: 13; 2 Cor. 5: 20; 13: 3; Eph. 3: 3-5). Apostles are coördinate with the prophets (Eph. 2: 20). Thus is the proof of the inspiration of the New Testament linked with the evidence for the inspiration of the Old Testament. In some respects the apostles claim, as throughout the Epistles to the Galatians and Hebrews, that the new is higher than the old. Moses was the servant, but Christ is the Son. While they testify to the inspiration of the Old Testament, they also claim for themselves a new, a higher, and a final revelation.

The direct evidence for the inspiration of the New Testament goes back to the testimony and authority of the Saviour; he declares of his own, as of the Old Testament words, that they shall not pass away (Luke 21: 33); that the word that he speaks shall judge men at the last day (John 12: 48); in his last intercessory prayer he pleads that he has given to his disciples the words which his Father gave unto him (John 17: 8). Four times, during his earthly ministry, he gave a special promise and pledge to his apostles that, in all they said as apostles, the Spirit should guide them into the truth. The first occasion was when he sent forth the twelve (Mat. 10: 19, 20), saying, It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you; the second is narrated in Luke (12: 11, 12), take ye no thought, for the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say; the third is in the week of his passion (Mark 13: 11, and Luke 21: 14, 15), to the same import; the fourth and final pledge is preserved in the Gospel of John, in the full and abundant promises of Christ’s parting lessons; his disciples were to receive the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth (John 14: 16, 17); he was to teach them all things, and to bring all things to their remembrance, whatsoever Christ had said unto them (14: 25, 26); he was to guide them into all truth, was to show them things to come

(John 16 : 12, 13). Such were the promises and pledges of the Redeemer, and they were most perfectly fulfilled in the royal Pentecostal gift (Acts 2 : 4 ; 4 : 31), whereby the disciples received wisdom and boldness which none were able to gainsay or resist. And the promise includes and covers there writings as well as their sayings; if it did not, it were broken in that which is most important. They themselves say they write as they speak (1 John 1 : 3, 4 ; 2 Thes. 2 : 15 ; Gal. 1 : 8, 12). And through their writings there is but one strain, one language. Paul begins each of his Epistles, excepting that to the Hebrews, with a claim of divine authority and commission, which never deserts him; he proclaims, as under a conscious divine influence, in a lordly strain, the very oracles of God. He declares to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 2 : 11, 12) that he has received the very Spirit of God, who alone knoweth the things of God; his words are in demonstration of the Spirit (1 Cor. 2 : 4, and 2 Cor. 2 : 17); he has a revelation of the mystery not made known in other ages (Eph. 3 : 5, and Gal. 1 : 12); the word which he declared to the Thessalonians (1 Thes. 2 : 13) was in truth the word of God; even the words he speaks are those which the Holy Ghost teacheth (1 Cor. 2 : 13). It is indeed said that Paul twice disclaims inspiration; even if he did in the cases alleged, he by inference claims it elsewhere; but when he says (1 Cor. 7 : 12), I speak and not the Lord, and that he has no commandment (v. 25), he is not distinguishing between what is inspired and uninspired, but between what is a matter of direct command and of apostolic advice. That this advice was inspired appears from verse 40, when he adds, I think also that I have the Spirit of God.

Peter, too, reckons Paul’s writings as Scripture (2 Pet. 3 : 15, 16), and claims like authority for himself (1 Pet. 1 : 12); he preaches the word which endureth for ever (1 Pet. 1 : 25, and 4 : 11); he puts his sayings on the same ground as the Old Testament (2 Pet. 3 : 2). The authority of Mark and Luke is resolved by the universal consent of the Church into that of Peter and Paul. The Apocalypse in its very form is an immediate divine revelation.

Such is the substance of the evidence, which leaves us only the alternative between imposture and inspiration. Self-deception to such an extent with such men is incredible. And these isolated citations give us the bare outline of the proof; the full evidence can only come from reading the Scriptures themselves, and seeing the unequaled majesty and authority with which the prophets and apostles discourse of those high themes upon which the wisest of men lisp and stammer. An air of conscious truth pervades their discourse; they speak as by a divine impulse, and in the name of him from whom there is no appeal. Their authority is from him. The Spirit of Christ was the spirit of prophecy; the Spirit of Christ is the spirit of the apostles.

We rest here upon the authority of apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone. The argument for the inspiration of both the Old and New Testaments runs back to and centers in Him, who is the way, and the truth, and the life. The ultimate testimony to inspiration is thus not human, but divine.

4. CONCLUSION.—The theory of plenary inspiration, as we have already given it, allows that all of Scripture is inspired; it recognizes the relative integrity of the divine and human elements; and it judges all parts of the Bible with respect to the great object for which it was given, to redeem mankind. Men are the free organs for this high communication of divine truth; they are selected and trained for this special work; and the divine influence elevates and purifies their faculties, their thoughts, and, where needful, their very language. And the book, written under such inspiration, for our instruction, contains whatever is needful for all mankind, whether in this life or in that which is to come, and is thus a treasury for all times. Solomon gives us the maxims of worldly wisdom, and John discourses of the heavenly Jerusalem; we have that marriage song of earthly love, which only the impure revile, as well as the promise of that blessed estate where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God. Temperance and chastity are enjoined for the care of our mortal bodies, while by faith we look forward to the time when this mortal shall put on immortality. History here instructs us even in minute details as to the chosen people of God, for of them the Redeemer was to come; and in his sacred Person the sum of type and prophecy was fulfilled. The same history tells us of the relations of the ancient nations to this one central kingdom, while prophecy, not yet consummated, but ever in the course of fulfillment, holds up the elevating vision of its final triumph to cheer us in all our conflicts. The highest truths, beyond which thought can not reach, as to God and man, and their relations to each other, center in him, who is both God and man, and the king of this divine empire. All, even the most insignificant portions of the original Scriptures, have their life from his Spirit, even as the principle of life embraces the hairs of the head as well as the beating of the heart. All is shaped by the wise Builder into one glorious temple, which speaks of him from the foundation to the topmost stone, and whose arches reverberate with songs of saints and angels magnifying the glories of his grace.

