The Problem of Immortality (Part 2 of 6)

CHAPTER IV .

I. The immortalization of man by means of faith in Jesus Christ, the principal aim of the New Testament writings-II. With a scope beyond the horizon of the Old Testament, the question already raised comes up again : What do the biblical writers mean by the words life and death ?—III. We maintain the literal and primarily ontological meaning of these terms--IV.

Declarations of some of the most esteemed Commentators-V. Teaching of Jesus in relation to immortality-VI . Study of his favourite maxim- VII . Accordant teaching of the apostles-VIII . Preliminary reply to two categories of objections-IX. Profession of faith drawn from the whole body of biblical writings.

Immortality, which in the Old Testament is conditional, is conditional also in the New. The Gospel adopts the teaching of Moses and the prophets, giving it precision and completion . In so doing it borrows the terms which are used in the Septuagint translation to represent the corresponding Hebrew words . The Alexandrine version thus forming the connection between the two Testaments, the biblical doctrine is, as it were, firmly clenched.

The New Testament has nothing to say about a native and inalienable immortality. This silence is not without meaning, for the Scripture takes care to teach the most elementary religious truths, proclaiming even those which might be taken for granted, as, for example, the eternity of God. If Providence is not named, there is no lack of texts in favour of that doctrine ; but as regards native immortality, neither the word nor the thing can be found.2

1 Deut. xxxii . 40 ; Rom. xvi. 26.

2 One of the latest champions of the traditional dogma in America explains this absence by saying that if there had been favourable texts the Conditionalists would have contested their genuineness. Life and Death

In both Testaments immortality appears as the result of a personal faith in the personal and living God : the redeemed righteous shall live ; the obstinate sinners shall be for ever destroyed.¹ Still, the horizon becomes wider ; the new Testament prolongs the lines ; it clearly extends to the future life the temporal promises and threatenings of the Old Testament. The eternity of life and the eternity of non-existence, veiled under the Old Covenant, are revealed and made prominent in the New.

Jesus upholds the conditions of immortalization. To one who asks of him how to obtain eternal life, he answers, like Moses : " Do this, fulfil the law, and thou shalt live. " 2 Man becomes immortal by righteousness ; but (and this is a new fact) Jesus offers in his own person the only bridge whereby a man may attain to righteousness . His expiatory death gives us the assurance of divine pardon, and an imperishable life becomes the portion of everyone who unites himself to Jesus by faith. Such, as it seems to us, is the fundamental thought of the New Testament, the precise aim of the Gospel. “ These things are written," we read in the Gospel of John, " that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing ye may have life." In this passage the word life is used in its full force ; it is active existence, normal, pure, happy, and also perpetual, because not poisoned by sin. That life alone is imperishable.

Here again, as at the outset of our study of the Old Testament, traditional exegesis cries " Halt ! " Put aside, it says, the rudimentary notions of existence and duration ; the life promised in the New Testament bears a mystic meaning synonymous with eternal happiness and holiness. Deprived of this mystic life, the wicked may still exist, and even exist

Eternal, by S. Bartlett, p. 50.-In despair of his cause, this author seems to have acted upon the rule said to prevail among the lawyers at the Old

Bailey : " If you have no good argument, abuse the opponent's attorney.”

12 Thess. i. 9 ; cf. Psa. xcii. 9.

2.Luke x. 28 ; Lev. xviii. 5.

3.John xx. 31 .

for ever. Without having life eternal, they may yet possess an interminable life .

Truly, if the definition thus put forth in opposition to u were well founded, it would undermine the very basis of Conditionalism.

But we are well prepared to meet the objection.

We have to oppose it with that which in a deliberative assembly would be called a motion to order, an appeal to the rules.

The principle which is held to govern all discussion among Protestants-we may say even among philologists in the study of the texts is, as we have seen, the historico-grammatical interpretation. By virtue of this principle, the proper and usual meaning of words has the precedence of all other meanings . Unhappily, without being aware of it, Protestantism has been unfaithful to the principle upon which it is founded. In relation to these most important notions, life and death, it has followed in the wake of the Roman Church, which has distorted, falsified, and mutilated the teaching of the Scriptures. Brought to book, there is only one thing for Protestantism to do : to recognize its inconsistency, and so to re-establish the meaning of the terms in question, otherwise it . will shamefully deny itself.

Meanwhile we maintain that life in the New Testament signifies specifically not happiness, nor holiness, nor anything else, but simply life ; that is to say, in relation to man, the existence of a conscient individual, capable both of thinking and acting. By death we understand the contrary of life : the deprivation of all sentiment, the end of all activity, the extinction of all individual faculties. Death without any restriction, expressed or understood, death absolute, sometimes called second death , will be the definitive and complete cessation of life as just described.

There are in Greek, as well as in French and English, plenty of words to express happiness. In French we have counted more than a dozen, and Greek is no less rich.

There are even more words to express the notion of misery, to convey which the term death is supposed to be used. Human lan-

guages are only too fertile in vocables expressive of the idea of suffering. Death and life, on the contrary, are without synonyms ; a further reason for leaving to these terms their proper meaning, which no other expression can convey without periphrase.

Strong in the principle which furnishes a basis for Protestantism and biblical philology, we take our stand upon the literal meaning as in a citadel.

In order to drive us out of it, our opponents have but one way of access : to prove that the adoption of that meaning leads, in this connection, to absurd consequences. It is, of course, necessary to take in a figurative sense those expressions which it would be ridiculous or contradictory to interpret literally. In such cases a tropical sense may, nay must, be substituted for the literal. In the Gospels, for instance, there are some hyperboles. Jesus directs us to turn the left cheek to the person who should strike us on the right. That is the letter. To one who smites him on the face he says : " Why smitest thou me ? " That supplies the interpretation according to the spirit. But to pretend that, in order to hold to the spirit, we must habitually take a meaning precisely opposed to the letter, is to " change darkness into light and light into darkness, to make bitter that which is sweet and sweet that which is bitter."

This would be the death and burial of exegesis .

With regard to the particular point now in question, by the admission that the soul can perish the representatives of the traditional dogma have, so to speak, cut the ground from under their feet. If the soul can perish, it is not by nature immortal. If it is not by nature immortal, there is nothing absurd in saying that Jesus confers upon the soul first of all an immortality properly so called. There is nothing absurd in the act of conferring imperishability. But if the literal meaning here has nothing absurd in it, there is no alternative ; that meaning must prevail, otherwise we forsake Protestantism ; and more than that, we forsake the universally-recognized domain of philology, for " there is only one philology."

Chap. II ., sect. vi. So, too, in the Chrétien évangélique of 20 Jan., 1881, p. 20. M. Geo. Godet, while combatting Conditionalism, subscribes to the conclusions of Lotze as to the contingence of all creatures, including human souls. See ante, pp. 54 sq., 70, and p. 82, note.

We have, therefore, full right to claim as in favour of Conditional Immortality all the texts in the New Testament in which it is said either directly or indirectly that Jesus is our life. We will not reproduce them ; that would be to quote nearly the whole volume. We will take as a single example that classic passage which the British and Foreign Bible

Society has had printed in three hundred different languages :

" God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life . "

In accordance with the rule to which we have appealed, this signifies that the believer, escaping the final and total destruction that awaits the impenitent sinner, acquires an imperishable life. This life will doubtless be holy and happy, considering the character of the God who gives it . In the widest sense of the word, in its full and emphatic sense, this life will be, as we have already indicated, perpetual existence in the normal developement of all human faculties , physical, intellectual, and moral health ; the harmonious unfolding of all those gifts of which the germs have been implanted within us by the divine bounty. By the goodness of the Creator, every life is generally joyous in the measure in which it is normal.

Nevertheless, in all life the notion of existence remains primary. Holiness and happiness are qualifications of life ; there may be life without them, but the converse is impossible ; life is a canvas, which they ought to beautify. No doubt a burning candle is flame and light, but it is in the first place a combustible . Let us , then, be careful not to put the attribute in the place of the subject, and always, in accordance with the rules of logic, to leave in the foreground that which is made prominent by the sacred text.¹

1 No one will contest the ontological meaning of the word life in this passage : " As the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself" (John v. 26). It is here evidently first of all existence that is spoken of.

In verse 21 of the same chapter it is said that the Son giveth life to whom he will ; therefore, judging by the context, it is existence that the Son gives to the believers. But it is asked how the Son could give existence to those who already have it. We reply, that to perpetuate a life ephemeral in its nature, to infuse a new life into a creature about to perish, to fill with oil a lamp that is going out, in short, to revive the dead, is indeed to give life in the ontological sense.

In the subsequent chapter Jesus identifies again, and even more evidently,

The traditional interpretation is, in short, a usurper. Like a parasitic plant, it infests the field of exegesis. Happily some excellent Commentators have contended against it, directly or indirectly. We will proceed to record some of their declarations .

§ 1. We will begin by quoting Hermann Olshausen, one of the most eminent of those who in our century have laid down the laws of biblical interpretation. He says :

Kuinoël deserves severe blame for the superficial manner in which he explains the word life. He comments with incredible negligence on the words, " this life is in his Son," as though the meaning were that " happiness is given by his Son."

It is evident that this false interpretation tends to weaken, and even to suppress, the true meaning of our holy books.

Schleusner asserts that the word life has nine different meanings, but he seems to ignore its only true meaning. Wahl and Bretschneider march in the footsteps of Schleusner, and have nothing better to say. Their interpretations do violence to the sacred writers, by attributing to them modern opinions. Lücke and Seyffarth have shown much more penetration . There is no doubt that the eternal life cannot be unhappy, but in the New Testament life never has the meaning of happiness.

Life is the normal union of the forces which maintain the existence of the the ontological life that he receives with that which he transmits : " As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he that eateth me shall live because of me " (John vi. 57) . The as and so suffice to prove that it is not here a question of happiness and holiness, but, firstly and fundamentally, of life, in its proper meaning of existence.

The principle that we lay down is that this fundamental meaning is never absent from the term in question. If Jesus elsewhere says, " This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou hast sent " (John xvii. 3), that knowledge is called life only by metonymy, and as the means of attaining the end. So also in the Old Testament : " There is death in the pot " (2 Kings iv. 40) ; death is used by metonymy for a deadly poison, the effect for the cause.

The same remark applies to that other saying of Jesus in the same Gospel (John xii. 50) : " His commandment is life eternal." This is again a metonymy, the cause put for the effect. Without metonymy this declaration might be paraphrased by saying that obedience to the commandment of the

Father is a source of immortality. The ontological meaning remains unimpaired.

1 1 John v. II .

living being. Death is the abnormal dislocation of these same forces. Applied to human nature, this definition will suffice to give us the true meaning of the word life in all the passages of the New Testament in which it is found.¹

§ 2. Professor Reuss could hardly misunderstand the ontological meaning of the term referred to. He says :

Life eternal is nothing else than that which is more simply called life, the adjective merely expressing the indefinite duration of an existence assured to the individual.

Son nent

For a man to eat the flesh of the signifies to have life in himself, a life henceforth perma-

• imperishable.2

Such being the privilege of believers exclusively, it necessarily results that the life of the wicked will be transitory, perishable.

Professor Reuss himself draws this inference :

When Paul says : " In Christ shall all be made alive," he cannot have in view all human beings in general, for the simple reason that they are not all in Christ. He means to say : All those who are in Christ will have life just because they are in Christ, who is the author and cause of that life henceforth indestructible.

The others pass through temporal death into death eternal.3

Are not these words of Professor Reuss decisive : life henceforth indestructible ?

For eternal torments an indestructible life would be absolutely necessary ; the wicked not having such a life, how could there be for them eternal torments ?

Let us remember that no such expression is applied to them in the Bible. Professor Reuss made use of it in a work published long ago ; but if we desire to observe the progress of his thought, we must take note of the much more recent affirmations that have just been quoted. As long ago as 1852 he wrote :

The notion of the indestructibility of the soul, of a continuity of life

1 Opuscula theologica, viii.

2 La Bible.

De notione vocis ZOE in libris Ν.Τ.

Théologie johannique, pp. 148, 188, 192.-We give notice once for all that here and in the following quotations the italics are ours. 3 La Bible. Εpîtres pauliniennes, vol. i., p. 260. Histoire de la théologie chrétienne au siècle apostolique, vol. ii., p. 234. 1852.

4 In his explanation of 2 Thess. i. 9, Professor Reuss speaks of an eternal damnation.

We should have no difficulty in admitting that expression, for, deprivation of life being clearly a punishment, a condemnation which makes it perpetual becomes an eternal punishment or damnation.

essentially inherent in the soul, all that which in philosophy we call immortality, is outside the circle of ideas in which apostolic theology moves. Incorruptibility, the quality of exemption from all decline, from all chance of death, properly belongs to God alone. None, therefore, but Christ, the image of God, could communicate to the world such a boon.1

§ 3. Professor Frederic Godet is in agreement with Professor Reuss on this point. The well-known Neuchâtel professor declares that :

The life that Jesus Christ communicates to believers is not of a purely moral nature ; it is his complete life, corporal as well as spiritual. When Jesus says : " I am the resurrection and the life," it is im-

Life possible to separate the moral from the physical meaning.

But for some designates existence in its perfect state of prosperity.

beings this developement is limited to the physical life, for others it extends to the intellectual and moral life.

John means to say that in union with the creative Word there was life, full life, perfect developement of existence for each being according to its capacity.2

§ 4. A lay theologian had preceded Professor Godet in this line of thought. M. Frederic de Rougemont has written :

All life, physical and spiritual, flows from God through the Word. The eternal Word of God is the life of all created things ; it is in him that they subsist physically and morally, and it is by him that they are reborn to life after sin has put them to death physically and morally.3 § 5. Let us now weigh the testimony of the venerable pastor to whom we owe the New Testament Explained, one of the most useful works of our French evangelical literature.

