diligence and holiness. In chap. ii., a similar exhortation (vers. 13, 14, &c.) is founded on the possession of full heavenly privileges as stated in vers. 9 and 10. See similar exhortations founded on similar grounds, in 1 Cor. xv. 58; Col. iii. 5, &c.; 1 Thess. v. 6, &c., and other passages.

"I write the above remarks, to a great extent, in the spirit of an inquirer. If the doctrine you propound can be proved from Scripture, I trust I am willing to receive it. May the Lord lead us into all truth.

"C. M."

THE

ATHANASIUS ON FUTURE PUNISHMENT.

THE opinion of such a writer and thinker as Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria, A.D. 326, can never be unimportant. In my table of the views of the early fathers on the various theories of the punishment of the wicked, I ranked him among those who held that an eternal life of misery was to be their doom.* I had never heard that Athanasius was supposed to hold any other opinion, and also gave him this place in my table from reading passages in his writings which seemed to show that such was really his view.

II. It was therefore with some surprise that I lately found writers on our side of the question claiming Athanasius as agreeing with us here. The Rev. E. White in his recent valuable work, "Life in Christ," p. 450, has quoted passages to this effect from one of the writings of the Archbishop; and the Rev. Dr. Petavel, in his smaller but very interesting and instructive volume, "The Struggle for Eternal Life," p. 144, grounding his views very much upon Mr. White's quotations, has ranked Athanasius among those who held the Scriptural view of Eternal Death as the doom of the lost.

III. I need not say that I should be very glad that Mr. White and Dr. Petavel were right, and I was wrong upon this point. Most willingly would I alter my table, and place Athanasius among those who maintained the extinction of evil from God's universe. But I am unable to do so. I fear that the examination of his opinions and his writings compels us to give him that place which I have given him, and which he has very generally been supposed to take. I would point out briefly my reasons for this.

IV. The deliberate and oft-repeated opinion of Athanasius upon the nature of the human soul and the doctrine of the resurrection would of necessity compel him to adopt either Origen's view of the restoration to God's favour of all mankind, or that of the eternal

*Duration and Nature of Future Punishment, 5th Ed., p. 325.

misery of those who were not restored. In no case could he hold the destruction or annihilation of a single human being. He held the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of all souls whatsoever, and he also held that the bodies of all, no matter what their character, would be raised incorruptible at the resurrection. It is impossible for a man who held such views to have put forward the theory of the annihilation of even a single man.

The following quotations will show us his view upon the nature of the soul of man. They are taken by me from the edition of his works referred to below.* For the translation I am responsible, as I have not been able to lay my hands upon any rendering into English of his works.

66

Thus in one place he speaks of the soul in general: "If, when tied to the body, it lived a life unrelated to the body: much more will it be the case that upon death it will live, and will not cease to live." (Vol. i., p. 36.) In another place he says: "If reason has demonstrated the soul to be unlike the body, and the body is by nature mortal, of necessity the soul must be immortal in being unlike the body." (Vol. i., p. 35.) And elsewhere he thus defines the soul of man: it is, he says, an intellectual essence, without body, without passion, immortal." (Vol. ii., p. 336.) This soul, thus undying and immortal, he identifies with ourselves: it is, he tells us, our inner man." (Vol. i., p. 626.) Athanasius' view of the soul, corresponding with that of Plato, with the important exception that the Christian father did not suppose it to have existed until it was joined to its body, would alone forbid us to suppose that he could possibly have held the extinction of the wicked.

But in addition to this view of his upon the soul, his doctrine of Resurrection would lead inevitably to the same conclusion. Instead of supposing, as Scripture teaches, that the resurrection of the just alone was a resurrection to immortality, he was of opinion that Resurrection conferred immortality upon all alike, whether just or unjust. The natural body was with him, in the case of every man, raised incorruptible. Thus in one passage he says, not of some but of all: "the dead do not perish, but live and become incorruptible through resurrection. (Vol. i., p. 80.) And in another passage where he speaks more at large upon this subject, he says: "Therefore in the time of the resurrection, by the command of God, all the elements restore invisibly what they took when the body died, and the soul joins itself, and the man rises again, as he only knows how who formed man, sown indeed in the earth corruptible, but rising in incorruption. And we can hence confute the Samaritans in the matter of the resurrection of this body, in that we bury the bodies as we hide any grain in the ground. And on this account God, from the very beginning, gave commandment through the fathers that we digging should cover the dead bodies,

Sancti Athanasii Magni Opera, Coloniæ, 1686, 2 vols.

that so man even against his will should confess the resurrection. For everything that is covered by us in the ground is certainly hid by us in hope of a resurrection. If therefore there were no resurrection of the dead, as heretics say, God would be found to be unjust. For he permits many just men to be here afilicted and miserably to perish: while he bestows upon many impious and sinful persons life and prosperity in their children and their business. But let not the Samaritans be deceived. For there shall be the time of resurrection and of judgment, that the pious who suffered here may be crowned, and on the other hand the impious who were fortunate should be punished by the just judgment of God in everlasting fire for ever and ever." (Vol. ii., p. 337.) As Athanasius held that the bodies of the wicked should be raised incorruptible, and that they would also suffer an everlasting punishment, he could not possibly hold that they would be destroyed or annihilated, but must have held the genuine Augustinian view of their doom.