And hence, in conformity with the teachings of Scripture, with the confessions of the Church in all times, with the demands of Christian experience and of a wise philosophy, we judge that inspiration is to be defined as plenary, working in all portions of the Bible. It is unwise and mechanical to try and measure it out by degrees, here a suggestion, there an elevation, again a direction, and in fine a superintendency. It is more than a superintending guidance; for that expresses but an external relation between the Spirit and the writer. But inspiration is an influence within the soul, divine and supernatural, working through all the writers in one organized method, making of the many one, by all one book, the book of God, the book for man, divine and human in all its parts; having the same relation to all other books that the person of the Son of God has to all other men, that the Church of the living God has to all other institutions. H. B. Smith.

Faith and Revelation.

FAITH, in its widest usage, designates a conviction in the reality of things unseen and eternal; in a more religious sense, it is trust in God and God’s word; in a more specific and theological meaning, it embraces the articles of belief drawn out into a definite system: in its most specific and evangelical sense, it denotes that full reliance upon Christ by which we become partakers of the salvation which he alone has purchased for the human race.

In all these senses, excepting the first, it has certain marked traits by which it is distinguished from philosophy.* It rests upon

• Of the relations of Philosophy and Faith, the same profound thinker eloquently writes: “The problems of the union of the finite with the infinite, of the reconciliation of a holy God with a sinful race, and of our personal and immortal destiny, which philosophy can only state, the Christian system solves. The full perception and conviction of this great fact about Christianity would end, and this alone can terminate, the unnatural war between philosophy and faith; for philosophy and faith are set at variance only by sin, and kept in discord only from not seeing Christ as he is! Philosophy and faith! both are from God; the one may descry the end, and the other gives us the means; the one states the problems which the other solves; philosophy shows us the labyrinth, and Christ gives us the clew; the former recognizes the necessity of redemption, the latter gives us the redemption itself. The two at variance! When every Christian knows, what one has said, that ‘when we speak the lanauthority, upon good, upon the highest authority, but still upon authority—confirmed, indeed, by experience; but it is the authority, and not the experience, which is ultimate and supreme. That authority is divine and decisive; it is the very word of God recorded in the Scriptures. As face answers to face in a glass, so does faith to the Bible, which it receives, both in history and in doctrine; and it is not so anxious to harmonize the parts as to imbibe the whole. It connects all things directly with the providence of God; to this it is ever submissive. It is content with miraguage of the Bible, we speak our mother tongue’; at variance! only when philosophy goes ‘sounding on its dim and perilous way,’ averting the heart from him who of God is made unto us wisdom, as well as, and because, righteousness and redemption; at variance! only as the light of the sun is at variance with the heat of the sun, or as the light and heat of the great ruler of the day are at variance with the lesser lights that rule the night; at variance! only as redemption is at variance with sin, eternity with time, the incarnation with creation, and the God of grace with the God of justice; at variance! ever and only as the solution of a problem is at variance with the problem itself; since all that Christ proposes and does is to solve, in a practical, living method, the absorbing problem of the relation of man to God and of sin to redemption. For this end was he born, and for this cause came he into the world, that he might be the King of the eternal truth.”

cles, and it accepts mysteries; it says God alone is wise. Here we see as through a glass, darkly; there we shall know as we are known.

Such is faith; it is called a life, and it is worthy of the name of life, it is so full and satisfying. The man who has it would as soon doubt whether his body were animated by the life of nature, when he is conscious of the movements of its muscles in their most strenuous efforts, and of the full delights of nervous sensation, as he would doubt whether his soul were a partaker of spiritual life, when its powers are expanded to their utmost intensity of action and of blessedness by the gracious truths which center in the person of our Lord.

If this be so, we ask next, what is faith, what does it claim to be, in what does it rest? Faith, internally, is a state of trust; but it is always trust in something external. Its real character can only be determined by stating its objects. And the Christian’s faith reposes, as we before said, upon a revelation—an historical revelation—a revelation historically attested, attested by miracle and by prophecy; a revelation recorded in a volume which claims to be inspired. It is not primarily a system of doctrines, nor a confession, nor a speculation; but it is a grand historical economy, a manifestation of God and his purposes, an annunciation of supernatural truth by natural agencies, by prophets and teachers, and, last of all, by Jesus Christ; a manifestation forming a part of human history, connected and progressive through thousands of years. And all this series of revelations comes to us in the Scriptures, which give us both the facts and the divine interpretation of them. Christianity thus claims to be a real revelation of God, made in the best form in which we can conceive a revelation to be made, made to give the highest and most needed knowledge, made to redeem mankind. And this whole historic revelation bears with steady and concentrated aim upon one person, himself an historical personage, himself a man, in whom it is declared that heaven and earth are reconciled, that the great problems of human destiny are solved. And thus the Christian religion presents itself as adapted to man’s highest wants in an exclusive sense, and with redeeming efficacy. This is the first aspect of the Christian economy, and here is the primary basis of faith. But this is not all, for faith claims an internal evidence as well as an historical basis. Man is a believer, made to trust. The infirmities of his finite and the necessities of his sinful condition make faith necessary to the attainment of the great ends of his being. And the Christian finds in his own heart a profound experience which fills and satisfies his soul, and which is entirely responsive to the substance of the divine revelation, as recorded in the word of God. And here is another series of facts, reaching through thousands of years, embracing men of every clime and degree, the sage and the simple, the civilized and barbarian, the young and the mature, the living and the dying, who all, with one consent, testify that in this revelation they have found their solace and support, that it is the source of the highest activity and blessedness of all their powers. And, in the experience of believers also, all converges around the same divine person, who is the center and crown of the historic revelation.

Nor is this all. That revelation, historically so grand in its origin, and confirmed by human experience, has also entered into and controlled the whole course of human history and of human thought since the coming of Jesus of Nazareth. And here is another series of facts. History is the grand test of truth; it does not lie, for it is the ever unfolding providence of God. It is more authoritative than mere speculation, for it gives us the highest reality. And in history the Christian system has existed as a real and permanent power; it has been the center of man’s noblest thoughts and strongest feelings in his most cultivated state for eighteen hundred years; it has controlled the destinies and led the march of the nations; from its bitter contests it has ever emerged with added luster, as though endowed with immortal energy. It is superior to defeat. Its power is now more intense and diffused than ever before. And thus is Christianity not only an historic revelation and an internal experience, but also an organic, diffusive, plastic, and triumphant force in human history; and in this history, as in the revelation, and as in the experience, the center around which all revolves is the person of Jesus Christ.