It is M.

Louis Bonnet who writes :

Life ought to be understood in its universal sense. The Scripture has no knowledge of the sterile notion of an immortality of the soul independent of the resurrection, and more especially of the renewal of our whole being of the pagan idea of an immortality outside of

1 Rom. i. 23 ; 1 Tim. i. 17 ; 2 Tim. i. 10.-Histoire de la théologie chré- tienne, etc., vol. ii., p. 237, sq. 1852.

2 Commentaire sur l'Evangile de Jean, vol. ii., pp. 130, 134, 333 ; vol. i., p. 156. Paris, 1864, 1865.

3 Notes inserted in a French translation by Clément de Faye of Trench's Synonyms of the New Testament, p. 110 ; and in Olshausen's Biblical

Commentary upon the History of the Lord's Passion, p. 245. Neuchâtel, the life in God, and of a state of pure spirit.

Never does the

Scripture teach the doctrine of an abstract immortality. This false spiritualism is as contrary to true philosophy as it is to the Gospel.1

The principle clearly laid down, as by a common accord, by Messrs. Frederic Godet, Frederic de Rougemont, and Louis Bonnet, is of the highest value, and it should be urged to its legitimate consequences . If Christ, the Word of God, is truly the source of all life, of every sort, even physical, it logically follows that the wicked becoming more and more strangers to the life in Christ, must eventually be deprived of life of every kind, even physical. The theologians just named would then be virtually Conditionalists .

As for Professor Reuss, he is perhaps expounding the view of the apostle Paul rather than his own. If he shared it, he, too, would be among the number of unconscious Conditionalists .

§ 6. Pastor Zietlow has expressed similar views : To the man [Adam] in his fallen state the gift of eternal life would have been baneful, as involving the eternal continuance of that state, and the production of a race of beings in eternal revolt against God. Still, the tree of life is not suppressed, but access to it is no longer permitted. Eternal life is essentially immortality, an indestructible life, a life which has eternity for its goal. It does not become the portion of the sinner, seeing that if it were to become his portion, he would be able Eternal life gives to the to pose eternally as an enemy of God.

natural human organism a capacity for eternal existence.

It makes the man capable of immortalization in both the soul and the spiritual body. If deprived of this eternal life he becomes the prey of death, in conformity with the sentence pronounced in Gen. iii. 19 ; not as an extraordinary event, but as the natural and necessary consequence. Eternal life is a free gift of God, an additional grant, donum superadditum. It is not a constituent part of human nature, but may be grafted upon it, so to speak. Without this graft human nature is perishable.5

1 Le Nouveau Testament de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ expliqué, au moyen d'introductions, d'analyses, et de notes exégétiques, par L. Bonnet, docteur en théologie, pasteur à Francfort, four vols., large 8vo. Lausanne, G. Bridel and Co.-Notes on Matt. xxii. 32 ; John i. 4 ; Rom. viii. II ; 1 Cor. xv. 18, 53 ; 1 Tim. vi. 16, etc.

3 Gen. iii. 22.

2 Heb . vii. 16.

4 Rom. vi . 23.

5 Extract from an article entitled Der Baum des Lebens, by G. Zietlow, pastor at Carnitz, Pomerania. Zeitschrift für kirchliche Wissenschaft, of

Chr. E. Luthardt, p. 21, sq.

§ 7. So also Dean Alford, one of the most esteemed English exegetical and critical writers. On the verse in the first Epistle of John (ii. 17), " And the world is passing away and the lust of it, " he makes the following comments :

In the world the ungodly men who are, in all their desires and thoughts, of the world are included. They and their lusts belong to, are part of, depend on, a world which is passing away. On the other hand, eternal fixity and duration belongs only to that order of things and to those men who are in entire accordance with the will of God. And among these is he that doeth that will, which is the true proof and following out of love toward him. As God himself is eternal, so is all that is in communion with him, and this are they who believe in him and love him and do his will.¹

§ 8. Professor Hugues Oltramare, late dean of the national Faculty at Geneva, calls the incorruptibility of believers nontransitoriness ; this supposes that the wicked reaping corruption would be transitory. What will that be if not a transitory existence followed by non- existence ?

§ 9. The evidence leads Professor Ménégoz to the same conclusions :

It is not only Paul's anthropology, but also the Pauline conception of redemption that is opposed to the understanding of death as anything else than the abolition of existence .

The chastisement of sin is the destruction of the life. In the day of the Lord the wicked will be exterminated. Their suffering ends in death, in the complete annihilation of their being. Apart from life in Christ and with Christ there is no life. The whole theological system of Paul falls to pieces if death be understood to mean anything else than the suppression of existence.3

§ 10. In a lucid statement already quoted, Professor Auguste Sabatier has brought out very clearly this biblical notion of an eternal life, which protects the believer.alone from falling back into nothingness :

According to St. Paul, who is the most explicit of all the writers of the New Testament, and who herein keeps well within the lines of

1 The New Testamentfor English Readers, in loco. 2 Commentaire sur l Epître aux Romains, vol. i., p. 197, edition of 1843.

3 Le Péché et la rédemption d'après St. Paul, pp. 78, 91, 83, sq. Paris,

1882.-M. Ménégoz has repudiated the name of Conditionalist ; but, in truth, the sentences quoted formulate our main thesis in a way that leaves nothing to be desired. He is apparently another unconscious Conditionalist.

Hebraism, man is not naturally immortal ; he can only become so by a new infusion of the divine Spirit ; he is not so by nature, he becomes so by faith. It is a grace.1

These sufficiently numerous declarations are like so many piles driven through the somewhat marshy soil of traditional exegesis. The eschatology of the New Testament may rest securely upon this foundation.2

Encouraged by so many adhesions, implicit or explicit, and determined to ascribe to the terms of the evangelical vocabulary their natural and legitimate meaning, let us now lend an ear to the words of Jesus .

" I am the bread of life, " said he. Bread is not a symbol of holiness, nor of happiness ; it is simply figurative of the maintenance of existence. " He that drinketh my blood hath eternal life, "

said Jesus again.

Neither does the blood symbolize happiness, nor holiness .

according to Moses .

The blood is the life

But these emblems will be further considered in the special study of baptism and the Lord's supper in our sixth chapter.

" As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life. " The view of the brazen serpent did not directly produce either sanctity or joy ; it restored life by setting the organic functions again to work.

In his last discourse Jesus compares himself to the vine, the sap of which is for the branch that which the blood is for the

1 Mémoire sur la notion hébraïque de l'esprit, p. 33.

2 There are probably passages in the writings of the authors just quoted which might be opposed to us. It seems that here and there some of them have not always submitted to the historico-grammatical principle of interpretation. Their exegetic probity has valiantly struggled against ancient tradition, but they could hardly be expected expressly to disavow a metaphysical doctrine which they had sucked with their mother's milk. They leave to their successors the duty of openly repudiating it. Our predecessors are like Moses mounting the slopes of Nebo. Our quotations prove that they have had a glimpse of the promised land of an exegesis without philosophic à priori.

3 John vi. 48.

5 John iii. 14, 15 .

4 John vi. 54.

animal. The branch separated from the stock is neither culpable nor sensitive of suffering ; it symbolizes only the lack of an independent life. It is withered, that is the sinner's agony ; it is burnt, that is his complete combustion.

This leads us to speak of the fate that Jesus assigns to the wicked. They have not in themselves a full and durable life.¹ A man may destroy himself. Jesus compares the wicked to the bundles of tares cast into the fire, to a man crushed under a rock, to criminals who are executed. It is true that the wicked will rise again ; they will have to appear at the last judgement, but if they are obstinate they will be finally destroyed, " both soul and body in Gehenna . " 3

Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ; or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? +

Such is the generally received translation of a saying which may be called the favourite maxim of Jesus. It would seem that no aphorism was more often on his lips. In forms more or less complete it is found as many as six times in the Gospels, and it occurs, as is not usual, in John as well as in the

Synoptics.5 Professor F. Godet perceives in this saying " the foundation of the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ " ; and M.

Louis Bonnet speaks of its “ supreme importance."

It is also very mysterious.

It is an enigma, a paradox, like that which may be heard in familiar conversation in speaking of a game in which " the loser wins." One word in particular

1 John vi. 53. The " life indeed" which endures (tés ontôs zoês), 1 Tim. vi. 19. In the sight of God and in reality the sinner's life is a dying life.

2 Luke ix. 25.

Heauton de apolesas, the man who loses or forfeits " his.

Y own self."-R.V .

3 John v. 25-29 ; Matt. x. 28. 4 Matt. xvi. 25, 26, A.V.

5 Matt. x. 39 ; xvi. 25, 26 ; Mark viii. 35-37 ; Luke ix. 24, 25 ; xvii. 33 ;

John xii. 25.

6 In Hebrew mashal. Orientals generally, and the Jews in particular, delighted to put their maxims into enigmatic form. The book of Proverbs.

offers numerous examples of this .

has been the despair of translators. They have all been foiled by the Greek term psuché, which they have sometimes rendered life and sometimes soul, while neither of these expressions is satisfactory. In order to indicate clearly the point of the difficulty, let us try the passage using the word soul : " Whosoever will save his soul shall lose it " ; that is an idea that revolts the thought, Jesus would thus be condemning as sterile and mischievous a pious and laudable endeavour. Such a translation would evidently be a contradiction. Let us now try the word life ; this term would introduce a contradiction equally grave in the last clause of the passage. Jesus would be asking what would be a compensation for the loss of life, or, in other terms, what is more precious than life, and by life would be understood generally and primarily the present life. This, therefore, would be likely to lead on a wrong track.

Jesus would seem to teach that existence here below is the chief good ; yet the Christian and even the simple patriot know more precious treasures, and Jesus himself has only just announced that it is sometimes wise to sacrifice the life .

Professor Reuss, who (like the English revisers) maintains in his translation the word life all through, acknowledges that this term " does not very clearly convey the meaning of the original. " In fact, it is equivocal. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that many translators should have preferred to introduce in this place the word soul instead of life, as adopted by them in the preceding verse. But to employ in the same argument in two consecutive verses two different words to render one and the same term in the original is to violate an established rule of translation.¹

What, then, is to be done ? We see only two alternatives : either to maintain the word life throughout the passage, adding in a note the indispensable explanation that the word used in the original sometimes designates that which is called specifically the human soul with the prospect of a future existence ; or else to have recourse to a paraphrase.

If a paraphrase be preferred, we will try the reflective pronoun himself as a rendering of the debateable term which

1 The latest edition of the Lausanne version, usually so strictly literal, here with a certain timidity departs from its fundamental rule.

appears four times in the two verses under review.

We will put it thus : Whosoever will save himself in contempt of the divine appeal, preserving at all costs his present life, shall lose himself ; but whosoever will for my sake make the momentary sacrifice of himself, shall find himself again. Wise and praiseworthy calculation ! For what shall it profit a man to prolong for a short time his earthly existence and to gain even the whole world, if he should lose himself ? Wherewith could he redeem himself ? This paraphrase is founded upon the example given by the evangelist Luke in one of the passages referred to. We can also appeal to the usage of the Aramaic Greek of the Gospels, the roots of which reach down to the Hebrew of the Old Testament. In Hebrew the soul (nephesh) is often used to designate the person : " The Lord of hosts hath sworn by himself " (Jer. li. 14) ; literally, " by his soul. " From the biblical point of view the individuality is in the nephesh, or psuché, the soul or life of man, and God himself is represented as having, or, more precisely, as being, a soul.³

We now hold the key of the enigma. Like the noun in the original, our personal pronoun himself bears a double meaning ; it will designate sometimes the present life of the individual, and sometimes his future existence, according to the sequence of the thought. For everyone there is an earthly life, with the possibility of a life immortal. The self is, as it were, separable into an inferior and a superior self. The inferior must be subordinated , and often even sacrificed, to the superior. The

1 Luke ix. 25. 2 In his pamphlet entitled Notre Durée, M. Byse quotes seventeen instances of this use of the word soul to designate God as a person .

These should not be confounded with those passages in which the Lord swears by his life.

Ezek. xx. 31 , etc.

3 In Hebrew, and generally in the Semitic languages, this word soul with the personal suffix is very frequently used to express the idea embodied in our reflective pronoun. All the translators of the New Testament into Hebrew -Reichardt, Delitzsch, and Salkinson-are agreed in rendering heauton (himself) in Luke ix. 25 by naphsho. So it is in the ancient Syriac version. The Greek of Luke is richer and more precise ; it here unites in a single word the body and the soul, which Matthew in a similar context mentions separately : " to destroy both soul and body " (x. 28).

4 Thus it may be said of the same individual at the same time : " He is no more ; he is dead " ; and, " He is in heaven ; he lives with God." This indicates the double meaning of the pronoun, as in our paraphrase. In the same way the nouns existence andperson sometimes contain a double meaning.

man who, at all cost, is determined to save his earthly life, will lose the possibility of attaining an immortal life ; but he who, on the contrary, will sacrifice his earthly life in the service of Jesus Christ, will receive a life imperishable.

