reserving our right, however, of interpreting it by our reason and conscience.

But here, at the very outset, the question presents itself: To what parts of the Bible may we fairly look for clear and authoritative teaching on the secrets or mysteries of the life to come? And obviously, if we know anything of the structure, history, and design of this great collection of Scriptures, we shall not for a moment assume that every book of the Bible speaks on all themes with equal distinctness and authority; that, wherever we find words that will serve our turn, we may detach them from their context, and attribute as much weight to them as though they fell from the lips of our Lord and his apostles. On the contrary, in selecting those Scriptures which will really aid us in our search, we shall have to lay aside by far the larger part of the Bible, not that we may induce it to speak our thought, but simply that we may argue the question fairly. The Old Testament, for example, except in so far as we can find large general principles in it which bear on our question, will be of no avail to us; for it is as certainly true as any such wide proposition can be, that the psalmists and prophets of old time never got more than momentary and partial glimpses of the life We are expressly told that Christ "brought life and immortality to light;" and if that be true,

to come.

clearly "life and immortality" were

more or less hidden in darkness before He came: and we must not go to the darkness for light.

But if, for our present purpose, we must lay aside the Old Testament, it is equally obvious that we must also lay aside the last book of the New Testament, though for a very different reason. Possibly the Apocalypse would throw a clearer light on the mysteries of the life to come than any other Scripture, if only we had the key to it and could read it "with the understanding." But, confessedly, we have not the key to it; it is variously interpreted, interpreted on principles wholly incompatible with each other, by the most learned and devout students of the Bible, the best scholars, the soundest divines; and till some certain interpretation of it is reached, or at least some interpretation of it which shall command a wide and general assent, it would be unwise and unsafe for us to build any conclusion on our private interpretation of it.

These are very large deductions to be made-the whole Old Testament on the one hand, and on the other the Book of the Revelation; but unless we are to "fall out by the way," to wrangle over disputed interpretations of doubtful Scriptures, I do not see how we can refuse to make them. If we cannot, we have only the Gospels and the Epistles left. Our

field of research, if much more limited, is also much more manageable. But even from this limited field. there remains one deduction to be made, or rather, perhaps, I should say, that over the entrance to this lessened field a certain “Beware” must be inscribed. Many of our Lord's most familiar allusions to the future conditions of men are couched in parables; and to say that the details of parables must not be insisted on, that we must be cautious how we use them lest we should be landed in false conclusions, is, after all, only to repeat a maxim on which all Commentators are agreed, although it is also the plain dictates of common sense- a quality for which Commentators get even less credit than they deserve. Let us bear in mind, then, that if the parables of Christ are to be used in this argument, they must be used with modesty and discretion, since parables are but pictures of truth, comparisons of things not in the world of sense with things which are in that world, and such comparisons seldom run on all fours.

And be sure of this-or why should you listen to me at all? or how could we hope to travel to any conclusion together in peace?-that in asking you to exclude these Scriptures from the list of authorities to which we make our common appeal, I am not trying covertly to bring the Bible round to my view, or indeed to any view whatever. The Scriptures which

we thus exclude are at least as favourable to the view to which my study of the Word of God long since led me, as to the more common and accepted view. If any man thinks that the Old Testament teaches the irrevocable condemnation of the vast majority of men at the moment they pass out of our sight, for every text he can adduce from it in support of that view, I will undertake to produce another which asserts the universality of the Divine Redemption, and implies the 'salvation of all men.1 And so with the Apocalypse, and so with the Parables. Indeed, no one who has not given many years to the study of the Bible can so much as imagine how numerous and weighty are the passages, even in these excluded portions of the Inspired Volume, in favour of the conclusion that human life beyond the separating line of death is as varied, as flexible, as capable of change as it is on this side; and how many intimations they contain of the ultimate restitution of all souls. The fact is, that throughout the Bible there are two main lines of thought on this subject, though hitherto the Church has been too apt to recognize only one of them. The first affirms or implies that to sin, to be in sins, is to be damned both in this and in all other worlds; that so long as men are shut up in sin the wrath of God abides, and must abide, on them, whatever the sphere in which

1 Some of these passages are cited in Lecture viii.

they move; that the only way to escape damnation, whether in this or in any other world, is to turn from sin, to come out of it, to exchange the "death in sin" for the “life in righteousness:" while the other line of thought affirms or implies that the wrath of God, the condemnation of sin, the punishments which are the natural and inevitable consequences of unrighteousness, are designed to correct men, to convict them of sin, to make them hate it and abandon it, that they may love righteousness and pursue it.

For the present, however, I must not dwell on this point; we shall recur to it again further on: but take just one illustration of it. You know what use has been made of such parables as those of Dives and Lazarus, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Sheep and the Goats. You know, too, how those who lay great stress on such details of these parables as "the great gulf," the shut door, the left and the right hand of the Judge as if the left hand were not the next best place to the right hand, or a door once shut could never again be opened, or a gulf once impassable could never be bridged: you know, I say, how apt those who lay stress on such points would be to suspect that the Parables were excluded from our field of view because they told against the conclusion to which I am trying to lead you. But do they tell against it? Suppose we also cared to violate an accepted canon of criticism