it could not have been made two thousand years before. It would have been inconsistent with the scheme and purpose of God, with that economy in the use of miracles which characterizes his government and education of the world, that the mighty works of Jesus should have been done in the ancient cities of the Plain and in the ports and emporiums of the Phoenician coast.

So much we can see, so much we admit. Nevertheless it irks and saddens us to think that even for these ancient and sinful cities God should not have done the most and best that could be done to bring them to repentance. It seems hard and unjust that a man's salvation, a man's life, should hang on the age into which he is born; that the sinners of Sodom, for example, should have had a worse chance than the still greater sinners of Capernaum.

Shall we say then that, although the men of Sodom might have been saved by a gospel they never heard, they nevertheless had all that they needed for salvation had they cared to use the means of instruction and grace which they possessed? I for one cannot say that. I am not unmindful of the fact that had they come into the world some two thousand years later than they did, and walked the streets of Capernaum, and witnessed the works of Christ, they must have accepted all the conditions of that later age, adverse as well as propitious, and might very possibly

have been so moulded and so hardened by them as that even then they would not have entered into life. And yet who dare say of any class of men, in any age, that nothing but their own will prevented their salvation? There are thousands and tens of thousands in this Christian land to-day who have never had a fair chance of being quickened into life. Conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, inheriting defects of will and taints of blood, cradled in ignorance and vice, they have hardly heard the name of Christ save as a word to curse by. And there are thousands and myriads more to whom the faith of Christ has been presented in forms so meagre and narrow, or in forms so fictitious and theatrical, that the only wonder is that so many of them care to worship Him at all. And with all these in our midst now that the Gospel has been preached among us for a thousand years, which of us will dare to affirm that those ancient sinners of Sodom, born in an age so dark, reared in "fulness of bread and abundance of idleness," enervated by a tropical climate and by the abominations amid which they were nurtured, had all that men needed in order that they might know the only true God and serve Him alone? Assuredly Lot was no Jesus, no Jonah even, or they might have listened to him and repented; if he "vexed his righteous soul from day to day" with their unlawful deeds, he did not hesitate to risk his

soul and the souls of his children by "standing in the way of sinners " to secure a fat inheritance.

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No; to say, Doubtless God gave these poor men all that was necessary to life and virtue,” and to make a merit of saying it as though it were a mark of piety, is simply to offer Him that insincere flattery, to shew Him that respect of persons, which even Job could see He Himself would be the first to rebuke, and rebuke the more heavily precisely because it was shewn to Him.1

What shall we say then? For myself I can only say that I see no way out of the difficulty, no single loophole of escape, so long as we assume what the Bible does not teach, that there is no probation beyond the grave, that no moral change is possible in that world towards which all the children of time are travelling. I, at least, am so sure that the Father of all men will do the most and best which can be done for every man's salvation as to entertain no doubt that long ere this the men of Sodom and of Tyre and Sidon have heard the words of Christ and seen his mighty works -seen and heard Him, perchance, when He stood and shone among the spirits in the Hadean prison, and preached the gospel to them that were dead, in order that, while still judged according to men in the flesh, they might live according to God in the spirit.*

1 Job xiii. 7-11.

2 1 Peter iii. 19, 20; and iv. 6.

B

And what else, or less, do our Lord's own words imply: "It shall be more tolerable for them at the day of judgment than for you?" Lives there the man with soul so dead and brain so narrow that he can take these solemn words to mean nothing more than that the men of Tyre and Sidon will not be condemned to quite so hot a fire as the men of Chorazin and Bethsaida! Must they not mean at least that in the future, as in the present, there will be diversities of moral condition, and a discipline nicely adapted to those diversities? May they not mean that those who have sinned against a little light will, after having been chastened for their sins with a "few stripes," receive more light, and be free to walk in it if they will? We are often chastened in this world that we may not be condemned with the world, often judged and condemned and punished that we may be aroused to repentance and saved unto life everlasting. Why, then, should we always take the chastenings of the world to come to mean judgments, and the judgments to mean condemnations, and the condemnations to mean nothing short of a final and irreversible doom? On the contrary, we ought rather to hope that, while during the brief hours of time our lives describe but "broken arcs," in eternity, and through whatever chastening and discipline may be requisite for us, they will reach "the perfect round.”

II. THE LIMITS WITHIN WHICH THE

QUESTION WILL BE ARGUED.

MIRACLES naturally strike men with astonishment; but what is there in them to win men to repentance? There is this miracles are signs of the Divine presence and activity. They feelingly persuade men that the God of whom they too habitually conceive as distant and quiescent is near them and with them, that He is at work in their midst. And how shall men become conscious of the immediate presence of God without at the same moment becoming conscious of the sins which have alienated them from Him? And how shall any man become profoundly conscious of sin without also becoming profoundly sorry for it?

Miracles, then, are a great means of grace; they tend to bring, and they are designed to bring, men to repentance, and through repentance to life.

Now this great means of grace was vouchsafed, our Lord tells us, to the men of Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin, although it failed to produce its proper effect upon them; and it was denied to the men of Sodom, and Tyre and Sidon, although it would not have failed to produce its proper effect on them.