What is it to sacrifice the earthly life ? In the first place it is, in various passages relating to persecution, to accept a violent death rather than deny Jesus Christ. In the second place it is to renounce, in order to serve Jesus Christ, not merely sinful inclinations, which needs no saying, but even the satisfaction of some innocent tastes and natural preferences. It may, perhaps, involve the renunciation of a brilliant or lucrative career, of the public favour, of an attractive marriage with an unconverted person, or, again, of the display of some special talent. In short, it will be to repress, if need be, a certain expansion of the personality. A pastor, for example, may have a taste for painting ; he will, perhaps, renounce its gratification , lest he should devote to it the time and energy which he owes to his ministry. This second sense, like the first, is in perfect conformity with the genius of the biblical languages, the soul in Scripture frequently designating the sum ofhuman aspirations, and occasionally a dominant passion. In the Gospel of John we see that Jesus applied to himself the maxim which he seems to have adopted as his motto.¹ He renounced the legitimate joys of the family and all temporal ambition. He sacrificed his person and his life ; but the loss was compensated by a speedy and glorious resurrection . Precept and example were in him admirably united. He sacrificed much ; he recovered as much, and more.

So also did his disciples. He who dies a martyr sacrifices an ephemeral existence ; in exchange he obtains immortality. Every faithful Christian will mortify worldly desires and tastes ; in return he will enjoy, not only beyond the tomb, but even here below, pleasures more noble and not less intense.

More than that, like the martyr, he will secure his personal immortality, he will " lay hold on eternal life. "

By following the method indicated by Professor Drummond in his captivating studies on Natural Law in the Spiritual World, there may be seen anticipated in this favourite maxim

1 John xii. 23-27.

2 See ante, pp. 21, 31 .

of Jesus Christ the formulation of one of Nature's greatest laws.

Among individuals, as among species, only those organisms survive which, accommodating themselves to the changes in their environment, renounce certain habits to adopt a new mode of life.

The famous law of " the survival of the fittest " rests in great measure upon these renunciations and this flexibility of certain types. On the other hand, the types which do not lend themselves to the indispensable transformations break down, and are only to be found by the archæologist in a fossil state.¹

Let us note in passing the variety in the expressions relative to the manner in which immortality is to be obtained. According to Matthew, the believer will find (heurései) , will discover as by a miracle that which he had lost. This evangelist has in view the essentially Jewish hope of the resurrection of the body. The divine omnipotence will supernaturally intervene in order to restore life to the dead body lying in the tomb. Luke, on the other hand, often aims at expressing the subtler shades of Greek thought.

According to him, the believer will reproduce (zóogonései) his life. It is the notion of the grain of corn in the Eleusinian mysteries ; by a sort of co-operation of forces the grain lives again in the ear, which it engenders or brings forth . It is the philosophical idea of palingenesis. Mark seems to represent the Roman faith, the faith of the soldier who hardly reasons at all. Without inquiring how, he knows that the struggling believer will in the end come forth safe and sound from the conflict with death ; he will wrest his life from the enemy who threatens it : he will save it (sósei) .

1 In America at the present time the race of the Red Skins is dying out before advancing civilization. Hope is, however, entertained of saving some tribes which have accepted the new life of the Gospel and have renounced the attractions of savage life. In the South Seas Christianity has saved whole peoples from the abyss. In South Africa the French Protestant Mission has preserved the existence of the Basutos, maintaining their vital force through the transformation of their national manners under the influence of a regenerative doctrine.

2 Luke, the companion of Paul, thus recalls the image employed by the apostle in one of his letters to the converted Greeks at Corinth ( 1 Cor. xv. 37). Jesus makes use of the same emblem at the time when certain Greeks ask to see him (John xii. 20-24) ; but he has in view the origin of his Church rather than his own personal resurrection, the production of the ear rather than the mere reproduction of the seed deposited in the earth.

Then, lastly, as represented in the Gospel of John, the believer cannot die. He will neither recover his life, nor reproduce it, nor deliver it from death in an agonizing encounter ; calm and tranquil, though at the same time vigilant, he will keep (phulaxei)¹ his life. This expression is in conformity with the most intimate thought of the Master, who said : " Whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die ."2 Begun here below, the communion of the believer with his Saviour is never interrupted ; it survives physical death, which is thus only an apparent death.

Let us now see what is to be the fate of the man who, through cowardice or egoism, refuses the required sacrifice.

" He will lose himself. "

And what is it to lose himself ?

We need not go far to ascertain the exact meaning of the word lose. We need not, indeed, go beyond the context. As we have just seen, in order to be saved, to obtain eternal salvation, it is necessary to lose something ; this something that is lost is absolutely suppressed, destroyed, annihilated. For the martyr there is total suppression of the earthly life, annihilation of present existence. For every Christian there is the voluntary suppression of certain enjoyments ; and here, again , suppression is synonymous with annihilation. Seeing, then , the parallelism of the terms, it follows incontestably that to lose himself when immortality is in question must be to destroy, to suppress, that prospect and to annihilate himself. The lexicological correlation makes it clear that it is the loss of that which is called in philosophy the ego, the individual personality, that is in question. The destruction may be progressive, but at last nothing will remain to him, nor of

1 The profound genius of John makes eternity begin here below, for the worldly man as well as for the believer. He who prefers the world to Jesus Christ has already begun to lose his being ; apolluei in the revised text, instead of the future of the Synoptists. " He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life " already (John xii. 25 ; iii. 36 ; v. 24 ; vi. 47, 54 ; 1 John v. II-

13). He takes possession of himself (Heb. x. 34, revised Greek text) ; cf. ver. 39 : those who save their soul, or take possession of it, peripoiêsin.

2 John xi . 25, sq. ; v. 24 ; vi. 50 ; viii. 51 .

3 Luke (xvii. 33) accentuates the notion of a culpable egoism, carnal and fundamentally sacrilegious ; peripoiēsasthai in the revised text, a word which sometimes bears the bad sense of monopolize or appropriate personally. Man does not belong to himself ; he has not the right to refuse to respond to the call of God.

him, who loses his true self.

The loss of the Christian is real, but comparatively light, and in some measure provisional ; that of the worldling is the supreme loss, the irreparable loss of existence. Supposing that at the last moment the worldling should wish to pay a ransom and recover possession of his being that is about to be engulfed in the abyss of nothingness, what would all his acquired possessions avail him ?

These could not restore his life, and, besides, he is about to lose them by speedily ceasing to exist.¹

The worldling grasping at earthly possessions has been compared to a man who should purchase a gallery of pictures and become almost immediately blind. This vivid comparison is a thousand times too weak. The heir of a magnificent empire dying on the very day of his coronation affords an image which is still very inadequate, since, according to the formal teaching of Jesus Christ, to be lost is to be destroyed " soul and body," deprived of all the faculties of the being, to enter at last into the horror of eternal nothingness. There is in this prospect enough to inspire salutary terror. Jesus leaves no hope of imperishable life to the man who despises his invitation. Every man must give himself to Jesus or perish, and must at once begin this surrender, or at once the process begins which will end in destruction. He who persists in rejecting the Saviour will at last perish utterly and for ever ; by a slow and painful death-process beyond the tomb the effacement and complete suppression of his individuality will be accomplished.

1 Cf. Psa. xlix. 6-9, to which Jesus seems to allude. 2 Cf. Matt. x. 28 and the valuable work of M. D. H. Meyer, Le Christianisme du Christ, p. 307, sq. The proper and normal meaning of the Greek verb apollumi is, moreover, clearly indicated in another passage of Matthew (v. 29, 30), relating to the amputated member which rots and perishes. Cf. Mark xiv. 4 ; Luke xxi. 18 ; John vi. 12, 27 ; Acts xxvii. 34 ;

James i. 11 ; Rev. xviii. 14. The meaning is evidently to cease to exist. So it is, too, with another verb used in Matt. xvi. 26, zêmios in the passive voice, which does not mean to endure pain, any more than apollumi. It means to be damaged, to pay a fine; and in this case to pay at the cost of existence or of damage to the being. When, in respect of the soul, a meaning is attributed to apollumi, which it never bore in Greek antiquity, a law of exception is made and exactitude is sacrificed for the sake of a philosophical hypothesis. Lexicology protests against such violence done to the sacred writers.

To sum up as concisely as possible the Master's thought : Our text speaks of two kinds of existence, one earthly and ephemeral, needing the other, which is heavenly and eternal, to be grafted upon it. Jesus exhorts man, if occasion should demand it, to sacrifice the earthly to the heavenly life. The sacrifice required involves, in the case of martyrdom, the total suppression of the earthly existence ; in any case, the deprivation of many temporal advantages. To lose is, then, to suffer a deprivation when it relates to the present life. When it relates to the future existence, there is nothing to prevent , rather everything to compel us to allow the same word to bear the same meaning in the second member of the same phrase. It follows that worldlings who refuse the required sacrifice find themselves threatened with the deprivation of their existence. Unhappily, Platonic ideas percolating into the Church have falsified the meaning of the most important terms of this important declaration.

To the human soul has been gratuitously attributed absolute immortality, without reserve or condition.

The result has been that the word translated to lose has been defrauded of its natural and legitimate sense . Its meaning was to suppress ; it has been made synonymous with render eternally miserable. But by a distortion of the meaning of the words , the balanced adjustment of the reasoning of the two verses before us has been upset, the point of the divine paradox has been broken, the two-edged sword has been blunted, the key of the enigma has been twisted out of shape ; this saying of Jesus has become untranslatable.

The Epistles furnish a commentary upon the teaching of the Gospels . The apostle Paul says : " God only hath immortality He will give eternal life to those who by patience in welldoing seek for glory and honour and incorruption

He that soweth to his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption The disobedient shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction. " Christ is the life of the apostle, the head indis-

1 Olethros aiônios, 2 Thess. i. 9 ; the death without limitation of Rom vi. 23, viii. 13 ; the end, Philip. iii. 19. " The punishment of sin is the destruction of the life," Ménégoz, Le Péché et la rédemption d'après saint

pensable to the existence of the body of the Church and of every believer ; he is the second Adam, the federal chief of all those who will share in the endless life. Paul speaks once of the resurrection of the wicked,¹ but their survival will be for so short a time that he usually passes it over in silence. There is no absolute immortality outside of, or apart from, Jesus Christ . The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says : " We are not of them that shrink back unto perdition, but of them that have faith to the saving of the soul suming fire adversaries . "

• for our God is a con-

• a fierceness of fire which shall devour the

That which God consumes he does not allow still to exist ; the burning bush in Exodus was a miracle just because, although on fire, it was not consumed. After the last judgement death will make no more victims, it will itself be abolished, and God will be “ all, in all the survivors .

The apostle John is still more precise ; he says : " He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever " ; the notion of a privilege consisting in a perpetual existence making a man eternal, being thus clearly and distinctly brought out. In the light of this saying should be read this other passage of the same epistle : “ Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. "4

In the Apocalypse the righteous only have access to " the tree of life, " which is by no means a symbol of enjoyment . Nothing is said about the beauty or attractiveness of the fruit ofthis tree. It was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which was pleasant to the eyes and the taste.

And so in order to attain holiness, Adam needed only to resist the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit. The only purpose of the

Paul, p. 78 ; Paris, 1882. This book has brought the question one step nearer solution. It brings out Conditional Immortality very clearly in Paul's writings ; but it makes the mistake of setting the teaching of the great apostle in opposition to that of Jesus Christ, some of whose words are summarily quoted, though in reality they have but little evidential force. We shall have an opportunity of analyzing each of the passages brought forward by M. Ménégoz.

1 Acts xxiv. 15.

We shall come again upon this question of the resurrection of the wicked and its purpose. See in particular Chap. XI., sect. vii.

2 Heb. x. 39 ; xii. 29 ; x. 27. 4 Di'autou, I John iv. 9.

3 I John ii. 17 .

tree of life was to perpetuate existence ; so distinctly is this the case that it is spoken of as having power to immortalize even impenitent sinners.¹

The " book of life " is the register of the living who will survive. It is a figure of the divine decrees. The lake of fire symbolizes the final destruction of those whose names have been blotted out of the catalogue.2

The " water of life " mentioned in the last chapter of the Apocalypse has the brightness and purity of crystal, yet it is first of all an emblem of perpetual life . " He that will, let him take of it ; " such is the message, in which is clearly formulated an attainable immortality. A life indefinitely prolonged is the gift offered to everyone who desires it and consents to take possession of it : whosoever refuses to drink of that water can but die of thirst. It is put in three words : Ho thelôn labeto, on the last page of the Bible, as though a summary of the whole.

At the outset we established the right and the duty of holding to the grammatical meaning wherever possible. Interpreted upon this principle, the whole New Testament teaches that Jesus is the only source of immortality. On the other hand, it attests that death is in operation in every one of us. The body is first to succumb, something surviving ; but this something being deeply tainted, sick unto death, will not survive indefinitely.

Left to itself, this vital force advances by a slow and painful process towards final destruction, which will be the second death , complete and absolute death, the end of the individual.

We can now affirm, having put it to the test, that the historico-grammatical meaning is not merely warranted, but required, in every one of the passages of Scripture in which are found the terms that have just been the subject of our study. It is a skein which can be easily unwound by anyone who begins at the right end. Our readers can convince themselves of it by the use of a concordance.

1. Gen. iii. 22 ; Rev. ii. 7 ; xxii. 2, 14. 2 Rev. iii. 5 ; xiii. 8 ; xvii. 8 ; xx. 12 , 15 ; xxi. 27 ; xxii. 19.

To the passages relating to life and death should be added a large number of others which speak of salvation and perdition . To save a living being is to snatch him away from a mortal danger ; to save an inanimate being is to preserve it from imminent destruction.

We have determined the meaning of the terms death and destruction .

But the traditional exegesis has turned death into a species of life, yet " a different mode of life." In order to sustain this paradox certain passages of the New Testament are brought forward, in which death seems not to designate the end of the individual, since he who is called dead still exists, perceives , and acts .

This state is called spiritual death ; it is the condition of impenitent sinners, and may, it is said, be prolonged indefinitely, a deathless death : there would therefore be room for endless sufferings. In our seventh chapter we shall reply to this objection, showing that spiritual death cannot immortalize, that it has no power to prevent either physical or metaphysical death, and that, on the contrary, it is only the precursor, the antecedent symptom of a complete and definitive death of the whole individual .