Nor yet is this all. This revelation has another aspect which has already been hinted at, but which requires a fuller statement. If man were entirely satisfied with the course of nature—with being born, living, and dying; if he had no sense of sin, if he had never sinned, he would not be ever asking those sublime questions, to which nature is deaf and reason is dumb. But he knows something of God, of law, of death, and eternity, and he would fain know more; for here are inquiries in comparison with which all the secrets of nature are not only insignificant, but patent to our gaze. Now, it is the grand claim of the Christian revelation that it answers these vital questions; that it solves all the great moral problems of human destiny. For each enigma, so dark to reason, it has a definite and an authoritative response; for all the great moral problems of our destiny it offers a solution, and the solutions are given in the person and work of Christ; they all meet in the same radiant center, in whom the revelation converges, in whom the believer finds his blessedness, and to whom all subsequent history has brought its loyal tribute.

This, then, is the primary aspect in which the Christian faith is to be viewed; as an historical reality, confirmed by experience, influencing history, and professing to solve the greatest questions of our destiny, and all concentrating in Jesus Christ, a personal object of faith and love, the very manifestation of God here upon the earth. And here, under God, is the hiding-place of the strength of faith. It is the majesty of a revealed economy; the profoundest experience of the human heart is with it; the might of history testifies unto it; it, and it alone, gives the key which unlocks the mysteries of our moral being. And thus is the Christian revelation, considered as a grand, historic, experienced economy, centering in one person, distinct from all other pretended revelations. H. B. Smith.

The Church.

Christ the Institutor of one Church in Successive Dispensations.—God has had but one Church in the world, and that Church has existed since the revelation of the seed of the woman at the fall of man. When, at first, Adam and Eve united in the act of offering sacrifice, connected with prayer and praise, the visible Church catholic was formed, and we can not doubt that it owed its being to “the voice of the Lord God,” who was heard in the garden at the cool of the day, calling the attention of the guilty pair to their destitute and sinful state, and to the way by which fallen men were to be rescued from the curse and condemnation of a broken law. The covenant made with Abraham was without doubt an ecclesiastical covenant, in which the visible Church in general was interested. This appears from the fact that, while some of the patriarch’s natural posterity were shut out from its blessings, express provision was made for the admission of others who were not his seed; and from the promise of being made “the father of many nations,” which could not have been fulfilled if the covenant had had respect only to the one nation of the Jews. He who proclaimed this covenant to the patriarch was no other than the angel of Jehovah, the uncreated Messenger of the covenant; for that covenant, we know, “was confirmed of God in Christ.” With regard to the solemn and awful transactions at Sinai, when the whole Levitical economy was fixed and arranged, we are assured that the law was “ordained by angels in the hands of a Mediator.” At the introduction of the New Testament dispensation—that dispensation which is to continue to the end of time—we are assured that the Lord Jesus Christ himself administered ordinances, authorized and sent forth ministers, countenanced with his presence the social meetings of the Church, and, on the day of Pentecost, shed abundantly on his assembled disciples the influences of his Spirit.

Christ Head over all Things to the Church.—The fact of Christ’s mediatorial rule over the Church is plainly testified in the Scriptures. He is “King upon the holy hill of Zion—King of Zion; he reigns over the house of Jacob for ever; the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the Head of the Church; he is the Head of the body, the Church. Moses was faithful in all his house as a servant, but Christ as a son over his own house, whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.” They “who sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb,” address him, besides other titles, by that of “King of Saints.” Therefore, however independent of man, the Church is under subjection to Christ. The doctrines which it is the duty of the Church to believe and profess are such as he taught. The ordinances to be observed are his institutions. The laws to be obeyed are his laws. The matter of faith, the form of worship, the line of conduct, are alike sanctioned by his authority. The ministers of religion, neither individually nor collectively, possess any legislative power. Their authority is wholly ministerial, and is subordinate to that of Christ. They are at best but servants, and whatever they do they are required to do in the name of their divine Lord and Master.

The Church possesses a Character of Visible Organization.—It is spoken of in Scripture as “a body,” the members of which exhibit admirable symmetry, nice adaptation, and wise subserviency one to another—as a “house,” all the parts of which are “fitly framed together”; as a “city,” whose streets are distributed with regularity, and whose municipal regulations are calculated to secure the peace and order of the inhabitants; as a “kingdom” and as a “nation,” figures which suggest ideas of good government, orderly management, and proper subordination. The nature of things and the necessity of the case require that the Church be considered as a thoroughly organized society. W. S.—God has made some things to be essential in the organization of the Christian Church, without which there can be no church, but a merely human association. There must be credible evidence of piety, some visible form of public recognition and mutual bond of covenant relationship, and an assent to a Scriptural creed. Provision must also be made for gospel officers, ordinances, and discipline. The whole must rest on the foundation of Jesus Christ, and his sovereign authority must be recognized in the prayers and praises and personal consecration of all the members. There may be good men where there is no such organization—yea, there must be good men, in order to such an institution; but those good men can constitute no gospel church in the absence of these requisitions. The forms in which these elements shall be combined have less consequence; the substance must be present. L. Hickok.

The Church consists of an Organized Body of Believers in Christ.—A Christian is a man united to Christ by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; and a church is a body of men, really or by a credible profession, thus united to Christ, organized for the purposes of Christian worship, the proclamation of the gospel, and for mutual watch and care. If this be the Scriptural definition of a church, we are not at liberty to alter it. The Church consists of the called, and every body of the called organized for church purposes is a church, whether local or denominational. Everywhere in the New Testament the word ecclesia is used as a collective term for the called. As a man’s being a Christian does not depend upon anything external—upon circumcision or uncircumcision, upon stature, color, or nationality—so whether a body of Christians be a church can not depend upon anything external. A nation is a nation, whether its government be monarchical, aristocratic, or republican. So a church is a church, whatever be the form of its external organization. Nothing can be essential to the being of a church that is not essential to the Christianity of its members. “Ubi Spiritus Dei, ibi Ecclesia,” has in all ages been a motto and an axiom. C. H.

