is forgotten; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun." Is it not to meet this twofold despair that Christ brought "life and incorruption to light ?" He revealed not the "life" of the spirit merely; telling us that all live unto God," and himself when put to death in the flesh, yet living in the spirit, and going and preaching the Gospel to the spirits in prison (1 Pet. iii. 18-20; iv. 6), "Spirit to spirit-ghost to ghost;" but also the "incorruption" of the body; being raised in a body of flesh and bones now "no more to return to corruption ;" and leaving us, by the mouth of his Apostle, the glorious promise that "this corruptible (body) shall put on incorruption;" as well as "this mortal (soul) put on immortality." FIDUS. THE PRUDENCE OF CHRIST. HE prudence of Christ in his conduct among his people was as re any qualities. this character of our Lord is better seen in regard to his claim to royalty than in any other respect. He had here a most difficult part to discharge. He must needs give sufficient proof that he was King of Israel, as the prophets had foretold of him. He must assert this, and prove this by his words and by his works before his death. Here-in his very success here-lay one grand danger arising from the temper and circumstances of his people and his times. If his just claim were accepted, the people would insist on making him king in their sense: popular tumults would arise: a colourable pretext would be afforded to the Romans for condemning him as a rebel against imperial authority: hostile feeling would identify him with one of the many false Christs of popular insurrections: his name would have been handed down to succeeding ages as but one of such pretenders: our faith would falter at such a view of Christ. The extreme danger of this is seen readily from the conduct of the Jews to other men who claimed the office of the Christ, and from their conduct on many occasions to Christ himself. The setting up to be the predicted king of prophecy was with every one except Jesus of Nazareth a call to arms responded to eagerly by a fierce and excited people. This we know from history. From our Gospels we know that multitudes were waiting and ready to act a similar part by Christ. Without any encouragement from him, nay, against his will, the exhibition of a power which proved him to be the prophet predicted by Moses was seized on by them as the opportunity for forcibly making him a king, and as such the leader of opposition against Roman rule. (John vi. 15.) Viewing these two matters, viz., the necessity of his claiming to be and establishing his claim to be King of Israel, and also to escape all just suspicion of setting up to be such a king as the people expected or of producing popular tumults, the conduct of Christ was pre-eminently prudent. He claimed and was acknowledged to be King from first to last. As such he was worshipped by the wise men in his cradle at Bethlehem. As such he was acknowledged by Nathaniel and his disciples at the outset of his public life. As such he was hailed by multitudes in his triumphal procession into Jerusalem. (Matt. ii. 2; John i. 49; xii. 13.) Yet, he never created a tumult: he never gave the slightest pretext for charging him with opposing Roman rule: such a charge was made against him before Pilate, but the man who was most directly interested in such matters only treated the charge as an impertinence. (Luke xxiii. 15.) The necessity for such a prudent course was certainly present in Christ's mind. (John vi. 15.) It gives us also a clue to some of his conduct which it is else not always easy to comprehend. Hence, when enthusiasm runs high he returns to a desert and hides in its welcome solitude till popular ardour has abated. Hence, we have little doubt, was the reason why, on several occasions when he had wrought one of his great works, he enjoined a partial or a total silence. (Matt. ix. 30; xii. 16; Mark vii. 36.) We cannot suppose that he gave an injunction that he did not wish to be obeyed. In his desire to avoid popular excitement there appears to be the real reason for such conduct on his part, and when his injunction was not followed we find him retiring from the scene altogether. (Luke xv. 14-16.) The great thing to be noted here is that Christ succeeded in both his objects. He was acknowledged as king by numbers during his earthly life, and these numbers have ever since been growing and increasing. To them-the honest and the candid-he gave sufficient proof that he was King of Israel. On the other hand, the suspicion even that he wanted to be king in the sense that Herod and Cæsar were kings, or in the sense that the false pretenders to be Messiah wanted to be kings, has never attached for a moment to his name. The Jewish nation never did affirm it of him, and do not affirm it of him now. Infidels may call him enthusiast, but such an idea as we speak of they never attribute to him. All this exhibits an astonishing prudence in the conduct of Christ. When we take into account the strange, excitable, suspicious, fierce, crafty temperament of the Jewish people in the time