Another objection is urged which would be of graver import .

Just as in the case of the Old Testament, to our army of witnesses are opposed a rear-guard of four or five verses, which are held to possess extraordinary properties. To begin with, if they had the meaning assigned to them, like veritable erratic blocks, they would be foreign to the general tenour of the books from which they are quoted . Then, by a special privilege, they would be able to balance, and even outweigh, a thousand other texts ; five ounces in one scale would weigh as much as five hundredweights in the other. The absurdity of such a claim is evident. But besides that, without even leaving the royal road of exegesis , we can perceive that these four or five verses are not erratic blocks, that they do not contradict all the rest, that they have not the meaning ascribed to them, and that by the attempt to interpret them otherwise than in

1 Sôzô, root soos or sôs, whole, subsisting, surviving (Alexandre, Schleusner,

Wahl, Grimm, Cremer). The meaning to make healthy is only secondary.

Save is opposed to destroy : James iv. 12 ; Heb. v. 7. Matt. xvi. 25 : " Whosoever would save his life shall lose it." Make his life healthy would here be a contradiction .

accordance with established rules the interpreter becomes the sport of an optical illusion.¹

We shall make a special study of these exceptional passages.2 We are, however, already acquainted with the general tenour of biblical teaching concerning the future life. The moment has arrived in which to summarize it.

So far as we are personally concerned, the following exposition will be at the same time our profession of faith .

The Scripture, a heavenly messenger, soaring above materialism and the old spiritualism, above science and tradition, brings to us glad tidings. At the voice of this celestial emissary we escape from the darkness of our ignorance, and from the nightmare of our superstitions. The teaching thus brought to us bears the impress of truth, which prompts and warrants our faith ; it appeals to the witness of the Holy Spirit in our consciences .

From the first to the last of its pages, the Bible sets clearly before our eyes life and immortality, but it is never the unconditional and impious immortality of the pantheistic religions . This religious encyclopædia, the work of fifteen centuries and a hundred different writers, teaches us the most evident truths of so-called natural religion : the existence of one only God, his eternity, the distinction between good and evil ; but in vain will it be searched for a word which affirms or implies the imperishability of the human soul ; it contains no more reference to such a thing than does the Pentateuch to a priesthood in the tribe of Judah, concerning which " Moses spake nothing. "

1 As an illustration we will mention Matt. xviii. 34 : " He delivered him up .

till he should pay all that was due," in connection with the words of v. 26 : " Thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the last farthing. "

Here some have seen eternal torments ; but why not rather the death of the insolvent debtor in the prison ? Usually a prisoner dies in the prison if he is never allowed to go out. Should the one of whom Jesus speaks be an exception ? To suppose so would be to beg the question, supposing the inalienable immortality which is in dispute. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus ( Luke xvi. 23) says not a word as to the duration of the Hades in which the scene is placed. Hades is not eternal ; according to the Apocalypse, it is to be at last destroyed : Rev. xx. 14.

2 See Chap. XI ., and in the Supplement the Table of Objections.

The soul is indeed spoken of as many as sixteen hundred times ; but in the whole range of Scripture there is not to be found the expression " immortal soul," that favourite term of ecclesiastical phraseology.

God alone, we read, hath immortality. No doubt there will be a survival for every man, but a " second death," a final death, will be the portion of the incorrigible sinner. Only " he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever," says the apostle John.

The Bible does not flatter us, does not exaggerate our value. In full accord with science, it teaches that, like man, every animal has a soul, and that the soul of the flesh is in the blood.

There is an immortality, but it is the privilege of the righteous ; the man who has not wisdom is likened to the beasts that perish. The future has no promise for the evildoer ; the lamp of the wicked is to be put out. Victim of moral suicide, the obstinate sinner will sooner or later succumb.

Undoubtedly man bore a divine image ; he was created in view of immortality, but under express conditions and reservations . He has infringed those conditions ; he has given way to his lower appetites ; he has chosen death, and become subject to it.

Twenty times the apostle Paul repeats that the wages of sin is death, death absolute, in the sense which the word bears in its composite deathlessness, the cessation of all life, death with the meaning which is unavoidable in so many passages where the apostle exhorts us to cause sin to be mortified or put to death . The Bible speaks of souls that die : the soul that sinneth it shall die ; he that shall turn a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death.

final death, but it leads to it.

Sin is not itself the

Death is the fruit of sin, the wages of the senseless war against God. If we give way to the flesh we shall speedily die ; lust engenders sin, sin when finished engenders death. Fallen man has been mercifully banished from the tree of life, which might have given him a baneful immortality ; he will therefore not live on in ceaseless torments . If he does not repent, he will return by a slow but sure process to the nothingness from which he has been called forth by divine goodness. He carried in himself a fragile mirror of the divinity ; the mirror is broken, and the man is now only a child of the dust.

Taken from the earth, the first man was but dust, as the apostle tells us.

Sin has taken possession of human nature. It sticks to us like the shirt of Nessus .

This inveterate evil is transmitted with the blood ; it empoisons the good gift of existence ; it undermines, ruins, and kills us.

Left to our own unaided powers, we shall never regain innocence, we shall exhaust ourselves in the struggle against the torrent which is carrying us away. The most we can do is to retard the developement of the fatal germ that threatens to destroy us body and soul, according to the expression of Jesus Christ. The axe is already laid at the root of the barren tree ; the pruning-knife menaces the unproductive vine branch,

Which, severed from the stock, must wither and decay.1

The verdict of Scripture respecting man left to himself is also the verdict of science ; we are without hope in the world, beings truly lost. " A single word sums up the situation : it is awful. " 2

But what a light shines suddenly in the night of the tomb just ready to close upon us ! It is Jesus Christ, our light and our life. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life. The incarnation of the Word unites a divine essence with our perishable nature. Along with our flesh, the Son of God adopts our interests and responsibilities. Representative of penitent humanity, priest and victim, Jesus offers with his blood the painful pledge of our repentance, and the requisite propitiation for the sins of the world. His death is a sanction of the moral law ; it proclaims and expiates our guilt. God in Christ reconciles the world to himself. He suffers for and with his guilty creatures. The cross becomes the instrument of the reconciliation .

By repentance, love and faith we become united to the Saviour ; we follow him to Calvary. Joined to him by all the powers of our soul, we are morally crucified with him, baptized with his baptism. Grafted into him, we become one plant with

1 Qui , séparé du tronc, doit périr desséché. 2 Louis Ruchet, La Science et le christianisme, p. 218 ; Paris, 1872 .

him, the members of a body of which he is the head. We die and we rise again spiritually with Jesus, and his immortal life becomes our own .

He that believeth on the Son receives the principle of a new life ; he has passed from the beginning of death to a beginning of that new life. The apostle John tells us fifty times over that Jesus is the only source of imperishable life, that the transmission of this life is the very object of the incarnation. Twice the evangelist declares that this glorious and necessary teaching is the purpose of his book. That life is holy, happy, full, glorious ; but first and foremost it is specifically life, in the proper and radical meaning of the word ; it is " the state of animated beings, so long as theyhave in them the principle of sensation and movement," and in speaking of man, his existence with the display of his various faculties. Jesus calls himself the bread of life ; we need to drink his blood .

He is the vine - stock of which we are the branches .

These images clearly signify that the spirit of Jesus penetrating our spirit communicates to it an element of immortality.

It was the Serpent who said : " Ye shall not surely die. " Jesus, on the contrary, exclaims with a sigh : " How narrow is. the gate and straitened the way that leadeth unto life, and few be they that find it ! " but " broad is the way that leadeth unto destruction, and many be they that enter in thereby." Life eternal is a promise, a favour, a prize offered to the believer who will lay hold of it, and who, by patience in well-doing, seeks for glory, honour, and incorruption.

The resurrection of Jesus is the guarantee of this promise. If Jesus had not risen again, a rough common-sense might say with the materialists : " After death all is dead ; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ! " But because Jesus lives we also shall live. The body dies : that is our share of expiation ; the spirit still lives, and the body will be born anew and transfigured.

We shall not suffer the second death ; our names.

inscribed in the register of the celestial city will never be blotted out.

God, with whom there is no respect of persons, will have pity upon the heathen and the ignorant, as he has had pity upon us.

Believers are a chosen band, not a caste.

The God of Jews and non-Jews is also the Cod of the baptized and the non-baptized, of the initiated and the non-initiated. The supreme judge will show himself just ; he will ask little of those who have received little.

Those for whom it would have been better never to have been born will be the exceptions. They must have blasphemed against the Holy Spirit of God to lose all chance of salvation ; that is the only unpardonable sin. The chastisements will be in exact proportion to the gravity of the offences ; and the gravity of the offences is in proportion to the gifts entrusted to each person. For those who have not been able to hear or to understand the divine message, a further announcement is in reserve . The first-fruits, of which we form part, will be followed by an abundant harvest.

It is written that in the future paradise there will be a tree of which the leaves will be for the healing of the nations. The nations are all those of human race to whom God has not yet been made known.

The Scripture, moreover, reveals to us a God who is good even to the wicked and the ungrateful, a God whose tender mercies are over all his works.

David's heart was as the heart of God ; on the death of his rebellious son the royal prophet was heard to exclaim : “ O Absalom, my son, my son ! " This voice was an echo of the fatherly compassion of the Creator even for the wicked .

God entreats the sinner to come back to him, he announces his goodwill, he will exhaust the means of reconciliation ; but he will never make man into an automaton by destroying his freedom. The rebel, summoned to lay down his arms, must surrender or perish . He is in a burning edifice ; if he delays he will escape only with wounds ; if he obstinately remains he will be consumed.

If we sin willingly and deliberately after having come to the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for the expiation of our sins ; we have only to await a terrible judgement and the fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries. The New Testament predicts a total extinction of the irreconcilable wicked ; to signify this it employs the same terms that Plato uses in the Phado to indicate annihilation .

There are no stronger terms.

The obstinate sinner will be as the rivers separated from their sources, as the trees with neither roots nor branches, as the dry bundles of tares, as the

corpses eaten by worms ; he will go to destruction, to Gehenna , the refuse-heap of souls. A fire more terrible than that of Sodom and Gomorrah will consume beings that are already in course of moral decomposition ; it will purify the atmosphere by putting an end to the last vestiges of their transitory existence. The remembrance of this ruin will last through the ages. Isaiah and after him the apostle John compare it to the columns of smoke which, from the heights of Mamre, Abraham saw rising above the Dead Sea after the burning and disappearance of the cities of the plain.

The rebels no longer existing, the revolt being suppressed , the devil trodden under foot and destroyed, there will be no more curse ; death will no longer reign, it will rejoin Satan in the abyss of annihilation, called in the Apocalypse the lake of fire and brimstone.¹ God will be all in all. The redeemed will survive for ever ; a new earth and new heavens will be their portion.

Sin had for a moment abounded ; grace will superabound world without end.2

In this teaching is there anything to wound the religious conscience ? If so, let it be shown. We perceive in it rather the synthetic, moral, reasonable , and sublime character which is the inimitable sign of a revelation. While searching for immortality in science alone, we were groping along a dark tunnel ; on opening the Gospel, we have at once seen resplendent before us the radiant landscapes of the sunny lands beyond the Alpine chain. This pure and soft light appears to us to be that of truth itself.

We have now to consider in what way man can unite himself with Jesus Christ, and how this union can make us immortal.

1 Probably in allusion to the history of the Dead Sea. In the time of

Abraham, the region now covered by the waters became the scene of a vast conflagration. The earth, impregnated withbitumen and naphtha, took fire ; it was then a veritable " sea of fire and brimstone." After the conflagration was extinguished the smoke continued to rise during years and ages (Wisdom of Solomon, x. 7). A sinking of the soil having taken place, the waters of the Jordan filled the great basin ; but " fish cannot live there, nor are any aquatic plants to be found there " (Stapfer, La Palestine, p. 71). A striking symbol of the eternal death that threatens hardened sinners .

2 See in Supplement No. IX. a doctrinal summary formed exclusively of quotations taken from the Old and New Testaments ; and the epitome by

Rev. Ch. H. Oliphant, Supplement No. X.

CHAPTER V.

I. Biblical psychology- II . Interior anarchy ; subserviency of the superior principle in human nature - III . The awakened conscience institutes expiatory sacrifices- IV . Definition of expiation-V. The Levitical sacrifices

VI . Jesus Christ the supreme victim -VII. Regenerative effects of communion in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. By the restoration of the interior hierarchy, man again becomes capable of immortalization —VIII . Justification and sanctification by the Holy Spirit, uniting us to the Christ-IX. Divine pardon is never impunity -X. Chastisements inflicted upon the offender, even though penitent-XI . The promised resurrection -XII . Its relation to palingenesis.

As we have seen in our second chapter, the traditional belief which denied soul to the animals cannot be sustained ; it is contradicted by biology, as well as by Scripture. Animals have souls. It has been stated by a great naturalist, who is not a Darwinist, M. de Quatrefages, that the moral and religious sense is the only generic difference that distinguishes us from the animals.

The New Testament, which has thus anticipated modern psychology, has a word to designate this distinctive trait of human nature ; it calls it the pneuma, the spirit in the special sense of that word.

" The God of peace sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire without blame, " writes the apostle Paul.¹ This passage is fundamental ; it establishes a tripartite division of human nature, which has been called the trichotomy . By soul must be understood the physical sensibility, the natural instincts, with the mental faculties. The spirit alone is the organ which can lay hoid on the divine ; it is the

1 1 Thess . v. 23.

moral and religious sense, which may be called in a single word spirituality . The apostle mentions it first because it is the highest prerogative of man, and because it is intended to rule over the body and the soul. In the divine plan, man's spirit in living communion with the Spirit of God should penetrate the soul, and by it reign over the body and all its organs .