On the authority of the New Testament, the Church is the body of persons who believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Saviour of men, crucified and risen; and so believe in him as to be personally conscious of a supreme desire to live his spiritual life, to resemble him, and be his true redeemed disciples. This definition takes the whole qualification for church-membership out of the power of sects and external ceremonies, lodging it in the internal region of the heart, among the affections and motives, whence all life makes its way out into speech, profession, and conduct. Its only test, therefore, is spiritual, not formal. Love to God as manifest in Christ, and love to man as God’s child, must be the ruling affections in the soul, whether they have conformed the character perfectly to them or not. The Church is the aggregate of these consecrated souls, aiming and longing, above all things, to live righteously, irrespective of names, of forms, of creeds, of age, of place, except so far as these affect this internal, central consecration to Christ. If there were only “two or three” such persons in the world, they would be a church, and Christ, fulfilling his promise, would be there in the midst of them. In all periods since Christ ascended, this has been the Church. It is distinct from all other bodies, whether scientific, civil, educational, benevolent, moral, or even religious, if they are not religious after the way and gospel of Christ. Its boundaries, as it is embodied in actual persons, may be indistinct to man’s eye, but they are plain to God’s; and the definition is plain. The Church is that body of people, in whatever age or nation, of which Christ is literally and spiritually the Head. And any one particular church, here or there, is a smaller collection of such people, and so a branch of the Church Universal. F. D. H.—There is a Church invisible, which enfolds and embraces all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity; which embraces these, to whatever confession they may belong—these, and none else but these. T.

The Church is the nursery of saints, not less than the refuge of sinners. By its doctrine and discipline, by the spiritual instruction and vigilant superintendence it provides, the edification of its members in knowledge, holiness, comfort, and social duty is promoted. The ordinances to which it gives access, and the interest it secures in the prayers of those who have power with God, can not fail to render the fellowship of the Church a distinguished means of extending knowledge, strengthening faith, confirming love, deepening humility, increasing joy, and cherishing every devout and holy affection. W. S.—The relations of the believer with the living water, which is Christ, are immediate; and the Church, the Christian commonwealth, during successive ages, is the river which brings to us the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and, so to speak, Jesus Christ himself. Without the Church there is no Christianity and no Christians. The very book which contains the truth is altered, forgotten, or perishes; and without an entirely new revelation, without a miracle incessantly repeated, you remain in ignorance and death. The Church, by its volume and its weight, forms a current which carries it forward, and bears to each of you that word, that name, that invisible element which, incorporating itself with you, renews your whole being. What formed around you that Christian atmosphere which you have not been able to avoid breathing? what created in your heart those spiritual wants of which before the gospel there was no idea? Though you knew it not, it was the Church; and if you believe me you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the importance which the apostles and Jesus Christ himself attach to the idea of the Church, that living and continual personification of the whole body of believers, and the remarkable prepossession which so often leads the sacred writers to speak of the Church where you would have spoken only of the soul. In fact, your Christianity, how individual soever it may be (and it never can be too much so), is extracted from, is stamped, so to speak, by the Christianity of sixty generations. Ages and nations have labored for each of you; each of you is an heir of antiquity, and the work of a whole world. A. V.

The Christian Church of the present, with all its faults and weaknesses, is the salt and the light of the world. As holding, preserving, and spreading the faith of Christ, as built on the feeling of brotherhood, and on trust in a common Saviour, as bound together by social worship, sacraments, a ministry and a discipline, and as containing in itself a self-reforming power, it is one of the bonds which bind mankind together, and on it the hopes of mankind in a great measure rest. Its influence extends far beyond its own pale, and beyond the religious interests of man; it originates or aids every effort to make him wiser, happier, and more manly. T. D. Woolsey.—Its aim is not reached in the communion of saints. There is a real end to which these are preliminary. It exists for the blessing and conquest of men. The field given to it is the world: the world of all kindreds and tongues, but also the world of human sin, and human misery, and human want. All this human life, with its stately possibilities, with its ceaseless thought and energy, its huge but common daily toil, its cries of pain and despair, its weakness, and crushed hopes, and awful shame, its alleys of poverty, its dens of vice, its wounded spirits, its bleeding hearts, its pitiful social sores—to win this life for Christ, to penetrate it at every point like the light of the morning—this is the mission of the Church. W. F. Stevenson.

Christ’s doctrine of brotherhood is the germ of all social virtues and reforms. It refines sympathy, quickens justice, kindles charity, and inspires devotion to truth, duty, and public welfare. There is no refinement of education, manners, virtue, or charity, not provided for in this doctrine. A late historian of communism, deploring its failures, incidentally directs attention to the Christian Church as the most cheering hope of socialism. And what do reformers seek, not provided for in the Church? Her philosophy is more profound, reforming the life by changing the heart. Her dispensation of charity is without expense of rents, pageants, or official service, and better guarded against frauds and partiality. Besides, she cultivates moral feeling and religious aspiration, without which material charities lose half their value. The Church perfected is the most effective Temperance Society, the most promising Moral Reform Association, the most useful Beneficial Order. While the special reformer strikes at a branch, the Church lays the axe at the root of the tree. While the special reformer would direct his water-power upon some single detached wheel, the Church would direct it upon a shaft, that by impinging cogs turns all the related wheels of a stupendous machinery. The most comprehensive of all reforms is Christianizing the world. Christianity incarnated in feelings, sentiments, customs, manners, and laws, will perfect the social order of the world. W. W. Everts.

