The Greek language is

extend through all such ages. not so poor that it cannot convey the idea of spirituality or of unbroken duration in terms not to be mistaken. On the contrary it is even a more precise and flexible language than our own, and contains many words by which it might have conveyed these ideas in the most definite and unquestionable way. So that when we find the Greek New Testament constantly using the words con and aonial where we should have expected to meet words carrying a spiritual or everlasting significance, we must conclude that these words were used with intention; we must also, or at the lowest we may reasonably, conclude that there is hidden in them some doctrine of the cons, or ages, which it will repay us to investigate and discover.

Now that there is such a doctrine I have more than once pointed out to you when neither you nor I were thinking of the future conditions of men.1 Instead of speaking of time as though it were a single period or epoch, the New Testament speaks of it as broken into many ages, in each of which some counsel of the Divine Will is wrought out. Instead of affirming that time shall be no more when men pass out of this present order and age, it speaks of "ages to come" as well as of "ages that are past." Thus, for example,

1 The reader, if he cares to look for it, will find a brief statement of this doctrine in The Expositor, Vol. iv., pp. 285, et seq.

age

we have, in the past, the age or dispensation prior to the giving of the Law, or the Patriarchal age; then the Mosaic age or dispensation; then the Christian age, or dispensation, of which the Jews spoke familiarly both as "the of the Messiah" and as "the age to come:" while, in the future, we have apparently many ages, only imperfectly known to us, under such names as the Millennium, the Regeneration, the Restitution of all things, and even ages beyond these which perhaps are all unknown to us. In short, we find in the New Testament a series of æons which are to precede, and in which men are to be prepared for, that final and eternal state in which, Christ having delivered up his Kingdom to the Father, God shall be all in all.

All these preparatory and intermediate ages, moreover, are contained within, are comprehended by, a vast epoch which St Paul calls "the con of the cons," i.e., the age which includes all ages, which covers the whole course of time; the age also in which what he calls God's "purpose for the ages," i.e., the redemption of the human race, will be wrought out. And how entirely this doctrine falls in with the demands and speculations of modern science and thought you will see at a glance. For they demand for the evolution of man, and of the world, and of the universe at large, precisely those past ages and those ages to come of which the New Testament so constantly

speaks; and, moreover, they, no less emphatically than the New Testament, affirm that all these ages must be gathered up under one, that they must all run up into a sacred unity in which the great scheme or purpose with which universal Nature is pregnant shall be slowly but victoriously developed.

This, stated briefly and in general terms, is the Christian doctrine of the æons, or ages. But as it may be novel, and even startling, to some of you, and as it is the key to all those Scriptures which speak of "æonial salvation" and "conial life," or of "conial judgment" and "aonial punishment," let me restate it a little more fully.

2

These æons, or ages, then, as we learn from St Paul, are epochs or periods of time in which God is gradually working out a gracious purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus long ere man fell from his first estate, long before those "age-times," as he calls them,1 in and through which men are being recovered from the fall. God's wisdom, he affirms,2 was ordained before the ages to our glory;" i.e., God, in his wisdom, had determined before time began to educe from the very fall and sin of man a greater glory both to Himself and to us. In his Epistle to the Ephesians3 he both expressly names God's determination to save men by Christ "the purpose of the ages," the end 1 2 Timothy i. 9. 3 Ephesians iii. 11.

2 1 Corinthians ii. 7.

that was to be wrought out through all the successions of time; and distinctly asserts that this redeeming work will take "ages" for its accomplishment. In the same Epistle1 he speaks of the revelation and work of Christ as "the mystery which hath been hid from the ages, but is now made manifest ;" and of the glory accruing from it to God “unto all generations of the age of the ages." In proof that he anticipates periods after and beyond the Christian era, I cite from this same Epistle the glorious ascription in which he speaks of Christ as set "far above all principalities and powers, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but in that which is to come;" and the noble hymn, we might almost call it, in which he sings of the great love wherewith God, who is rich in mercy, hath loved us, quickening us who were dead in sins together with Christ, and raising us together with Him, and establishing us in the heavenly world with Him, "that in the ages to come He might shew the exceeding riches of his grace toward us through Christ Jesus." In proof

3

that he conceived of these æons as periods of time which had or would have their commencement and their close, I refer to his description of the believers of his own day as those upon whom "the ends

4

1 Ephesians iii. 9 and 10; 21 (Comp. Colossians i. 26).

2 Ibid., i. 21.

3 Ibid., ii. 4-7.

4 1 Corinthians x. 11.

of the ages are met," a phrase which shews that he conceived of the primitivè Church as standing at a point at which two great epochs, the Jewish and the Christian, ran together, the terminal end of the one and the initial end of the other meeting, as it were, in the brief span of their single life. And this description is confirmed by a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews1 in which it is recorded of Christ, "Now once, in the end of the ages (the conclusion or the terminal point, as some take it, the conjunction or meeting-point, of the ages, as I take it) He hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.”

For brevity's sake I have as yet only appealed, save in one instance for a confirmation, to the writings of St Paul, although his doctrine of the æons pervades the whole New Testament; but I do not doubt I have already cited passages enough to give you an insight into the meaning and scope of this suggestive but neglected doctrine. I understand him to mean, I understand the New Testament throughout to imply, that, before time began, God foresaw the sin and misery of mankind; that He purposed to redeem us from that sin and misery by the gift and sacrifice of his Son; that the full accomplishment of this great redemptive work, this new creation, will occupy ages to come, just as the creation of the physical universe

1 Hebrews ix. 26.