As we have also before said, the question whether the story in Genesis of the fall of man in the garden of Eden be historic or symbolic is of secondary importance ; that which is important is the actual, evident, incontestable, universal fact of sin pervading humanity. In every man there is a very strong tendency to subordinate morality and religion to the sensual appetites, or else to the satisfaction of pride and vanity. God , to whom all is due, so far from occupying the first place in the heart of the natural man, the place to which he has a right, is the object of an indifference which often becomes enmity, and which in any case deserves to be condemned as ingratitude. The natural man is a kingdom in a state of anarchy ; the body and the soul are in revolt against the spirit ; the pneuma is in bondage. Above the divine commandment we have all at some time or other preferred the forbidden fruit, which was a delight to the eyes " and " good for food," and seemed to us " to be desired to make one wise. " As the apostle puts it : " we all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind . "

The religious sentiment itself had gone astray ; it had lost itself in superstition and fanaticism . A writer who was well acquainted with men has very clearly described the moral disorder of humanity : " Men," said M. Thiers, are naturally cowards, liars and sluggards. "2

As a faithful disciple of Kant, who tells us of radical evil, M.

Renouvier insists upon the importance of the problem of sin.

He says :

A superficial civilization which is pleased to turn away from the problem of evil, or to be satisfied with insufficient solutions, is liable in the course of ages to perish like those of antiquity, to be absorbed by

1 Ephes. ii. 3.

2 Fortnightly Review, Nov., 1877, p. 650.

IO the fermentation of the multitudes from whom it separates itself more and more.

In my opinion, no religion is worth the name unless it is a recognition of sin, in the general and in the particular, and the re- Indifference cannot keep the question in demption of the sinner. the background, the hope of progress cannot put it aside ; it forces itself upon us ; it has never allowed itself to be relegated to future ages, nor to be classed, without more ado, among the desiderata of science. My starting-point is the man who is truly man, that is to say, who has attained to the moral consciousness, and I do not need to know how he has been made thus, or has become thus.

I lead him, as may be done in a day or even an hour, to the point that we all know (happy he who knows it only imperfectly by the witness of his own heart), to the point at which, knowing that he has done that which he ought not to have done, that he has broken the law, he finds himself in the critical position of feeling himself degraded, of having lost his self-esteem, and of seeking for bad reasons to prove to himself that in doing ill he has done well, and of justifying himself in his own eyes in spite of his conscience.

In this, I believe, we see a fact, a real phenomenon, if ever there was one.1

Nevertheless, a large number of men seem not to trouble themselves about this disorder which is threatening their very existence. They appear to have no idea that, in accordance with a universal analogy, the perturbation of the functions of the personality must logically end in the final cessation of those functions, and consequently in the suppression of the person . The majority of our fellow-men are, as it were, asleep on the brink of a precipice. They are so thoroughly asleep, so completely strangers to the divine life, that the Holy Scripture in certain passages seems to deny that they have the sense of the divine.

" That which is born of the flesh is flesh, " said

Jesus Christ ; according to this declaration all the unregenerate are mere psychical beings . So, too, the Epistle of Jude speaks of men who are psychical, not having the spirit, the pneuma, thus designating sensual men who are on the way to perdition.

1 Quoted by M. Astié. Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, article Péché (Sin), vol. x., p. 371 .

2 John iii. 6. Those who are psychical, having no higher life principle than the psuchê (the soul), are placed on a level with sensual and carnal men ; the psychical wisdom is a carnal wisdom. 1 Cor. ii. 14 ; James iii. 15 ;

Jude 19. Cf. Rom. vii. 14 ; Col. ii. 18. See Ch. Byse, Notre durée, and the remarkable thesis of M. Alex. Westphal, Chair et Esprit, op. cit.

These passages have a hyperbolic character ; in order thoroughly to understand them we must take account of the usages of language. A quality is often spoken of as absent when it exists only in a very feeble degree. A person may be said to be " without heart " or to have no memory, " " no head, " etc.; these expressions, which, taken literally, would be exaggerated , are readily understood in their limited and comparative sense. On the other hand, the predominating element in a personality may serve to characterize it. Thus an individual may be spoken of as " all heart, " " all enthusiasm ; " a preponderating element in his nature is considered, by hyperbole, as excluding other elements, although present. He in whom the animal soul, or psuché, predominates, is psychical, a stranger to the spiritual life ; he who submits himself to the pneuma is pneumatical, or spiritual. The work of the Holy Spirit consists in the awakening and developement of this spirituality, giving it the preponderance over the other faculties. But, whatever may be the disorder of the human faculties, the conscience still distinguishes the man from the animal. Jesus

Christ calls the conscience the light of man.¹

All Paul's preaching to the heathen implies the persistence in them of this element .

Asleep and paralyzed, the conscience may yet awake, break its bonds, and with the aid of God's Spirit resume the direction of our life .

Spirituality in man may be compared to a spark smouldering among the ashes , which may be revivified by a heavenly breath, but which also may be extinguished. It may again be compared to a germ, in which there is a latent life. The unregenerate man is sometimes moved by the power of religious emotions ; but under pain of death this spiritual germ needs to be fecundated. As we shall see presently, the fecundation of the human pneuma is the work of the Holy Spirit .

To awaken sleeping consciences, to set before them the torch of revealed truth, to put them into communication with the

1 Luke xi. 34 ; Matt. vi. 22 . 2 See in Supplement No. XI. some thoughts of M. César Malan on Spiritual generation. See also The Fate of the Dead, by Th. Clarke, M.D. , p. 36, sq., op. cit.

Spirit of God, this will be the preliminary operation, indispensable if they are to be immortalized.

Men are diseased, mortally diseased ; the Gospel brings a promise of healing, but it requires docile patients. This fact divides humanity into two categories : on one hand the sick who do not believe themselves sick, and who therefore reject the offered remedy ; and on the other hand the sick who seek a physician. In other terms, there are men who, seeing the moral evil within themselves, mourn, strive and pray, and there are other men who, satisfied with their spiritual state, neither strive nor pray.

The sinner who strives, who prays, or who at least mourns over his faults, is deeply sensible of the need of reparation . He often perceives that reparation is beyond his power, when it relates to his fellow-men ; but his anguish is more poignant when he feels himself in the presence of an offended God. He then endeavours to abate the anger which his troubled spirit attributes to the sovereign lawgiver.

of divine grace.

Perhaps he has heard

However that may be, he wishes to attest the reality of his repentance, and with that aim he will sometimes sacrifice that which he holds most dear .

In order to satisfy this imperious need for reparation, he will even go so far as to shed blood : his own or that of a victim which he will pray God to accept in his stead. Such is the origin of the expiatory sacrifices which are found at the starting-point of all religions ; such, too, is the motive of many a suicide.

Even when not going so far as suicide, the penitent sinner would strike his breast as though to simulate a voluntary death ; he would cover himself with ashes as though to place himself by anticipation among the dead. In our own days the haircloth worn by the Israelite on the great day of Atonement is the shroud destined for his burial. The rigid fasts of the Jews and Mahometans testify to a similar sentiment ; they symbolize a voluntary death. As we shall soon see, the baptism by immersion administered by John the Baptist presents more than one symbol of penitence, it indicates the instrument of death and the tomb of the offender.

History is full of the terrible abuses of this need for expiation. Many contemporary thinkers, by a kind of reaction , struggle against the instinct of which such abuses are the excessive manifestations ; but it is in vain that they strive to suppress it . This it is which, ever alive, even though dormant, sometimes awakes and brings the murderer back from the ends of the earth, without the intervention of any officer, to appear as a prisoner at the bar of a court of justice, and even on the scaffold, erected, as it were, at his own demand .

In common life it frequently occurs that a man annoyed at himself or by someone else gives vent to his ill-temper by breaking with feverish hand some precious object. This object is his own property, or if otherwise he is prepared to restore its value. Why should he have broken it ? Behind the act, apparently senseless, there is this sense of the need for expiation ; he has satisfied it at the cost of an object which itself was in no way to blame. In default of the one really culpable, perhaps unknown or out of reach , an imperious instinct demands a victim of some kind . A scapegoat is one upon whom is laid the burden of others' faults ; this proverbial expression is likewise the indication of an irresistible tendency of the human spirit, to which a substitution, voluntary or forced , seems natural. Often astray, often ferocious in its exasperation, this instinct is in itself quite legitimate, normal, logical, supremely honourable. It is imposed by the sentiment of justice in our relation towards the Governor of the world, and from this point of view is of the highest importance.

It is logical, for it represents in morals the universal principle of continuity, which allows no cause to remain without effect .

Sin once committed must have its deleterious effect ; it must lead to death. In principle the culpable being has lost the reason of his being. The sinner has some sense of this, but, wishing to save his life, he anxiously seeks the conductor that can ward off the lightning-stroke about to fall upon his head. Especially is this sense of the need for expiation honourable . He who, having done evil, does not endeavour to repair the wrong is either careless or else a man of bad faith, deserving contempt from others as well as from himself. It is, therefore, worth our while to study more closely the notion of expiation.

What is the precise meaning of the word expiate ? According to the dictionary of the Academy, it is " to make reparation for a fault "; Littré adds, " by punishment endured or inflicted. "

But this definition needs to be defined.

At first sight it would seem that the reparation here spoken of is only a rhetorical figure. The murderer whose life is taken on the scaffold expiates his crime, but in dying he does not restore life to his victim : where, then, is the reparation ? As M. de Pressensé has said : " In itself and alone, suffering does not make any reparation. " By consulting the usage of language we should rather arrive at this definition : Expiate is to suffer or cause to be suffered the effects of a penal law ; it is sometimes to suffer the penal consequences of a fault committed by the sufferer ; it is also to suffer for a fault committed by another, the responsibility of which is assumed by the sufferer ; it has, too, this other sense : to cause a third party to suffer the punishment for any fault.

The object or aim of expiation, whether forced or voluntary, is always the sanction of a violated law. The reparation is not that of the deleterious effects of the fault, but in a notable measure that of the outrage done to the law, and indirectly to the lawgiver. In fact, to display clearly the evil effects of the violation of a law is indirectly to prove the excellence or the advantages of that law, and to confirm its authority, which the transgression has more or less shaken .

Among the majority of nations, in the earliest times expiation was made by the offering of human victims. In Palestine, for example, from the time of Abraham until the Babylonian captivity, it was a custom of the non-Israelite peoples to offer the first-born sons in sacrifice to the local divinities.

The

Israelites often followed their example.¹

Jehovah, the God of Israel, is distinguished from other gods

1 Such was more or less the universal custom. Among the Greeks Agamemnon offers Iphigenia ; Erechtheus immolates Chthonia ; Idomeneus, a Greek Jephthah, sacrifices his son. The Druids in times of great calamity used to slay human victims.

CHAPTER V.

SECTION VI.

by the fact that he rejects with horror these human sacrifices :

but in the sentiment by which they are dictated there is element which he approves and even demands.¹ Moses, in the name of the Lord, institutes the Levitical rites which require the immolation of animals, of which, moreover, many serve n for the nourishment of man .

The Israelite will make the sacrifice of that which is most precious to him, his family excepted. If he is rich, he will bring his most immaculate bull ; if poor, his single sheep . He will put his hands thereupon, confessing his faults, and then he will himself slay the victim. In this onerous sacrifice , ratified as it was by a divine sanction, the Israelite's conscience obtained some relief. But the Levitical rites were yet only symbols, of which the whole value depended upon the sole effectual sacrifice which they prefigured. In other words, for the Christian they appear as the shadow projected beforehand by the unique sacrifice which was to stand in the place of all others .

This brings us to the expiation accomplished by Jesus

Christ.

The way of immortality traverses Gethsemane and Golgotha.

1 Abraham, the father of the faithful, set the seal to his calling by his obedience to the voice that demanded the sacrifice of Isaac, Cf. Gen. xxii. 1 , 11, 16 : Haelohim, God as he has made himself known in nature and in the traditional conscience, ordering the sacrifice ; and Jehovah, the God of revelation, forbidding it. The story helps to reconcile, not two Gods, but two apparently opposite attributes of one only God. It is noticeable that the word conscience is not found in the vocabulary of the Pentateuch. "In harmony with Hengstenberg and Bertheau, we consider that Abraham imperfectly understood the divine command, under the influence of the contemporary Asiatic superstitions concerning human sacrifices ; but the patriarch's mistake was made to serve in promoting his religious education. "

Lange's Commentary. - The true God demanded an entire abnegation, the spiritual sacrifice of the first-born ; he did not desire the slaughter claimed on behalf of the Syrian or Canaanitish gods : Baal, Moloch, Astarte, Kemosh, Milcom, Remphan. Yet, in spite of the teaching supplied by this story ofthe sacrifice of Isaac, and in the face of all the Mosaic legislation, the infamous custom of immolating the first-born was perpetuated among the Israelites on their exodus from Egypt, in the wilderness, under the Judges, under the kings of Judah, and until the captivity : Lev. xx. 1-5 ; 1 Kings xi. 7 ; 2 Kings xxiii. 10, 13, 32 ; Psa. cvi. 37, 38 ; Jer. vii. 31 ; Ezek. xvi. 20 ; xx. 26 ; xxiii. 39. Some of these passages intimate that the Hebrews associated these abominable rites even with the worship of the Lord.

In vain will any other route be sought. We will descend into the dark valley and mount the fatal hill.