Perpetuity of the Church.—No outward events affect its existence. The apostles, one by one, pass away; the Church lives on. Great teachers and preachers arise and work, through many lands, and then are not; the Church remains. One language disappears from use, and others become mere languages of letters; but the Church learns others, and is not for an hour interrupted in its life. The Empire falls, in flaming ruin—the trophies of twelve hundred years crashing together in smoking heaps, above which rise barbarian shouts, with wails of woe that fill the heavens. The Church is not smitten by that destruction. It teaches the savage barbarian its truth, and is seen, like its Lord, walking unscathed amid the furnace, speaking the words of holy cheer to them that suffer. It is corrupted; but again it renews its life from Christ, and becomes, as of old, his faithful witness. A new era begins in human affairs; it is not thereby superseded. It makes the recent arts its ministers, the more powerful machineries its facile instruments. It rides abroad on the wheels of new letters, scatters its seeds in the furrows of revolution, and incorporates other races in itself. When the time for that has come, it crosses the seas in the track of the discoverer; it plants its standards upon new continents, and makes the farthest islands its home as truly as was Antioch or the plain of Philippi. And it is around us here to-day as vital in itself, and as closely conformed to its primitive model, as if but eighteen years had passed, not eighteen centuries, since first it appeared. Resting for ever on the lordship of Christ, established in him as a brotherhood of believers, simple as the home is, yet more impressive in its simplicity than in all the glitter and complex apparatus of Roman pomp—the Church abides; immovable as mountains; not afraid of decay; watching the rise and change of states; waiting the development and the glory it shall have, as speeding years bring in millennium. It abides, while all things pass. It shall abide, while the earth continues; because founded on the fact that in him from whose life and death it springs God was incarnate. R. S. Storrs.

Considerations respecting Christian Missions.

Principle underlying all Christian Effort.—As the organizing principle of the kingdom of God on earth is the love of God, inbreathed by the Holy Spirit, so the characteristic expression of it is love to Christ manifested by his followers. Love to Christ as man; as the representative of a race redeemed and purchased by his blood; as the representative of that eternal and all-comprehending Mercy, which, through the agency of his followers, is to fall, like the rain and the sunlight, upon the pathway of universal man. This, as touching the relation of man to his fellow-man, is the distinctive and characteristic feature of the kingdom of God on earth. In one word, this is Christianity. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” There may be much in other organizations, other systems, other sovereignties which Christianity approves. There may be many precepts and maxims of human morality and human prudence which it envelops and sanctions. But in this one thing it is peculiar. In this one thing it stands forth, transcendent, glorious, alone. IT IS THE LOVE OF GOD MANIFESTED IN LOVE TO UNIVERSAL MAN.

But manifested, let us ask further, in what form? The kingdom of God is spiritual and moral. Its appropriate and characteristic action is therefore spiritual and moral. It is action which aims to deliver mankind from the power of sin, by propagating everywhere faith in Christ as a spiritual deliverer from sin. The spirit which prompts the Church to this action, we call the Missionary Spirit. It would be easy to cite a thousand crucial instances to prove that where this spirit burns the Church lives and flourishes, that where this spirit flags the Church wanes and dies. As touching human relations, then, it follows that the missionary spirit constitutes Christianity. It is the very core and essence of it. It is that which being given, Christianity is given, and which being taken away, Christianity is taken away. It is that without which Christianity can not exist or be conceived. And conversely, it is that which without Christianity could never have existed, and would never have been conceived by man.

If these views touching the characteristic essence of Christianity itself are correct, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the true missionary spirit in the Church is the measure of her Christian principle, the test and thermometer of her piety. H. Smith.

The Missionary Idea and Spirit an Inspiration of the Gospel.—The one blood of the cross is offered to all, and adapted to all in whose veins flows the one blood of creation. That blood is as adequate for the redemption of the whole race as for the redemption of a single soul. It is wonderful to observe how the unities cluster around the cross of Christ—one God and Father of all, one Mediator, one dying race, one offering for sin, one divine Spirit, one faith, one baptism, one gospel, one Church, one common salvation, and one eternal heaven. There is but one Bible and but one religion made for man. In this respect Christianity stands forth in solitary and unapproachable grandeur. All other religions have been local and national, without even the conception of a universal extension. All others have risen, flourished, and decayed within their narrow domains, except only as they have been propagated by immigration or the sword. None but Christianity has ever sent its missionaries across the seas and its evangelists to the ends of the earth. It has been reserved for the gospel to grasp the idea of one faith for all nations, and to teach that its field is the world, and its home the heart of every human being.

Christian Europe and America the Result of Missions to Heathen.—The European nations are now the most enlightened, powerful, and highly civilized portion of the globe. And what has civilized them? The gospel of Jesus Christ. By what instrumentality were they converted to Christ? By the preaching of the cross; by missions to the heathen. They were once all heathens, of the darkest, fiercest, most vindictive character. When Christianity first encountered them they were as ignorant, as barbarous, as much without hope and without God in the world as any of the pagan tribes and nations to which the gospel is now sent. But during the long progress of ages the gospel was preached, the Scriptures were translated, the generations were taught and trained, the foundations of the Church were laid, a native ministry was raised up, and the mighty change was wrought. For centuries all Europe was a missionary field; and at last all Europe was converted from idolatry to Christ. The rude Goth, the roving Vandal, the treacherous Frank, the warlike Norman, the daring Saxon, the ferocious Hun, the sturdy German, the impetuous Celt, the hardy Scot, the fur-clad Scandinavian became a Christian. Let it never be forgotten that all the nations of modern Europe were evangelized and civilized by Christianity. This was its second great missionary triumph, not less decisive and important than the first. This is the work which it was doing through all the middle ages. And though its power was greatly impaired by the corruption and despotism of the papacy, yet its progress was onward and upward; and it prepared the material out of which sprang the memorable Reformation of the sixteenth century. And now behold the result of missions to the heathen—Christian Europe and Christian America, two continents conquered and given to Christ. Shall we, then, whose own ancestors were once savage idolaters, doubt the power of the gospel to convert the heathen, and to win its final and universal victory? L. J. Halsey.

The Purpose of Modern Missions is to reproduce among all other Heathen Peoples what has been wrought in the now Christian Nations.—What cultivated peoples now present of the spirit of discovery and invention; of logical argumentation and research; of profound conceptions of life, of man, of God, of futurity—what each of them has produced in natural and mental philosophy, in chemistry, agriculture, theology, law, medicine, political economy, poetry, history, biography, travels—all these, Christian missions hold the philanthropic purpose and competency to produce for all that sit in darkness, of every kindred and nation and tongue and people. Actually and truly, Great Britain and the United States are to be reproduced, intellectually, upon all pagan countries! And when these missions shall have been planted extensively over pagan countries, and shall have turned the heart of the people generally unto God, religion will have reached a new and holier age; piety attained a vaster power. There will be outflowing a larger tide of charity; there will be a purer scene of all good works upon the face of society. And we, God’s people, are intrusted with this great enterprise of exalting Jehovah in the world. Our missions, which are to exalt him, must be taken close into the arms of the Church till they feel the warmth and faith of her heart throbbing, glowing as a life all through them. Nothing less must she give to them than the whole vitalities of her spirit and the whole strength of her arm. We are detached to the service of bringing man back and presenting to Jehovah his godlike intellect, his vast heart, his powerful hand, his iron will, his entire being, his whole race. C. White.

