4 2 " 6 to them now, and be trained by a still severer and nobler discipline. And therefore you will expect to hear that the Christian æon has a life and a discipline peculiar to itself. It will not perplex you to read of an "œonial life," 1 or of an "aonial inheritance," in which, by making friends to ourselves of the Mammon of unrighteousness, we may prepare for ourselves "æonial tents." " 3 Nor, on the other hand, will it perplex you to read of an "aonial judgment," or an "aonial punishment," 5 or even of an "aonial fire." You will understand that, in the one case, the life that is spoken of as æonial is the life peculiar and proper to these Christian ages, the life of faith in Christ; and that the promised "inheritance" is the happy spiritual estate or condition to which such a life naturally conducts us. And, in the other case, you will readily understand that the æonial judgment is the judgment peculiar to this great series of ages in which God is working out his purpose of redemption; while the æonial fire is a symbol of that æonial punishment which is to be inflicted on all who adjudge themselves unworthy of the life of Christ, the punishment peculiar and proper to the Christian ages. And you will remember that the element and thought of time, of ages, is implied in all these phrases, that it cannot be 1 St John xvii. 3. 4 St Mark iii. 29. 2 Hebrews ix. 15. 3 St Luke xvi. 9. 6 Jude 7. dissociated from aught which pertains to the æons of time; so that even this large and important class of passages does not carry us beyond the bounds of time, and reveals nothing concerning the final and everlasting conditions of men. All this, however, will, I trust and believe, grow still clearer to you as we proceed, in my next Lecture, to examine more in detail a few of the more important passages in which these words and phrases are employed. WE have now entered on an investigation of those passages of Scripture in which the future conditions of men are spoken of as eternal and everlasting, with a view to ascertain whether or not they lend any support to the popular conception of a ceaseless torment, an ever-burning hell. To prepare you for a right apprehension of these passages I asked you, in my last Lecture, to consider the way in which these words are used `in the Bible; and the conclusions we arrived at were such as these. The English words "eternal" and "“everlasting" are used to translate the Greek words aiúv and alúvios. Happily these Greek words have been transαἰώνιος. ferred to our own language, so that we can all look at them for ourselves, and in some measure judge what they mean the Greek alúv becoming œon in English, and alúvios becoming aeonial. Eon, like aiúv, means a term, a period of time, an age, an epoch; and aonial, like aiúvios, means that which is of or for an age, that which endures through or pertains unto an epoch of time. So that if we wanted to translate the words won and aonial, which are mainly used by poets and men of science, into more familiar English, we might very fairly render them by the words age, and age- or ages- long. That the words were used in this sense by the Jews of our Lord's time, that they do not therefore necessarily and invariably imply either spirituality or everlastingness in the objects to which they are applied, I shewed you by alluding to passages in the Greek Version of the Old Testament then in use; passages in which the inheritance of the land of Canaan, the priesthood of the Sons of Aaron, the temple in Jerusalem, the sacrifices offered in it, and even the leprosy of Gehasi, are called conial, though all these were but for a time and have long since come to an end. And to these passages I might have added as many more from the New Testament itself, where the same Greek words are used in precisely the same sense. For there are at least a score of texts in the Scriptures of the New Testament in which these words are confessedly applied to limited periods of time, or to things and persons which were only for a time; as, for example, when St Paul charges them that are rich in this con, or age, that they do not trust in uncertain riches, or as when he complains, "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present œon.' 1 "2 Beyond a doubt, then, the words con and aonial suggest to us an epoch of time, that which is of or for 22 Timothy iv. 10. 1 Timothy vi. 17. an age, or at most that which is for all time; and beyond a doubt also they were so used and so understood by our Lord and his Apostles. But were they never used in any other, in any larger sense? That remains to be seen. For the present I simply affirm that, unless some good and sufficient reason for it can be assigned, it cannot be right to translate them by such words as eternal and everlasting; cannot be right to take words which are saturated through and through with the sense of time as though they denoted that which is beyond and above all time. No doubt it was right at one time to translate conial by eternal, and would be right again could we reinstate the original significance of the word: for, strangely enough, the word "eternal" originally meant æonial or age-long. It comes to us from the Latin æternas, the older and longer form of which is æviternas: and the word avum, which is the root of it, is simply the Latin form of the Greek aiúv and the English con. But, as we have seen, this word has now come to have two meanings which are as nearly as possible the very opposites of its original meaning. As we now use it, eternal means either that which is outside of or above time, or that which outlasts time; that which is spiritual or that which is everlasting. We cannot measure and limit that which is spiritual by the sequences of time; we cannot say that truth is so |