Like Socrates at Athens, Jesus died a victim of unjust hatred. This is very generally admitted. But Jesus assigns to his death a propitiatory value. Socrates, although himself also a victim of human malice, had no idea of making an expiation for the sins of his people, while, as Napoleon I. said , Jesus expects everything from his death.¹

Having " power to lay down his life, and power to take it again, " Jesus lays it down, specifying the precise purpose of his sacrifice. The payment of a ransom, that is the purpose, the supreme object of the mission of the Christ : " The Son of man came ... to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. " 2 The visible expression of this sacrifice is the blood, which is shed with a view to the remission of sins and for the benefit of a multitude of sinners . The shed blood of a voluntary victim becomes the emblem of our redemption. Being at the same time priest and victim , representing the multitude of offenders, Jesus in their name offered, in the oblation of his blood, the symbol and the

1 " The Christ expects everything from his death, is that the invention of a man ? No ; on the contrary, it is a strange proceeding, a superhuman confidence, an inexplicable reality ! Having as yet only a few dull, uneducated disciples, Christ is condemned to death ; he dies a victim of the anger of the Jewish priests, an object of the nation's contempt, abandoned and contradicted by his own people. And how could it have been otherwise with him who had announced beforehand that which was about to take place ? He had said :

"" I am about to be seized and crucified, I shall be abandoned by all, my first disciple will deny me at the beginning of my sufferings. I shall allow the wicked to have their way ; but as a result, the divine justice being satisfied, the original sin being expiated by my death, the bond uniting man to God will be renewed, and my death will be the life of my disciples : they will then be stronger without me than with me, for they will see me risen again. I shall ascend to heaven, and I will send to them from heaven a spirit to instruct them. The spirit of the cross will enable them to receive my Gospel. In the end they will believe it, they will proclaim it, they will persuade the whole world to accept it.' " And this foolish promise, so appropriately designated by saint Paul the folly of the cross, this prediction of a crucified victim has been literally fulfilled .

And the mode of its accomplishment is perhaps more extraordinary than the promise itself."-Sentiment de Napoléon sur le christianisme. Conversations religieuses recueillies à Sainte Hélène, by the

Chevalier de Beauterne, p. 95, sq., 6th edition ; Poissy, 1845. 2 Matt. xx . 28 ; Mark x. 45.

pledge of their repentance, which is the necessary condition of their salvation.¹

Three principal considerations seem to have inspired the expiatory work undertaken by Jesus Christ : first, a clear view of human sin, and of its consequences tending to the ultimate destruction of the entire race ; second, the brotherly love which prompted the Saviour to assume the responsibility of our faults ; third, the filial love which unites him to God as his brotherly love unites him to man. Moved thereto at the same time by filial and fraternal love, in his voluntary death, Jesus renders a loyal homage to the justice of the laws appointed by the heavenly Father and violated by us ; he has offered himself as our sponsor .

The heavenly Father has accepted the pledge offered by his first-born Son . In consideration of that pledge he has granted conditional pardon to penitent offenders. By raising again his

Son who had been put to death, he has signed and sealed the contract by which we are saved. The apostles proclaimed with joy the glad tidings of grace offered to all. As the apostle

Paul put it : " Jesus .

was delivered up on account of our trespasses, and was raised on account of our justification. " 2

It is for each one of us, as regards himself personally, to accept or to disavow the mutual contract which the Gospel sets before us for ratification, and so to justify or nullify the sponsorship of Christ.³

1 See in Supplement No. XII . our study, entitled Salvation by the Blood of Expiation (Le Salut par le sang de l'expiation). As we shall have occasion to note in our next chapter, at the very outset of his ministry Jesus in his baptism prefigured his expiatory death. An antitype of the deluge, baptism was the emblem of an execution deserved by all sinners. John the Baptist declines to administer it to Jesus, who has no fault to confess ; but Jesus claims baptism. Associating himself in sympathy with the sufferings of sinners, he asks to be allowed to suffer with them the just sentence of which the immersion was a figure. Matt. iii. 15.

2 Rom. iv. 25. Dia with an accusative signifies on account of. 3 During many years it seemed to us a duty to repudiate the idea of a vicarious satisfaction as forming part of the work of redemption, it appeared to us to be immoral ; but now, on the contrary, as the result of a more profound examination, we perceive that a pardon without previous satisfaction would really be the scandal. An arbitrary and unconditional pardon would, so to speak, juggle away the necessary effects of the fault ; it would thus interfere with the principle of continuity, which forms part of the laws of our spirit, as God has constituted it. It ignores, or desires to ignore, one portion

To understand Christ's design, to associate ourselves therewith by an act of faith and with the whole heart, therein is salvation. To put aside that design, to turn away the eyes from his cross, is folly or disloyalty.¹ In this world or in the other, sooner or later, every sensitive conscience will render homage to the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It is written that the redeemed will for ever sing the praises of the

Lamb of God, slain for the sin of the world .

The sunbeam, decomposed by the prism, produces all the colours of the rainbow ; and in the same way a sincere faith in the expiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ will be in practical life the constant source of all Christian virtues : resignation, thankfulness towards God, humility, separation from the world, temperance, piety, self-devotion. These dispositions of the regenerate man cannot but exist in the heart united by a sincere faith with the Man of sorrows .

It was sin that necessitated the cruel death of our best Friend : how can we do otherwise than hate sin ? It was expressly with a view to draw us away from sin that he suffered so much : how can we consent to remain in that pestilential atmosphere ? Although our love for our Friend who was crucified for us be but weak, how can we delight in that which would make him sad, in acts which to his bleeding heart would be so many fresh wounds ?

Adhesion to the entirely moral work of reconciliation accomplished by Jesus Christ will necessarily emanate from the moral sense, and like that work itself, that masterpiece of the human conscience, will assume the character of an act of conscience.

Is it possible to acquiesce in the holy life of Jesus Christ, in his incessant mastery over the most legitimate natural instincts, in his perfect consecration to the will of the Father, in his uninterrupted communion of the texts and one side of the question.

It is, however, true that traditional orthodoxy, under colour of exalting the work of the Saviour, has failed to recognize the part of expiation (we do not say ofpropitiation) which remains to both believers and the impenitent themselves. See, too, with reference to propitiation : A. Gretillat, Exposé de théologie systématique, vol. iv. , pp.

1 In the New Testament the faithful ( pistoi) are loyal, of goodfaith, at the same time as believers. Cf. John xx. 27 .

with him, as in the normal life of humanity, which ought to have been that of us all, without ipso facto appropriating to ourselves the moral principle of that life, and without making it thenceforth the very soul of our own ? Adhesion to such a consecration is surely self-consecration. Would it be possible to accept the moral reparation offered by him as an act which ought properly to have been our own, to ratify in our conscience the sentence pronounced upon the sin of the world by the normal conscience of him who has made the reparation by suffering the punishment, without that sentence becoming ipso facto in our own heart and will the doom of death to our own sin ?

It is this assimilation of the conscience of Christ crucified, contained in the act of faith, that St.

Paul in his energetic language, at the same time literal and figurative, characterizes by these expressions : being " crucified with Christ "; being baptized (plunged) into the death of Christ. "1 To adhere to the death of Christ for sin is to die to sin, that is to say, to break away radically from it. It was this reflex action of the object of faith in the believer himself which was so deeply felt by that Bechuana convert who exclaimed : " The cross of Christ condemns me to be holy. " This word condemns expresses very naturally the effect which is produced at first by the view of the cross in the old human nature when it feels itself drawn by faith in front of that instrument of death, whereon the sin of humanity has been judged once for all in the person of the Son of God. It is then of the essence of a justifying faith, by the very virtue of its object, to create in the soul of the believer an insurmountable hatred of the sin so painfully expiated by Christ, and an inexhaustible sympathy for the excellence so admirably realized in his person.2

A vital communion in the propitiatory work of Christ is at the very centre of the Christian life. Eternal salvation is in that communion ; by restoring the hierarchy of our faculties, it renders us capable of immortalization. Order takes the place of moral anarchy ; it is the restoration of the interior hierarchy. Henceforth the body obeys the soul, the soul obeys the spirit, and the spirit submits itself to the divine will. Reestablished on the primitive plan, man has entered upon the way of life eternal.

Already, indeed, he possesses it in its principle.

1 Gal. ii . 20 ; Rom. vi. 3. 2 F. Godet, Etudes bibliques, 2nd series, New Testament, p. 200, sq.

This inward renovation is the work of the Holy Spirit, who thus prepares the immortalization of our nature . In accordance with a Gospel saying, the Holy Spirit takes of that which is Christ's and communicates it to us.¹

There are two phases of this preparatory work : justification and sanctification .

In justification it is not faith, but the grace of God that takes the initiative, presenting to the sinner the propitiating blood of Christ as the pledge of pardon. In the moment when faith takes hold of this pledge, justification takes place and unites these two factors, grace and faith, in an indissoluble whole. God then declares just the soul which is really and fundamentally just, insomuch as by faith it henceforth submits its own will to the divine will.2

The new man is at first like a child just born. Sanctification is the growth of this new-born child. In every-day life and conduct the ideal dimly perceived in the hour of conversion is pursued. The Holy Spirit will complete the work of immortalization in the day of resurrection, when he will endow the faithful soul with a glorified body.

The fruit of faith is a new birth .

The new man is born capable of continued life, but this new birth needs to be followed by all the care requisite for the maintenance of a life still feeble, although heavenly. For lack of watchfulness this flame may be extinguished ; it is with spiritual as with physical life : God takes it away from the man who is not careful to maintain it. It is a gift for him who will make good use of it ; it is also a loan which God will take back from him who abuses it. Conditional in its principle, immortality remains conditional, even to our last breath.

We need to strive without ceasing, first to lay hold and then to keep hold on eternal life . Thus in the Gospel we find again the great law of the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest, which, as we have seen , shows itself in geology, in natural history, in ethnology, and in history properly so called : " So run, " says the apostle, “ that

1 Literally, will announce, or will reveal it. John xvi. 13-15 .

2 See César Malan, La Conscience morale, Geneva, 1886 ; and G. Fulliquet, docteur ès sciences, LaJustification par lafoi, thèse, Geneva, 1889.

ye may obtain the prize. And every man that striveth in the games is temperate in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. "¹ And immortality is just this incorruptible crown, the crown of lasting life spoken of by the apostle James.2

Everything is liable to be abused. The apostle Paul had, even in his day, to complain of those who discredited the Gospel by saying : " Let us continue in sin that grace may abound. " In our days the doctrine of salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ has been grossly abused, and the abuse has caused the condemnation of the doctrine. Escaping Scylla only to fall into Charybdis, men have replaced it by a doctrine of arbitrary and unconditional pardon, which would be complete impunity.³

Both conscience and logic protest against a false doctrine of the pardon of sin, but the true biblical doctrine remains untouched by these attacks, as we will endeavour to prove .

1 1 Cor. ix. 24, sq.

Cf. Rev. ii. 10.

3 Lately a professor of dogmatics expressed himself thus : " The humble and sincere acknowledgement of the fault is the only reparation required by the living and true God. Repentance, then, is the only expiation worthy of the name. " He also denounced the monstrous character of a theory which would make of God a judge thirsting for vengeance. 4 See among others the works entitled : La Justice de Dieu, by Hippolyte Rodrigues ; Examen critique de la religion chrétienne, by Patrice Larroque ; and Moïse et le Talmud, by Alex. Weill.-M. Larroque writes thus : “ From the true notion of supreme justice this consequence follows, that every fault must be expiated, here or elsewhere, by the punishment or the suffering of him who has freely committed it. I do not fear to add that if, by an impossibility, we were offered the remission of the punishment incurred by our evil actions, the weight upon the soul left by the consciousness of faults not expiated would be so great and painful that it would lead in the end to a demand on the sinner's part, as for a boon, that he might make a temporary expiation which would re-establish the order of unchangeable justice. From this it follows that every other external fact, every institution, every rite is radically powerless to replace personal expiation. The dogma of the remission of sins by the application of the merits of Christ, by virtue of a sacrament, by an absolution pronounced by a priest, is therefore contrary to the true notion of divine justice. But I go farther. I say that this dogma is immoral. It is a stimulus to evil, inasmuch as it inspires a false security in the sinner, excuses him from true amendment, and offers itself as always within his reach as an easy means of getting rid of his faults.... The dogma

According to the opinion too generally admitted, the pardon of sins would be an act whereby God, in consideration of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, would treat the culprit as innocent. Such a pardon would be impunity ; but the Scripture is formally opposed to that definition. Five times over the Bible declares that God will not hold the guilty for innocent ; or, to translate with more verbal exactness : " Leave unpunished ! he leaves not unpunished. "¹

God's pardon, according to the Scripture, would rather be the assurance given to the penitent sinner that, in spite of his faults , God loves him still, and that the deleterious consequences of his fault shall not go so far as the entire destruction of his being. In other terms, the repentant sinner is restored to favour, justified, sanctified, but he is, nevertheless, not treated as innocent .

" The wages of sin is death . "

But death is the cessation of life, and in an absolute sense the cessation of all activity and all sensation . In pardoning the sinner God declares him protected against this supreme chastisement of sin, but under a triple reserve :

1st . The pardon supposes the repentance of the sinner, and presupposes his regeneration.

It even consists mainly in a respite granted in view of the moral renovation.

It is a conditional postponement, which may be only temporary ; it is provisional, and the supreme chastisement remains in suspense.4 The postponement becomes definitive, and peace takes the place of the armistice, when the sinner's amendment is confirmed .

of the remission of sins is opposed to the true principle of sound morals . " According to the same author, " a a true and solid repentance, and not that which is so conveniently practised by Christians, is certainly an expiatory suffering. "-We believe the teaching of the Scripture to be yet more radical and more moral. There is no expiation but by way of destruction, total or partial. Anticipated or suffered, expiation can produce repentance ; it consists always in a loss. But repentance, by preventing relapses, limits the deleterious effects of a previously committed fault.