But my readers will perhaps ask what we are to do with those passages which Mr. White and Dr. Petavel have quoted from Athanasius. These passages are apparently very strong for Mr. White's view. We will give the strongest part of one of them in Mr. White's translation. Athanasius, speaking with special regard to the sin of our first parents, says, "The transgression of the command brought them back to their natural condition. So that even as, when not existing they had been created, so also they should undergo destruction of being in the course of time. And justly, for if possessing the nature of not being once, by the presence and philanthropy of the Loges they were called into existence; it was right that men, being emptied of the knowledge of God, and turning to the things that are not (for evil things are things that are not, but good things really are, since they proceed from the really existing God), should be emptied also of eternal existence; and this is for them, being dissolved, to remain in death and destruction." It may very naturally be said, in support of Mr. White's view, that this passage teaches the annihilation of the wicked just as strongly as Athanasius view of the soul and resurrection must be supposed to convey to us that he could not have believed in their annihilation. Does Athanasius contradict himself, or can we show how passages apparently contradictory may be reconciled? Athanasius was a man of a clear and logical mind, and the idea of contradiction is not to be readily entertained. I believe we can reconcile the various passages in the following

way :

Athanasius, in his treatise on the incarnation of Christ, from which alone Mr. White has quoted, seems, in my judgment, to have had the following object. He supposes, and most justly, that the effect of Adam's sin would have been to involve the entire race of man in absolute and lasting destruction, so that they should have no more being than they had before they were created. He

supposes however that the work of Christ reversed this doom for the entire race, so that instead of the race perishing, not a single individual would perish. The passages, therefore, which speak of the perishing of the sinful race, and on which Mr. White and Dr. Petavel rely, speak only of man as he would have been if Christ had not become incarnate, and not at all of man, or of any portion of the human race, since Christ died on behalf of humanity. And thus we see that these passages from Athanasius, quoted by Mr. White, do not controvert the inference I have drawn from passages of his elsewhere; for, instead of being contradictory to, they are in perfect harmony with the view that Athanasius held that the wicked should suffer misery for ever. The work of Christ for the race at large, according to him, conferred upon the impious the terrible boon of immortality. An astounding doctrine this is indeed, but one which is not peculiar to the great Archbishop of Alexandria. The Bishop of Winchester, in his "Spital Sermon," preached on the 14th of April, 1873, put forth precisely the same fearful view. "We could not stand," he said, where the world stood on the day preceding the resurrection, for Christ had risen, and in his rising the grave was unlocked, and the chains of death unloosed for the whole world. Eternity was before us, and we could neither decline nor escape it; immortality was perforce to be ours." (Daily News of date.)

I will give one further quotation from Athanasius to show the sort of idea in his mind that led him to a view of the effect of Christ's work, which is, to my mind, of the most appalling character, if I for a moment believed in its truth. The passage is this: "It would be unbecoming," he tells us, "that they who were once created rational and partakers of God's own reason, should be extinguished and should return again to nothingness through corruption. For it were unworthy of the goodness of God if that which was created by him should perish on account of the fraud of the devil against man: and, moreover, it were most unsuitable that the handiwork of God or man should be extinguished, either through their own want of care, or the craft of the devil." (Vol. i., pp. 58, 59.) Here is the solution of Athanasius' view of the work of Christ, and Athanasius' answer to the inference Mr. White and Dr. Petavel draw from isolated passages. Man, according to the old father, would have sunk back to nothingness for his sin; but it would be unsuitable that any creature made in the likeness of God should perish: hence Christ came and restored to the whole race a lost immortality: hence, so far from all the race perishing, not one individual of it will be destroyed. They who will not have an immortality of bliss, shall have an immortality of woe!

Such are some of my reasons for concluding that in placing Athanasius in the column with those who held an eternal life of misery for the wicked I was right. Most gladly would I find myself in error. Most cordially do I invite Mr. White and Dr. Petavel

to pursue their inquiries into the opinions of the brave old father, and, if possible, to show that he was at one with us here. Their success would be of use to our cause. The highest human names are indeed less than the dust of the balance against one word of God; but there are numbers whom the authority of such a man as Athanasius would lead to give a candid consideration to opinions which otherwise they would contemptuously set aside without a hearing. If Mr. White and Dr. Petavel can establish their opinion that Athanasius rejected the horrible doctrine of eternal evil and misery they will confer upon him, in my opinion, a far higher honour than his falsely-supposed authorship of one of the creeds has done; and we would in the eyes of many be reputed more orthodox than we are if we could inscribe upon our banner of Life in Christ the name of Athanasius.

HENRY CONSTABLE.

GETHSEMANE!

I.

Y soul is sorrowful exceedingly,

"MY

Even unto death:" thus mournfully had said
The Master, with eyes drooped, and reverend head
Bowed to the coming agony.

Anon he kneels apart,

II.

And wrestleth in agony of pray'r

With throes and groanings of his mighty heart,

Born of some supreme care

That cloudeth the ineffable serene

Of his meek-orbed eyes, love-eloquent;
The holy fairness of his brow besprent

With welling beads of onset seen

By those dull watchers ere their drowsed eyes-
(Ah, surely they at least might watch and weep,
Whilst his soul travaileth in anguish'd cries)—
Darken'd in slothful sleep.

III.

Is it the shadow of the shameful tree,

Or thought of the abhorred traitor-kiss,
That causeth his great heart Divine to be
Rack'd with a woe like this?

Some direful phantasm of Calvary :

To know he must upyield his mortal breath With more than mortal anguish wings the cry,"My soul is sorrowful unto death!"