of Christ, as we find them depicted in the pages of Josephus and brought strongly forward in many incidents of the Gospels, we will admire the marvellous prudence of speech and conduct which enabled the young Galilean teacher to spend his extraordinary life in the midst of them, making and establishing his lofty claim to be Son of David and King of Israel, and yet never exposing himself even to a suspicion that he wanted to be a potentate of this age. His conduct never led king, or tetrarch, or high priest, or people, watched closely as he was by all of them, to imagine that he sought, wished for, dreamed of a kingdom now. And his conduct arose neither from the absence of lofty hopes and aspirations upon Christ's part, nor from personal timidity. In the highest sense of the word Christ was ambitious. The offer of the kingdoms of the world made to him by Satan was, beyond doubt, a strong temptation to the mind of Christ, to be overcome only by the sense of his duty to his Father. (Matt. iv. 9-10.) Timidity had nothing to do with the prudence of Christ. There was never a more fearless man than he. He faced an angry nation for years: they feared him his cheek never blanched before them. Alone, he drove them from the temple alone, he denounced woe after woe upon their ruling classes, while these glared upon him with fury in their hearts: alone, he stood before Pilate, the Sanhedrim, and the multitude, the only heart that beat no faster, while the passions of evil were bubbling and seething around him, when Peter lied and cursed in abject terror, when the Governor gazed in alarm at the unconcerned man before him, whose manner told that he lived in a region raised above the storms of earth. The prudence of Christ we see to have been upon a par with his power and his love. HENRY CONSTABLE. CORRESPONDENCE. FOR OF CHRIST'S ARGUMENT SIR,-I have to thank Mr. Waylen for the kindly remarks on my paper on this subject in the RAINBOW for June, with which he opens his letter on my paper. I must at the same time, with your permission, express my decided dissent from the views he puts forward in his letter on the subject of the intermediate state, and also say that I think he is mistaken as to such views entering to any extent into our Lord's argument for the resurrection which was the subject of my paper. Though I have been called a Sadducee* on account of my denial of the natural immortality of man and cf the eternal torment of the unsaved, I am really not a Sadducee at all. I believe not only in the resurrection and in angels, but also in spirits. Mr. Waylen believes evidently in the first of these three; also, I have no doubt, in the second; but I confess I am unable to distinguish between what Mr. *See p. 65 of my book on "Everlasting Punishment as Tanght in Scripture." Kellaway & Co. Waylen and some other of your contributors hold on the subject of the disembodied spirit state and what the Sadducees held in their denial of the third, i.e., the exis. tence of spirits. For it was surely not the existence of God as a spirit that they denied; and it was clearly not the existence of good or evil angels who are spirits, that St. Luke alluded to when he charged them with saying there was no spirit; for that he makes a separate charge against them. Nor can it be said that what they denied under that head was the existence of spirit in the living man; for it was evidently the existence of such a spirit as the Pharisees spoke of when they said in their strife against the Sadducees: "But if a spirit or an angel hath spoken to him, let us not fight against God" (Acts xxiii. 9); and I should say also such a spirit as the disciples thought of and our Lord spoke of when he said, "A spirit hath not flesh and bone as ye see me have." (Luke xxiv. 39.) I need only refer to my line of argument as condensed in pp. 283-4, if not to my whole paper,-submitting at the same time that it is logically complete as it stands,-to rebut Mr. Waylen's notion that "the presence of this element," i.e., the opinion that the dead in Christ are now blessed and resting in paradise from their labours, is "injurious to the main structure of the argument." I can only say further that he misunderstands my argument, and as I believe our Lord's argument too, if he thinks the presence of that element at all injurious to it. I suppose Mr. Waylen will not deny that, with the exception of the Sadducees, the Jews of our Lord's day, believed firmly, whether rightly or wrongly, in the intermediate state as a state of conscious existence. Taking that for granted, it seems to me that Mr. Waylen must suppose that our Lord's words in Matt. xxii. 31, 32, in some mysterious way, dissipated such a belief from the minds of the multitude that heard, or that heard of, how he put the Sadducees to silence. He must suppose too that the Sadducees perceived that their foes the Pharisees were proved wrong in one point of difference between them (that of "spirits ") without their uttering a word of satisfaction or exultation with which (if it were indeed so) they might have covered their defeat on the point of the