1 Nakke lo jenakke. Exod. xxxiv. 7 ; Numb. xiv. 18 ; Jer. xxx. 11 ; xlvi . 28 ; Nahum i. 3.

Cf. Exod. xxiii. 7 ; Prov. xi. 21 .

2 Ezra ix. 13-15 ; Psa. lxxviii. 38, 39 ; xcix. 8.

3 Rom. vi. 23.

4 See Exod. xxxii. 32-34 ; and the parable of the barren fig-tree, Luke xiii. 6, sq. See also Psa. cxxx. 4 ; Acts xvii. 30 ; Rom. viii. 13 ;; Heb . x. 26, 27..

2nd. Far from being impunity, the divine pardon is accompanied by all due chastisements , except the total destruction of the sinner. The Lord pardons the rebellious people, which will therefore not be exterminated ; but the fathers will die in the wilderness , the children only will enter the promised land.¹ Moses and Aaron themselves, guilty of impatience, will not enter therein. Isaac renews the blessing of Jacob when aware of his falsehood, but Jacob's life thenceforth will be only a long expiation. David, guilty of adultery and murder, obtains his pardon, but the child of his crime perishes ; and soon the revolt and death of the incestuous Absalom pierce the heart of his unhappy father. Paul, when converted, has still his thorn in the flesh. A faithless wife, delivered by Jesus from the vindictiveness of the Pharisees, will have to meet the anger of her husband. The prodigal son himself, not to speak of the sufferings of his exile, will retain in his body and his soul the marks of his sin, and his father does not say to him, as to the elder son, " All that I have is thine. "

The robber on the cross, though pardoned, has still to expiate his crimes, as he says : " and we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds . " The Bible fails to supply an example of pardon that is impunity. In practice the divine pardon is always accompanied by partial chastisements.2

3rd. If the condition of the pardon is not observed by the offender, the final chastisement will be all the more severe and irremediable. If the divine pardon were always absolute, definitive, and without condition, the sentence finally pronounced against the pitiless debtor in the parable would be illegal.

Misrepresenting the principle of Paul and Luther, it has been said by some : " Let us sin, that grace may abound ; let us sin, it will cost no more ; let us enjoy the delightsome taste of the forbidden fruit , we will repent to-morrow; let us taste

1 Numb. xiv. Here is the commentary of Messrs. Keil and Delitzsch on verse 20 : " In answer to the earnest prayer of Moses, the Lord grants forgiveness, that is to say, the maintenance of the existence of the nation, but not exemption from the well-deserved chastisment."

2 John xv. 2 ; Rom. viii. 10 ; Heb. xii. 5-11 ; 1 Cor. xi. 32.

3 Psa. xcix. 8 ; Matt. xviii. 32, 34 ; Rom. xi. 22 ; Heb. x. 26, sq.;

2 Pet. ii. 20.

the intoxication of pleasure, when we grow old we will repent. " The principle of the condition of existence cuts short all these perfidious reasonings. According to this principle, sin is a gangrene ; he who sins introduces or extends this gangrene .

Sin having been committed, grace can no doubt save that which has not yet been tainted with the disease ; but it will not be without a painful amputation, mutilating more or less the individual who has to undergo it.

It is in this sense that the Scripture compares the man saved by grace to a brand plucked from the fire, more or less blackened, more or less consumed.¹

The true notion of divine pardon is of the highest importance ; it is fruitful of practical consequences.

We will mention a few. Every sin committed has irreparable effects ; sooner or later it always brings after it a chastisement proportioned to its gravity . One of the chief advantages of the divine pardon is that it requires and produces the amendment of the sinner. From sin to sin, and from chastisement to chastisement, we were hastening towards nonentity ; the arm of Jesus makes us halt and turn back.

The sinner continues to suffer for his faults, but the individual is saved because he has quitted the way of perdition. Drawing his strength from the reopened springs of grace, he remounts the fatal slope that he had begun to descend. He suffers, and his body perishes, but his spirit, united to God by Jesus Christ, lives for ever. All believing individuals will enjoy eternal life, but in the common abode of happiness there will be degrees of fortune and of spiritual privilege, varying according to the degree in which here below the tendency to sin shall have been repressed. The punishments and rewards of the future life will eventually be in exact proportion with our conduct, good or bad. In case of a fire, the essential thing, doubtless, is to escape without loss of life ; nevertheless, the differences among the survivors may be great,

1 Amos iv. II .

2 Matt. xvi. 27 ; Rom. ii. 6 ; 1 Cor. xv. 40-42 ; 2 Cor. v. 10 ; Col. iii. 25 ; Rev. xx. 12, 13 ; xxii. 12. The parable of the penny and that of the talents complete each other. In one, each worker receives the same sum ; that is the eternal life promised to all. In the other, the servants receive more or less reward, each one according to his desert. Cf. Matt. xx. 1-16, and

some being mutilated for the rest of their days, and others without a wound. Antinomianism is the secret but profound sore of Protestantism. " He who counts upon the remission of sins will not be careful to avoid committing them," are the words of a thoughtful man. Thankfulness, which has been made the sole motive force of the Christian life, is too quickly cooled. The logical notion of pardon presented by the Scripture becomes a powerful curb upon the evil passions in the human heart.

But no doctrine is sufficient of itself.

In order to be delivered, the sinner must open all the avenues of his soul to the renovating breath of the Holy Spirit .

As our Forerunner, Jesus has opened up a new way of access to God.

It is ours to follow the Captain of our salvation into the deadly breach whither he has entered before us. If the sight of his sufferings produces in us a true repentance we shall desire to participate in them. Like him, we shall give a full consent to the sentence which condemns us, and while repudiating any further complicity with sin, we shall accept, if we have not the courage to claim, our share of the expiation.³

All those who associate themselves with this design of the

Christ obtain thereby the benefit of the divine grace, the salutary virtue whereof they had been prevented from experiencing only by fear mixed with shame. This grace is free,

1 Rom . v. 2 ; Eph . ii. 18 ; Heb. vi. 20 ; x. 19, 20 ; xii. 2. Forerunner, Captain, these titles of Jesus Christ make allusion to a victorious assault under the leadership of a chief who is himself the first to enter the stronghold. This chief marches bravely at the head of his soldiers, and the soldier who would not follow him would justly be expelled from the army and put to death. The salvation presented to us in the Gospel is not, then, to be attained by a mere passive acceptance ; but it promises a certain victory to the combatant who strives with all his strength .

2 Jer. x. 24.

3 We make a distinction between expiation and propitiation. Jesus alone has made propitiation for the sins of the world. It is only the innocent who can propitiate ; every sinner expiates when he suffers and when he dies. The sinner who rejects the propitiation of Jesus Christ must himself alone expiate according to the degree of his culpability, which goes on increasing.

Succumbing under the weight, his personality perishes. The expiation of the penitent believer is limited to the measure of the sins actually committed byhim.

without money and without price ; it is a gift. The guilt is gratuitously remitted. It is not so, however, with the punishment, the deleterious consequences of the fault. These fall in part upon Jesus, as we have just seen, and in part upon each sinner individually.

From this point of view, which appears to us to be the true one, Jesus would not have expiated the whole ; nor does the Scripture assert that he has. Each one of us suffers, dies, and therefore expiates in a certain measure. But there is this difference between our expiation and that accomplished by Jesus Christ, that he dies the innocent for the guilty ; it is for the purpose of saving them that he gives himself over to the attacks of their malice, and the effect of his expiation is to prevent the total destruction of the penitent sinner's soul.

His expiation alone is a propitiation.

The hardened sinner drinks to the dregs the cup of expiation ; the deleterious results of his sin will go the whole length of a complete suppression of his being. An eternal death is the wages of his obstinacy ; for him, as a matter of fact, it will be found that Jesus has not made any expiation .

The penitent believer, on the contrary, asks for and receives the new spirit which triumphs within him over sin, the antidote which neutralizes the mortal poison. He is, however, far from escaping entirely the consequences of his past or present faults. They all dog his footsteps continually : regrets, bad habits, physical or moral sufferings, complications, embarrassments, illnesses, the miseries of life and the miseries of death ;¹ all with one sole exception, the greatest and most terrible, the bondage to sin, of which the issue is eternal death, the total and final death of our soul, to which from depth to depth our first faults would have inevitably led us. As in the shipwreck of Paul and his companions, the vessel and its treasures are lost on account of the navigators' folly in refusing to follow the apostle's advice ; but when they at last conform to his instructions, they all have their lives saved, and with life saved, fresh resources and a new ship may be obtained. So is it with the saved soul. Sin had caused the loss of its innocence, but by

1 The body is dead (proleptically) because of sin ; but the spirit is life because of righteousness. Rom. viii. 10.

faith it obtains pardon, and a new body will be given to it after that which it now occupies will have perished in the tempest of this world. And what has it cost to save our imperilled souls ? Nothing less than the sacrifice of Jesus. To sum up, this sacrifice was indispensable, efficacious, meritorious ; it deserves on our part eternal and unbounded thankfulness .

The Christian, weeping, blesses that death which gives him life, and his gratitude will last as long as the imperishable existence for which he is indebted to Jesus Christ.

The certitude of our resurrection rests upon the formal and infallible promise of the Son of God : " This is the will of my Father, that everyone that beholdeth the Son and believeth on him should have eternal life ; and I will raise him up at the last day. " ¹ In spiritual communion with the Christ, the believer possesses an inward assurance ; he knows in whom he has believed, and it is morally impossible for him to doubt the promises which to his eyes bear the inimitable seal of the

Holy Spirit.

Reconciled with God, become his adopted son by a moral and spiritual union with the Well-beloved of the

Father, the Christian has found a reason for his existence, and has become worthy to live for ever. A son, he is also an heir ; henceforth he has an appointed place in the home and at the table of the heavenly Father.2

From an apologetic point of view, and as an external proof fitted to win the attention of non-believers, the resurrection of

Jesus is also the guarantee of a divine sanction : Jesus Christ, says the apostle Paul, " was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead. " Eleven apostles and five hundred disciples saw Jesus living after his death ; the Church has been founded upon their testimony. If Christ did not really appear,

1 John vi. 40.

2 Rom. viii . 17 ; John viii. 35.

3 Rom. i. 4.- Professor Gretillat has briefly and clearly established the apologetic value of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Exposé de théologie systématique, vol. iii.; Dogmatics, I.; Special Theology, Cosmology, pp. 1 and 2 ; Neuchâtel, 1888.

4 1 Cor. xv. 5, sq.-The authenticity of the Epistles to the Corinthians is generally admitted by modern criticism. This fact may then be considered if he had not repeatedly proved the reality of his resurrection , it would be impossible to explain the indomitable courage, the unquestioned union, and the indefatigable perseverance of the first propagators of the Gospel. The foundation of the Church would be a psychological miracle more inconceivable than the fact which the Church itself declares to be the starting- point of its existence .

" But now hath Christ been raised from the dead , the firstfruits of them that are asleep. "1

United to Christ in his sufferings and in his death, we are going on towards the day when our Saviour, sharing the almighty power, will transform our body of humiliation into the likeness of his own glorious body. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit concur in the performance of this supreme miracle. Paul says : " If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you. " 2 The almighty power which has intervened for the creation of man and for the resurrection of the Christ will intervene for the accomplishment of our own resurrection. If there was a good reason for the miracle of man's creation, we may the more confidently reckon upon the promised miracle which will endow the redeemed with the glorious organs of a new life.

It is an error in the so-called Apostles' Creed that it speaks of a resurrection of the flesh (carnis resurrectionem). " Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. " It is also an truly historic, that the apostle, in support of the truth of the Gospel, establishes the reality of Christ's resurrection upon the testimony of five hundred eyewitnesses. Most of these witnesses were still living as he wrote. The simple fact that the Corinthian Church was maintained upon the foundation laid by the apostle proves that that Church had been convinced of the evidential value of the testimony in question. The conviction of the Corinthian believers in this matter is for us a guarantee of the more force, as faith in the

Gospel imposed many renunciations and exposed to many persecutions. It may well be supposed that the Corinthians did not fail to make full inquiry. How could the apostle's statements have been accepted without examination ?

1 1 Cor. xv. 20.

31 Cor. xv. 50.

2 Rom. viii. II .

error to imagine that the future body will be composed of the same atoms as our present body. Paul's teaching is quite different : " Thou sowest not the body that shall be, but a bare grain but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him. " ¹ So far from being identical with the seed from which it

• springs, the plant has not even the same outward form.

No doubt the germ of the resurrection body of which the apostle speaks is invisible and impalpable ; but so, too, in fact, is every germ . That which is usually called seed, if carefully considered, may be recognized as being only an envelope, or rather a series of envelopes, like the bulb of a hyacinth . The true germ is mysteriously hidden in the central cell ; and what is that germ, if not a molecule in which there dwells a vital force which is absolutely imperceptible ? Inexplicable wonder ! Every living being springs from a microscopic cell, an apparently empty vessel, which, however, contains in principle all the organs and most of the innumerable characteristics which will distinguish the future individual, including the power of transmitting these organs and characteristics to all its descendants. In the tiniest ovule there is a whole potential world. This extreme tenuity of germs being admitted, it is easy to suppose that at the moment of death some element of ourselves may survive in a form a thousand times more subtile than the air we breathe. If placed in a suitable environment, this impalpable nucleus of plastic forces may be able to manifest itself in a new shape by the assimilation of the matter which will form the resurrection body. The germination of plants, the developement of the bird in the egg, would be images of these future transformations.

