or

by laying stress on the details of parables, what bright and happy inferences might we not draw from such parables as these? "The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened; again, "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost until he find it?" Would it not be quite easy to interpret these weighty and emphatic phrases as signifying that the whole mass of mankind is to be leavened and quickened by the truth of Christ, and that the great Bishop of our souls will never cease from his quest of any poor lost sinner until he find him and restore him to the fold? Might we not even insist on reading that "pearl of parables," the Prodigal Son, in a very novel and surprising light? Might we not take the righteous, and self-righteous, brother as a type of those good people who, with Luther, think it “the highest degree of faith to believe that God is merciful who saves so few and damns so many," and imagine, with St Thomas Aquinas, that in the world to come their bliss "may please them the more because they are permitted to gaze on the punishment of the wicked"? Might we not take the younger son as a type of those whom they call "the lost," and the “far country" as hell, and the return to the Father as the

recovery of the self-doomed sinner from the error of his ways? It is very certain that in so reading these parables we should depart no farther from the dictates of common sense and the canons of sound criticism than do those who pile up so great a weight of dogma on similar phrases and analogies in other parables.

But if in answer to the question, To what parts of the Bible may we look for clear and authentic light on the mysteries of the life to come? we have determined to confine ourselves to the plain teaching of our Lord and his apostles, i.e., to the very cream of Scripture ; if we have gone so far as to select our materials, another question forthwith meets us, viz., What sort of structure may we hope to rear with them? May we hope to frame a clear, full, and coherent theory of the life that is both spiritual and eternal? to determine with precision what the fate, whether of the good or of the bad, will be when they put off the tabernacle of the flesh ?

No reflective man will for a moment suppose that, while we are compassed about with the limits and crippling infirmities of the flesh, we can hope to comprehend what the purely spiritual life will be; or that in this, the first stage of our being, we are able so much as to conceive what the final stage of our course will be like. Christ descended into Hades; yet when He came back to earth He disclosed none of the secrets

of the prison-house. Paul was caught up into Paradise, and saw some faint shadow of its glory; yet he maintained to the last that it was impossible for him to utter what he had seen and heard, albeit he was a great master of the most subtle and flexible language spoken among men. And a little reflection will convince us that that which is eternal cannot be fairly, or, if fairly, cannot be fully, comprehended by those whose thoughts are governed and conditioned by the sequences of time; that so long as we are to be approached from without only through avenues of sense, that which is purely spiritual can only be set before us in pictures, in similitudes and analogies, which, like all analogies and comparisons, have their inevitable defects, and conceal almost as much as they disclose, in some cases even more. All deep knowledge presupposes not only the proper faculties for acquiring it, but that those faculties should have been highly trained and developed. It is of no use to talk the higher mathematics, to pick holes, for instance, in the differential calculus, as our friend James Hinton was so fond of doing, to one who has not even mastered the elements of arithmetic and geometry.

Nay, a knowledge beyond our reach may be simply injurious and misleading to us. We know very well, for example, that we should only injure young children were we to discuss with them some of

the commonest facts of our own mature life, that we should awaken a morbid and prurient curiosity in them, and that our words would only mislead them because they would take other shapes and relations, quicken other trains of association in their minds, to those which they assume and quicken in our own. In short, we are aware that, by trying to communicate a knowledge for which they are necessarily unprepared, we should simply impose an intolerable and degrading burden on them. How is it then that we do not see, if indeed we do not, that we ourselves are too immature and untrained to grasp the mysteries of eternity, of an absolute and unconditioned existence, or of an existence whose conditions are utterly different from our own? We ought to be aware, when we reflect upon it, we are aware, that if, while we are still babes in the spiritual life, clothed with flesh, conditioned by time, the secrets of the unclothed, unconditioned, spiritual world could be put into any words with which we are familiar, they would only mislead and oppress us. What faith can apprehend and realize, what the intuitions of love can grasp, this indeed lies open to us, and is helpful to us, as we see in the case of children; but the points with which speculation would busy itself and a merely intellectual curiosity, these are mercifully hidden from our eyes.

What, then, may we hope to learn from these

C

selected Scriptures concerning the life to come?

We

may hope, I think, to see, on the one hand, that the Scriptures, when fairly interpreted, do not sustain that theory of the future state which has long found general acceptance, and which, like so much else in the Roman Church-from which we have received it seems to be a survival of ancient heathen beliefs shewing through the thin Christian varnish with which Papal theologians have sought to disguise it; and, on the other hand, we may hope to find that there are great principles, principles that run through the Bible from end to end, which point conclusively to a very different theory—a theory consistent at once with our highest conceptions of the character of God and with the dictates of reason and conscience. In fine, I would advise any of you who wish to know what the Bible really teaches of the future life, first, to study attentively all those passages in the Gospels and Epistles which are commonly adduced in favour of the endless punishment of the impenitent, for you will find that they are at least patient of another than the current interpretation; and then, refusing to pin your faith to any theory built on isolated texts and passages, to inquire what large, general, pervading truths, what spacious and controlling principles, are woven into the very stuff and substance of Scripture which bear on this question, and what are the conclusions to which they point.