A Chief Objection answered.—It has been asked, Why has the progress of missions been so slow? If Christianity be divine, and the only religion for man, why have not all nations been converted long ago? In answer to such an objection, it is sufficient to say that the God of Providence is not straitened for time. “Providence,” says one, “makes a step, and ages have rolled away.” If it took four thousand years to prepare the way for the advent of Christ, and the first promulgation of his gospel to the nations, shall we say that eighteen centuries are too long for its final consummation? If it took three centuries to convert the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea, and from five to ten centuries to evangelize the great nations of modern Europe, are we to say that Providence is too slow, and that the chariot wheels of a final triumph are too long delayed, because the Gospel has not conquered all Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the sea, in less than a hundred years? Let us not forget that almost all great movements are slow. The coral reefs are slowly built; but when at last they rise from their deep and broad foundations, they form the bulwark of mighty continents, and defy the ocean and the storm. Colonization is slow. The growth of nations is slow. The advance of science, of art, and of human liberty is slow. The progress of the gospel is in analogy with all other great moral movements. It has, indeed, led the van in the march of human civilization.

Let no one then say that the work of modern missions has failed in its grand purpose of converting the world, because everything has not been accomplished within this nineteenth century. When tempted to think that too much money and time have been spent on the mission work, and too many valuable lives sacrificed, let us remember that the foundations of Christianity among the heathen have to be laid in the lowest depths, and that it requires time to raise the structure. The apt illustration of one of our missionaries now in the field is here in point: “We build, as they build a breakwater upon some coast where there is no harbor. Year after year, thousands of tons of stone are quarried and brought and cast into the sea. Thousands of dollars are spent, but the passer-by sees not the faintest sign of any result. Years pass, and the waves roll on unbroken, but at last a solid wall rises above the water, and remains to defy all storms to the end of time. How rejoiced the builders must be when the first frail line of stone peeps out of the sea! Till then they have toiled in faith; then faith begins to be aided by sight, and they go on joyfully to assured triumph. Just so it is that we rejoice over any sign that Christ’s breakwater against idolatry and sin—the Christian Church—will ere long arise here high and strong—lasting enough to bear all assaults, and defy all opposition. Men may say, ‘The sea has swallowed up all your Bibles and tracts, your teaching, your preaching, and your prayers, and gives no sign.’ But we can see the wall arising, and it shall never be swept away, for the corner-stone is Christ.” L. J. Halsey.

Lo, I am with you, saith the Master, till the world shall end. It is enough. It is everything. Be of good heart, ye servants of the Lord! Moreover, Providence opens to you a cheering vision. Unmistakable gleamings there are even now of that coming light that shall beam in upon every family of the earth. The heralding star is up. Night is waning. The morning breaketh. Work on in joy and hope.

The final consummation reached; Jehovah exalted to reign; the whole world subjugated affectionately, obediently before him, and all is done! All might has passed from the oppressor to the Protector, from the corrupter to the Sanctifier, from the extinguisher of hope to the Giver of assurance and glory. Man is a sanctified intelligence; earth is a suburb of heaven; divine holiness is poured abroad over it all. As the lofty anthem swells up from every nation and tribe and tongue, responsive peals forth the glorious psalm in heaven: heartier, warmer goes answering back the acclamation from the heart of the world! Chorus of heaven and earth, shout on! shout on! For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth for ever! C. White.

[THE titles of leading works, additional to those given in the previous volume, are here also appended to the names of authors. An excellent service in the interest both of readers and writers is thus subserved.]

W. A. Wm. Adams, D. D.

N. A. Nehemiah Adams, D. D.

J. A. A. J. Addison Alexander, D. D.

J. W. A. James W. Alexander, D. D.

W. L. A. W. L. Alexander, D. D.

A. Henry Alford, D. D.

How to Study the New Testament.

Ambrose, d. 397.

J. A. Joseph Angus, D. D.

T. D. A. Thomas D. Anderson, D. D.

M. B. A. M. B. Anderson, D. D.

Anselm, d. 1109.

Johann Arnd.

T. A. Thomas Arnold, D. D.

Christian Life.

Wm. Arnot, D. D.

Church in the House.

Wm. Arthur, D. D.

Tongue of Fire.

Aug. Augustine, d. 430.

Francis Bacon, d. 1626.

A. B. Albert Barnes.

Sermons.

Isaac Barrow, D. D., d. 1677.

C. G. Barth, D. D.

Wm. Bates, D. D., d. 1699.

Bax. Richard Baxter, d. 1691.

Basil, d. 379.

G. T. Bedell, D. D., Bishop of Ohio.

L. B. Lyman Beecher, D. D.

Beng. J. A. Bengel, D. D., d. 1752.

T. D. B. T. D. Bernard, D. D.

Bernard de Clairvaux, d. 1153.

G. W. Bethune, D. D.

R. Besser, D. D.

Bp. Wm. Beveridge, d. 1708.

T. B. Thomas Binney, D. D.

Weigh House Chapel Sermons.

H. A. B. H. A. Boardman, D. D.

Earthly Suffering and Heavenly Glory.

Horatius Bonar, D. D.

Light and Truth.

G. B. George Bowen.

Thomas Bowdler.

J. B. Bossuet, d. 1704.

C. B. Chas. Bradley.

Parochial Sermons.

Chas. Bridges.

William Bright.

Faith and Life.

S. A. B. Stopford A. Brooke.

Thomas Brooks, d. 1680.

P. B. Phillips Brooks.

Sermons.

Sir Thomas Browne.

Religio Medici.

D. B. David Brown, D. D.

J. B. John Brown, D. D.

Chas. Buck.

W. I. B. Wm. Ives Budington, D. D.

Bun. John Bunyan, d. 1688.