resurrection. Also, that no one-whether Pharisee or Sadducee then or Christian ever since could understand our Lord's argument, or perceive its force against the Sadducees, without denying at the same time the conscious existence of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the intermediate state, and holding that our Lord denied it too. As to this last, I may say that I am one of many living instances to the contrary of it. And as to all these suppositions, which seem to me absolutely necessary to Mr. Waylen's case, I consider that, even if not in each case exceedingly improbable, they are a much greater burden than may well be laid on the understanding of the passage in question. If only it be granted that the promise of the possession and inheritance of a certain promised land could not, in the nature of things, be made good to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob while in "the disembodied spirit-state," and while in the "paradise of "the third heaven" (2 Cor. xii. 2-4), my account of our Lord's argument remains, I submit, untouched and unassailable, notwithstanding the presence in my mind of the element which Mr. Waylen considers so injurious to it. I have read a good deal of what has been written in the RAINBOW and elsewhere on the side that Mr. Waylen takes in this question; but I am still of opinion that it is an utterly unscriptural opinion he hoids, as well as quite unreasonable as an inference from the teaching of Scripture. It is sometimes put forward as a help to the denial of eternity of torment; I can only say that the stoutest and bitterest upholder of that dogma that I know, holds with Mr. Waylen in denying the existence of disembodied spirits. But I am far from saying that it is not fairly an open question among Christians, and a proper question for occasional discussion in your journal. This is not the place to enter into the discussion of such a question on its merits, but I may, perhaps, be allowed to put forward in the end of this letter, long as it is, one interesting argument for Abraham's conscious existence in the intermediate state, which I have not seen alluded to in the RAINBOW. I refer to John viii. 56. As it stands in our Authorised Version, that verse contains an unmeaning and unworthy tautology; but as rightly translated (see Alford in loco) it reads thus: "Your father Abraham rejoiced that he should see my day; and he saw it, and was glad." That is, he rejoiced when on earth that he should see (iva ion) the day of Christ; and when that day came, at the incarnation, he saw it (ɛide) and was glad. Unless the word "eide," occurring the second time in the verse, has a different meaning from what it bears the first time-unless it means "see" in one place and "foresee" in the other, our Lord asserted-as I believe, with Alford, he did that Abraham saw his day "in his paradisiacal state of bliss." This is, I believe, one of many places where our Lord and his apostles expressly endorsed the belief of the orthodox Jews of their day in the disembodied spirit-state as a state of conscious existence, and of comparative bliss for the righteous dead. I am, Sir, yours faithfully, [The publication of this letter has been delayed for want of space. -ED.] CHRIST'S ARGUMENT FOR He THE RESURRECTION. SIR,-J. W., according to his last letter (Part I.) on this subject, seems to think that because, as he quotes, "Scripture is given by inspiration, and profitable for doctrine," therefore every sentiment recorded in Scripture is true. can hardly mean this, however, or I am sure he will not, after a moment's reflection, for he must know that we have the sentiments of Satan and of wicked and foolish men recorded there, and these I am sure he does not think therefore true. At any rate, he seems to think that whatever Moses and other saints and men of God have said, as recorded in Scripture, must be good and true, and may be used as foundation for our Christian faith. But I would ask, Did Moses never "speak unadvisedly with his lips ?" Are we to adopt all the petulant sayings of Job, even such Elihu reproves him for uttering? (See Job xxxiv. 9.) Was Abraham justified in all his recorded words? 66 as Or to come to what J. W. seems to think must be still more certainly true-their words addressed to God. Did Moses never anger God by such ? For answer see Exodus iv. 14. Was Elijah "the man of God," right in all that "intercession of his "to God" recorded in 1 Kings xix. 10-14 ? He says: Many, if not most, of the passages quoted by St. Paul from the Old Testament, in support of his doctrine, are simply the utterances of some Old Testament saint addressed to God." Instead of making such a strange and rash assertion as this, would it not have been better if J. W. had given even one instance in point ?* I cannot think of one. I know St. Paul quotes Elijah's "utterances addressed to God." Not, however, to support his doctrine thereby, but rather by giving "the answer of God unto him," to point the folly of all such like "intercession against Israel" in his own day. Does J. W. really think that the words of Moses to God are as |