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His offspring, and whose gracious purposes, are not circumscribed by this little span of human life, but that He is the same just and loving God, yesterday, to-day, and forever.

Such is the doctrine the Church needs to give her success, because it is the true doctrine and the full gospel. The world can never be frightened by fears to Christ, nor won by a mutilated gospel. Catholic Christianity has not been able to hold more than half the lands once won. Protestant Christianity, still more severe in its dogmas about the future, discarding any relief, such as purgatory gave in the older system, has waned in all the lands of the Reformation. It is scarcely holding its own in this most favored land; for numbers are sometimes a deceptive standard. It makes much of its missionary zeal and conquests. But it is estimated that the addition to the ranks of Pagans and Mahometans by natural increase are fifty times as great as the converts from among them to Christianity. The Church has been seeking to evangelize these millions with a gospel that largely conceals the grace of God, that draws a dark veil over His face, and denies that it is glad tidings of great joy to all people. Her success either at home or abroad furnishes no argument against the trial of some new and more merciful view. The world has not been won, and cannot be, in any way that conceals from men the true knowledge of God. The Holy Spirit will not honor testimony that robs the mission of the Lord Christ of half its grace and glory. Nor can an appeal to men's fears avail which so exaggerates its terrors

that the very men who utter it recoil from it, while their hearers are only dazed and stunned into stolidity or unbelief. We want a rational doctrine of hell, as well as a full gospel proclamation of Him who holds its keys, and whose resurrection shed down its light of hope among the "spirits in prison," the myriads of earth's dead who have been carried away captive into its dark domain. And we need to arouse men, not only by the hope of individual salvation,—a hope not free from selfishnesss-but by the high aim of fellowship with Christ in present sacrifice, that so, baptized for the dead, they may be fitted to take part with Him in those ever-widening. conquests by which He shall recover from the land of the enemy the captive multitudes of our race for whom His soul travailed unto death. The anxious cry of the heathen, "What of our ancestors ?" when they first hear the gospel, would find here its satisfying answer.

APPENDIX A.

THE TIME OF RESURRECTION.

Upon this point a variety of opinions prevail among Christians.

1. The traditional opinion is that the countless multitudes who have lived upon the earth are all to be raised together, good and bad, at the last day.

2. The extreme opposite doctrine is that of Swedenborg, which has also its adherents in various evangelical churches. It is that, upon the death of the material body, man emerges into a spiritual world in a spiritual body. Death and resurrection are two parts of but one process.

3. Many advocates of conditional immortality hold that all men, even the saints, remain unconscious in death until the resurrection, which they believe will occur at a great crisis of the future-the coming of the Lord. They believe, however, in the first resurrection of the saints, and that, after a long interval, the wicked will be raised and punished by being consigned to extinction in the lake of fire, which is the second death.

4. Others, who reject the idea of the unconscious sleep of the soul-especially in the case of the saved-befcre resurrection, still hold to the idea that it is eclectic and progressive." Every man in his own order."

As between the old traditional opinion that resurrection is simultaneous, and this view that it is progressive, there can be no doubt that the latter is taught in Scripture. The passage which seems most to favor the view that all classes are raised together is St. John v. 28, 29.

But the "hour" of vs. 25 is so manifestly a period of long continuance that we are not only justified, but obliged to regard the hour of universal resurrection (vs. 29) as a prolonged administration of the Son of Man, during which He shall recover all the captives in the realms of death. And various other passages teach plainly that there is "a first resurrection" (Rev. xx. 5, 6); that there is a chosen company first gathered from the harvest fields of death (Phil. iii. 11), "out from among the dead." "They that are Christ's at his coming."

The first view, which we have classed as Swedenborgian, makes the Scripture promise of anastasis, or resurrection, to be simply the promise of a future life. And that man enters upon this life immediately upon death is death is affirmed from such Scriptures as our Lord's conversation with the Sadducees (Luke xx. 26-38), in which He establishes the fact of resurrection by declaring that God's words to Moses about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob imply that these patriarchs were still living, and, therefore, raised out of death. The appearance of Moses and Elijah, with Jesus, on the Mount is also appealed to. Also His words to the dying thief, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Paul's words in 2 Cor. v, also seem to imply that immediately upon his putting off of this earthly tabernacle, he would find a "heavenly house" awaiting him in which he would be at home with the Lord. Other of his writings, however, assume that during the interval preceding the Lord's manifestation from heaven the saints would be asleep (I Cor. xv. 51; 1 Thess. iv. 13-15), out of which they would be aroused by the

trumpet-sound of some signal triumph over the empire of death.

The truth, we believe, lies between these two views. The Swedenborgian view is defective,

I. In the fact that it does not give proper weight to the fact of death as the wages of sin, and of that death-state which lies beyond the grave,—the sheol and hell of Scripture. It makes death to be simply the loss of well-being, and strips of its proper meaning the sentence, "The soul that sinneth it shall die."

2. It does not appreciate the fact that man is more than "a spiritual being." He holds relation to this created system. He is destined to unfettered dominion

over it. For this purpose his body is to be redeemed and the whole creation to be delivered into the liberty of his glory (Rom. viii. 19-21). While, therefore, it is freely conceded that saved men enter upon a future life at once upon their departure out of this world, and that the words of Jesus that such "never die" require this, we must also hold that they do not attain the complete glory of the resurrection state, nor enter upon its full activities, until this emancipation of the creature. The full redemption of man requires his re-investure with a body suited to a redeemed creation. Such a cosmical change seems plainly set forth in Scripture. Its closing pages are gilded with the glory of it.

Both sides of the truth concerning man's future life may be reconciled by bearing in mind what we have learned of his nature as body, soul, and spirit. We have seen that the "soul" is virtually an intermediate embodiment of the spirit, that it survives the death of the carnal

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