Wm. Burkitt, D. D., d. 1703.

Edward Burton, D. D., d. 1836.

H. B. Horace Bushnell, D. D.

Sermons.

Bp. Joseph Butler, d. 1752.

W. A. B. Wm. Archer Butler, D. D.

B. J. G. Butler, D. D.

John Caird, D. D.

Cale. John Calvin, d. 1574.

John Cameron, d. 1625.

R. S. Candlish, D. D.

Joseph Caryl, d. 1673.

A. C. A. Caspers, D. D.

Footsteps of Christ.

Daniel Cawdrey, d. 1664.

Richard Cecil, d. 1810. T. C. Thomas Chalmers, D. D. Stephen Charnock, d. 1680. Peter Charron, d. 1603. G. B. C. Geo. B. Cheever, D. D. Windings of the River of Life, etc. Theodore Christlieb, D. D. Chrys. Chrysostom, d. 458. S. T. C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Friend; Aids to Reflection. C. W. J. Conybeare, D. D. Life and Epistles of Paul. H. C. Henry Cowles, D. D. Commentary on Hebrews and Revelation. Samuel Cox. Expositor’s Note Book. Tobias Crisp, D. D., d. 1642. Howard Crosby, D. D. Ralph Cudworth, D. D., d. 1688. Nath’l Culverwell, d. 1650. John Cumming, D. D. T. L. C. T. L. Cuyler, D. D. Cyprian, d. 258. Cyril of Jerusalem, d. 386. Cyril of Alexandria, d. 444. O. E. D. O. E. Daggett, D. D. D. D. David Dickson, D. D., d. 1662. Select Practical Writings. Franz Delitzsch, D. D. H. M. Dexter, D. D. Thomas De Quincey. D. Philip Doddridge, D. D., d. 1751. J. D. James Drummond. J. T. D. J. T. Duryea, D. D. John Eadie, D. D. Jonathan Edwards, D. D., d. 1758. B. B. E. B. B. Edwards, D. D. E. Charles J. Ellicott, D. D., Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. Epictetus. G. S. Faber, D. D. P. F. Patrick Fairbairn, D. D. Pastoral Epistles. Anthony Farindon, d. 1656. A. R. Fausset, D. D. G. P. F. George P. Fisher, D. D. S. W. F. Sam’l W. Fisher, D. D. Sermons on Life of Christ. John Forsyth, D. D. J. F. John Foster. Lectures, 2 vols., etc. D. F. Donald Fraser, D. D. Synoptical Lectures, Romans to Rev. Andrew Fuller, d. 1815. Thomas Fuller, D. D., d. 1661. E. H. G. E. H. Gillett, D. D. Life Lessons. F. Godet, D. D. J. H. G. J. H. Godwin, D. D.

Francis Goode, D. D. The Better Covenant.

A. J. G. A. J. Gordon, D. D. In Christ.

E. M. G. Edward M. Goulburn, D. D. Pursuit of Holiness; Sermons, etc.

Gregory Nazianzen, d. 389.

D. S. Gregory, D. D. Bp. Gregg.

W. H. G. Wm. H. Green, D. D.

E. D. Griffin, D. D.

M. Guizot.

J. J. Gurney.

T. G. Thomas Guthrie, D. D.

H. B. Hackett, D. D.

W. H. William Hanna, D. D. Resurrection of Our Lord.

Wm. Hague, D. D.

Sir Matthew Hale, d. 1676.

Bp. H. Bp. Joseph Hall, d. 1656.

Robert Hall, d. 1831.

John Hall, D. D.

Newman Hall.

James Hamilton, D. D. Sermons and Lectures.

J. H. John Harris, D. D.

Mammon, etc.

Julius C. Hare.

A. W. H. Aug. W. Hare.

Samuel Harris, D. D.

F. W. Havergal.

H. C. Haydn, D. D.

Death and Beyond.

Matthew Henry, D. D., d. 1714.

Hengs. E. W. Hengstenberg, D. D.

Hildebert, d. 1132.

Hill. Sir Richard Hill, d. 1808.

Deep Things of God.

R. Hill. Rowland Hill, d. 1833.

G. Hill. George Hill, D. D., d. 1820.

R. D. H. Roswell D. Hitchcock, D. D.

C. H. Charles Hodge, D. D.

Wm. Bradford Homer.

Memoir by Prof. Park.

Richard Hooker, D. D., d. 1600.

H. H. Herman Hooker, D. D.

Bp. Ezekiel Hopkins, d. 1690.

M. H. Mark Hopkins, D. D.

Evidences of Christianity; Law of Love, etc.

Alvah Hovey, D. D.

John Howe, D. D., d. 1705.

H. John S. Howson, D. D.

Life and Epistles of Paul, etc.

F. D. H. Fred. D. Huntington, D. D., Bishop of Central New York.

John Huss, d. 1415.

J. E. Huther.

Edward Irving, d. 1834.

J. A. J. John Angell James.

Christian Charity Explained.

J. J. John Jackson, D. D., Bishop of London.

Wm. Jenkyn, d. 1685.

Bp. John Jebb, d. 1833.

Jerome, d. 422.

Robert Johnstone.

Lectures on James.

Dr. Sam’l Johnson, d. 1784.

Wm. S. Karr, D. D.

Ker. John Ker, D. D.

John Keble, D. D.

E. N. Kirk, D. D.

C. K. Charles Kingsley.

Sermons.

J. P. Lange, D. D.

F. A. Lampe, D. D., d. 1729.

L. Archbp. Robert Leighton, d. 1684. Works, 2 vols.

Leo the Great, d. 461.

W. H. Lewis, D. D.

T. L. Taylor Lewis, LL. D.

H. P. L. H. P. Liddon, D. D.

University Sermons, etc.

J. B. L. J. B. Lightfoot, D. D., Bishop of Durham.

J. L. John Lightfoot, D. D., d. 1675.

David Livingstone.

John Locke, d. 1704.

C. E. Luthardt, D. D.

Martin Luther, d. 1543.

M. James Macknight, D. D., d. 1800.

A. M. Alexander Maclaren, D. D.

Sermons—First and Second Series.

N. M. Norman Macleod, D. D.

J. M. Macdonald, D. D.

Hugh Macmillan, D. D.

W. C. Magee, D. D., Bishop of Peterborough.

David Magie, D. D.

John McClintock, D. D.

James McCosh, D. D.

McD. George McDonald.

R. J. McGhee.

Bp. C. P. McIlvaine.

Hugh McNeile.

T. M. Thomas Manton, D. D., d. 1667.

Lectures on James, etc.

James Martineau.

E. M. Erskine Mason, D. D.

Pastor’s Legacy.

John Mason, d. 1694.

J. M. M. John M. Mason, D. D.

Increase Mather, D. D., d. 1723.

Frederick D. Maurice, D. D.

First John, etc.

Maximus, A. D. 145.

Joseph Mede, d. 1638.

Selah Merrill, D. D.

H. A. W. Meyer, D. D.

H. H. Milman, D. D.

George Moberly, D. D., Bishop of Salisbury.

Adolph Monod, D. D.

Discourses on Paul.

J. B. Mozley, D. D.

Julius Müller, D. D.

N. J. Aug. W. Neander, D. D., d. 1850.

Epistle to Philippians, translated by Mrs. H. C. Conant; etc.

H. A. Nelson, D. D.

John Henry Newman, D. D.

O. Hermann Olshausen, D.D., d. 1830.

John Owen, D. D., d. 1683.

William Paley, D. D., d. 1805. Horæ Paulinæ.

B. M. P. B. M. Palmer, D. D.

The Family, in its Civil and Churchly Aspects.

Blaise Pascal, d. 1662.

John Parkhurst, D. D., d. 1797.

F. L. P. F. L. Patton, D. D.

J. J. S. Perowne, D. D.

A. P. Austin Phelps, D. D.

The Still Hour.

A. T. Pierson, D. D.

Matthew Pool, d. 1679.

N. P. Noah Porter, Sr., D. D., d. 1866.

Noah Porter, D. D.

P. Bp. B. Porteus, d. 1808.

Thomas M. Post, D. D.

De P. E. de Pressensé, D. D.

S. Irenæus Prime, D. D.

Proclus, A. D. 429-438.

John Pulsford.

E. B. Pusey, D. D.

Francis Quarles, d. 1644.

Q. Pasquier Quesnel, d. 1719.

A. R. Alexander Raleigh, D. D.

The Little Sanctuary, etc.

G. R. George Rawlinson, D. D.

Bp. E. Reynolds, d. 1676.

John H. Rice, D. D.

M. B. Riddle, D. D.

F. W. R. Frederick W. Robertson, D. D.

Lectures on Corinthians; Sermons.

S. R. Stuart Robinson, D. D.

Discourses of Redemption.

Wm. Romaine, d. 1795.

J. L. Ruckert, D. D.

Samuel Rutherford, d. 1661.

John Ruskin.

J. C. Ryle, D. D.

Bp. Robt. Sanderson, d. 1662.

A. S. Adolph Saphir.

The Hidden Life.

James Saurin, d. 1730.

P. S. Philip Schaff, D. D. F. E. D. Schleiermacher, D. D. Archbp. Secker, d. 1768. Jeremiah Seed, d. 1747. J. H. Seelye, D. D. W. T. G. Shedd, D. D. James Sherman. Prof. Shirley.

T. H. S. Thomas H. Skinner, D. D.

H. B. S. Henry B. Smith, D. D. Henry Smith, D. D.

J. C. S. John Cotton Smith, D. D. John Pye Smith, D. D.

S. William Smith, LL. D. James Smith.

R. S. Robert South, D. D., d. 1716.

C. H. S. Chas. H. Spurgeon.

A. P. S. Arthur P. Stanley, D. D. Rudolph Stier, D. D.

J. S. S. John S. Stone, D. D. Mysteries Opened.

R. S. S. Richard S. Storrs, D. D. Baron Stow, D. D.

M. S. Moses Stuart, D. D.

W. S. Wm. Symington, D. D. Messiah the Prince. Benjamin Tappan, D. D. John Tauler, d. 1361.

I. T. Isaac Taylor. Saturday Evening, etc.

J. T. Bp. Jeremy Taylor, d. 1667.

N. W. T. Nathaniel W. Taylor, D. D. Sermons.

W. M. T. Wm. M. Taylor, D. D.

F. T. Frederick Temple, D. D., Bishop of Exeter. Rugby Sermons.

A. T. F. A. G. Tholuck, D. D.

J. H. T. James H. Thornwell, D. D. Collected Writings.

J. P. T. Joseph P. Thompson, D. D.

A. W. T. Anthony W. Thorold, D. D., Bish- op of Rochester.

Andrew Thomson, D. D. R. T. Reuben Tinker. Sermons. Aug. P. Toplady, d. 1778. G. T. George Townsend, D. D. L. T. T. L. T. Townsend, D. D. T. Richard Chenevix Trench, D. D., Archbp. of Dublin. Epis. to Seven Churches; Sermons.

H. B. T. H. B. Tristam, D. D.

Ch. Tr. Christian Treasury. John Tulloch, D. D. Karl Ullmann.

V. Charles J. Vaughan, D. D. Lectures on the Revelation, etc.

V. D. H. J. Van Dyke, D. D.

Van O. J. J. Van Oosterzee, D. D. Year of Salvation, etc.

T. E. V. T. E. Vermilye, D. D.

A. V. Alexander Vinet, D. D.

C. W. C. Wadsworth, D. D.

R. W. Robert Walker, D. D., d. 1783. Sermons.

J. A. W. J. A. Wallace.

F. W. Francis Wayland, D. D. Daniel Webster.

B. F. W. B. F. Westcott, D. D. The Christian Life, etc.

Chas. White, D. D.

D. D. Wheedon, D. D.

H. Kirke White.

J. G. Whittier.

Samuel Wilberforce, D. D., Bishop of Oxford.

Daniel Wilcox, d. 1733.

W. R. W. Wm. R. Williams, D. D.

Bp. Thos. Wilson, d. 1755.

Octavius Winslow, D. D.

Christopher Wordsworth, D. D. Bishop of Lincoln.

T. D. W. T. D. Woolsey, D. D.

Religion of the Present and Future.

Zanchius, d. 1590.