" Doth not nature itself teach you ? " says St. Paul. As a symbol of resurrection the metamorphoses of the lepidoptera deserve special mention.

What a contrast between the butterfly which displays in the sunshine the brilliant colours of its wings, and the caterpillar that crawls at our feet ! Enveloped in a shroud, the chrysalis is preparing for a higher life. By studying it with the microscope, the future butterfly may be discovered in it: the wings are folded between the first and second segment, the antennæ are hidden in front of the head ;

1 1 Cor. xv. 37.

the feet of the pupa serve as sheaths for the future legs of the insect .

The anatomist Swammerdam has discovered these organs in a rudimentary state in the body of a caterpillar that had not even reached the chrysalis condition. Might we not see a symbol in this fact too ?

Richard Rothe, a profound thinker, had arrived at the supposition that our resurrection is being prepared in this life.

He believed that, under the veil of the material nature, a new nature, a superior organism, is slowly being built up.

On this hypothesis the human personality would find itself furnished with a provisional abode, as it might be called, at the moment when it quits the material body. The greatest modern French metaphysician, M. Charles Renouvier, is of the same way of thinking. He has supposed " the existence of an imperceptible organism which survives the actual perceptible body and preserves the powers required for the production, under new conditions, of a form of body similar or superior to that which has already been worn by the individual. "¹

The naturalist Charles Bonnet, of the school of Leibnitz , and the physician David Hartley, of the school of Locke, had previously arrived at the same general views . Our compatriot, too, M. Eugène Mittendorf, has considered the question from an analogous point of view. He says :

The spirit being the dominating and ruling principle of the new existence, the body will be suited to its new conditions of life, and put into due relation with the activity which will be characteristic of the resurrection life. The former body has furnished the germ of psychologic nature, which, while assimilating to itself elements which are imperishable and glorious, assures the profound identity of the two bodies. For Christians, the life eternal has already begun here below by the fact of their union with Christ, the source of true life. The resurrection will be only the extension to their body of the work of revivification wrought by the Redeemer.2

In the caterpillar the appetites and functions of vegetative life are predominant. The organs of locomotion and intelligence are but feebly represented. Two enormous jaws and the

1. La grande question : l'Immortalité personnelle ( Critique religieuse,

1878, p. 192).—See in Supplement No. XIII., under the title Palingenesis, a longer excerpt from this article.

2 Essai sur la doctrine de la résurrection; Geneva, 1862.

intestinal tube play the principal part. In animals generally the stomach is the seat of government of the individual. The butterfly seems to be an exception to this rule ; the heavy feet of the caterpillar are replaced in part by the wings, and the jaws by a slender proboscis. The caterpillar crawled upon earth and was repulsive, causing aversion ; the butterfly soars in the air and is attractive, exciting admiration. The caterpillar was voracious ; the butterfly eats no more, but only sucks the nectar of the flowers. The life of nutrition exists only at its minimum ; it has given place to the life of relation. Is it possible to imagine a more complete transfiguration ?

Yet this is but a feeble image of the contrast which will be established by the resurrection between our present and our future life. We are only creeping here below. " We groan within ourselves, waiting for the redemption of our body," but while we groan we do not allow ourselves to be cast down ; we even rejoice beforehand in the prospect, for we trust in the faithful God who has raised up Jesus Christ, and who will surely raise us also in due time. Even in the hour of death the believer can sing the song of hope :

No more the dark passage I fear

Which leads me to bliss evermore ;

In life that exists even here

Are signs of the greatness in store.

The seed that the husbandman sows

Becomes the ripe corn in the fields ; The snow gives its place to the rose,

The grub to the butterfly yields.¹

Life and death, death and resurrection, the new birth and the future life, all these master-ideas we shall find embodied in the ceremonies which have been called the two sacraments of the primitive Church : baptism and the Lord's supper. These will be the subject of our next chapter.

1 William Petavel.

The French words are :

Je ne crains plus le noir passage Qui doit me conduire au bonheur ; La vie entière est un image De notre future grandeur.

Le grain qu'en terre je dépose

Devient épi dans le sillon ;

La neige fait place à la rose, Et la chenille au papillon.

CHAPTER VI .

I. The baptism administered by John the Baptist-II . The baptism submitted to by Jesus- III . The baptism instituted by Jesus Christ and interpreted by his apostles, the symbol of a new birth-IV. The Churches have distorted both the rite and its meaning-V. Protest of the Baptist Churches - VI. Admissions of Pædobaptist theologians - VII . The history of the rite a protest against the alterations that it has undergone- VIII . Examination of an objection against baptism by immersion- IX . The Lord's supper an emblem of the sustenance of the new life symbolically conferred in baptism-X. This another symbol, the key of which has been lost by the Churches through their Platonism.

IF the sinful man is on the way to absolute destruction, if the immortalization of our nature is the purpose of the Gospel, we may expect to find this thought embodied in the two emblematic ceremonies which are, as it were, the escutcheon of the

Church of Jesus Christ.¹ And, in fact, it is so, for both baptism and the Lord's supper tell us of death and immortality. In order that we may be convinced of this, let us begin by the study of baptism as it was instituted by John the Baptist, adopted by Jesus, and prescribed by him to his disciples .

1 The ministry of Jesus is opened by baptism ; it is closed by the Lord's supper. The two ceremonies embody a common thought ; they both tell us of a death needful for the salvation of the world, and also of a new life born in baptism and sustained by the Lord's supper. Jesus speaks of his death as a baptism : Luke xii. 50 ; Mark x. 38.

It will be observed that we avoid the use of the word sacrament, the meaning of which has been unhappily falsified. According to the dictionary of the Academy, the sacraments " have been instituted in order to confer the grace of which they are the sign." The danger is lest to the sacrament should be attributed a magic virtue. If we are to avoid falling into fetishism, we are bound to maintain that without the concurrence of faith the sacrament is powerless to confer any grace.

GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW.

Chapter III.

In those days appeared John the Baptizer ; he preached in the wilderness of Judea.

" Repent ye, " said he, " for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

It is of John that the prophet Isaiah speaks when he says : "A voice is heard in the wilderness : Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

John had a tunic of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins ; and his food was locusts and wild honey.¹

The inhabitants of Jerusalem, of all Judea, and of the region round about the Jordan went out to John the Baptizer. They were baptized by him in the river after having confessed their sins.

But John seeing a great number of Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, said to them : " Ye offspring of vipers, have ye learnt to flee from the wrath to come ? Bring forth then fruits answering to repentance, and do not believe that it will suffice to say within yourselves : We have Abraham as our father.'3 No, for I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And even now is the axe laid at the root of the trees ; every tree, therefore, that bringeth not forth good fruit, is about to be hewn down and cast into the fire.

" For my part, I baptize you in the water with a view to repentance. But he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to bear. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire. With the fan in his hand he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing-floor ;

1 These were the clothing and nourishment of the poor. Austerity was appropriate in an apostle of repentance. The true penitent considers himself unworthy to live ; he keeps himself apart, he deprives himself of the pleasures of civilized life, his food is of the simplest, and his clothing the coarsest. The sackcloth worn by the Jews in time of mourning was made precisely of camel's hair ; it was at the same time a sign and an instrument of penitence. A leathern girdle would make the wearer all the more sensible of the coarseness of this tissue, the old French name of which, camelot, from the Latin camelus, seems to be an allusion to the costume of John the Baptist. It was a very coarse and cheap material.

2 In other terms : " What are you come here for ? No doubt for you this baptism is only another rite added to so many other formal rites, a mere opus operatum. Be not deceived ; no rite will protect you from the wrath to come." 3 Another mischievous illusion of the Pharisees : salvation by the privilege of birth .

4 This flame will burn out the impurities of believers ; it will burn up the impenitent.

he will gather his wheat into the garner, but the chaff he will burn up in unquenchable fire. "

Then Jesus, coming from Galilee, went to the Jordan and presented himself to John to be baptized by him. But John would have hindered him, saying : " It is I who have need to be baptized by thee, and comest thou to me ?" Jesus answering said unto him : " Consent to it now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." Then John consented. After having been baptized Jesus went up straightway out of the water, and lo ! the heavens were opened before him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending in the form of a dove, coming upon him. At the same time was heard a voice from heaven, saying : " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

What, then, is the predominant thought in this baptism administered by John the Baptist ? It seems to relate to a mortal danger threatening the sinners. This thought was symbolized by the ceremony in question. The object of the baptism was an escape from a " wrath to come." John the

Baptist speaks in turn of the axe that cuts down the barren trees, of the fire that burns them to ashes, of the wind that carries away chaff and makes it disappear. The chaff that is not carried off by the wind becomes the prey of unquenchable fire. Then , adding acts to words, he plunges the sinners into deep water. In harmony with all the images in his discourse , this immersion is a new symbol of death. It is a simulation of a capital execution.

Let us note that those who came to John the Baptist began by confessing their sins. They remind us of certain malefactors who, urged by remorse, make voluntary confession of their crime and submit to the punishment. This has actually occurred. The English newspapers, some years ago, told the story of a murderer who, having taken refuge in Australia and being then no longer in danger of pursuit, spontaneously recrossed the ocean to come to London and denounce himself, thus, as it were, himself putting the rope round his own neck . So it was with the Jews who sought the baptism of John ; they acknowledged themselves unworthy to live.

The apostle Peter speaks of baptism as the antitype of the deluge.¹ God having declared that he would not send another

1 1 Pet. iii . 21 .

universal deluge, the human conscience none the less claims the death of transgressors. On a reduced scale the immersion of baptism is a deluge voluntarily submitted to, even demanded, by the guilty individual. We would here again call attention to the manifold symbol presented by the deep water : it was at the same time the instrument of capital punishment, and a tomb ; it was also a veil covering the sinner from the view of a God too pure to behold iniquity. The symbolism was so much the more admirable because the accomplishment of the rite was almost without danger and its application always easy, for water is never altogether lacking in the neighbourhood of human habitations.

Fire and steel are, on the contrary, symbols of which the use could hardly be otherwise than dangerous. Lastly, the rapid and impetuous Jordan might be thought of as ready to carry off the baptized offender into the depths of the accursed lake, known by the name of the

Dead Sea .

It is said that John baptized at Ænon, near to Salim, because there was much water there.¹ According to the dictionaries which are recognized as authorities, to baptize in the original language signifies to plunge, and sometimes when it relates to living beings to drown .

The ancient classic authors employ this term in speaking of a ship which, leaking in all parts, founders and is engulfed in the waters of the sea ; or, again, in speaking of the smith who dips into a vessel filled with water the red-hot iron that he has just been hammering ; he makes it undergo a baptism. In the Septuagint translation the same term is used with reference to Naaman the Syrian , who plunged himself seven times in the Jordan.3

1 John iii. 23. The very name of Ænon indicates a plentiful spring. In

Matt. iii. 6 it is said that John was baptizing in the Jordan, not on the bank of the river.

2 " Those who are being drowned in the sea " : hoi en të thalattē baptizomenoi, Bas. , 256. " He killed him by drowning " : baptizōn auton apekteine, Æsop, Fab. See the French- Greek lexicons at the word noyer. The French word noyer, to drown, is derived from the Latin necare, to put to death , immersion being no doubt the easiest and most usual mode of putting noxious animals, etc. , to death . [In Dr. Dunbar's English-Greek Lexicon (Edinburgh, 1840) the first meaning of the verb to plunge is baptizo.]

3.2 Kings v. 14.-In German, Taufe, baptism, taufen, to baptize, spring from the same root as tief, deep, Old German, toufen.

Such, at least, was

The Jews went in crowds to John the Baptist because there was in the air the presentiment of a catastrophe. The epoch was indeed very threatening, not unlike our own . Israel, the frail sparrow, was struggling in the talons of the Roman eagle. The imperial legionaries in the midst of Jerusalem were like an axe placed at the root of the trees.

The thunder-cloud could be seen forming, the distant rumblings, precursors of the lightning-flash that was soon to strike, could already be heard ; there were premonitions of one of the most frightful disasters that ever terrified the world .

In the same way as the voluntary vaccination-wound averts the disease by paying it a kind of tribute, so it was hoped that by the acceptance of the simulated death of baptism the divine anger might be turned away, and escape from the imminent peril secured. Touched by this repentance, God, by John's ministry in baptism, pardoned the true penitents . On the other hand, he rejected the Pharisees and Sadducees who, strangers to true repentance, thought to make of this immersion a magical device for reconciling themselves to God. The Pharisees and Sadducees are the hypocrites whose superstitious formalism will always seek to materialize religious ceremonies . John the Baptist warned these men against such culpable illusions. Neither baptism, nor circumcision, nor sacrifices, nor the fact of belonging to the posterity of Abraham, nor the sacred rolls of the Law, could ever save anyone. There is no salvation except in conversion and a new life.

These remarks will enable us to perceive the sense and meaning of the baptism submitted to by Jesus Christ.

Jesus being without sin, and being therefore unable to confess any, it is easy to understand that John would decline to administer baptism to him. An innocent man is not to be executed.

John naturally exclaims : " I have need to be baptized by thee ; it is I , a sinner, who would need to be the etymology maintained by Luther. This is closely related to the English dip, deep, and the name of dippers formerly applied to the Baptists ; in

Dutch, doopgezind and doopen, akin to the German taufen.

baptized by thee, and thou comest to me ! " But Jesus insists . In his sympathy, although himself innocent, he wishes to share the punishment of the guilty. Jesus, who was to crown his ministry by an expiatory death, begins that ministry and prepares himself for it by submitting to the symbolic ceremony of baptism. Spontaneously he presents himself to receive it, in the same way that three and a half years later he will go forward towards death. His baptism becomes the earnest and the pledge of the sacrifice of his life. The solidarity which his love for sinners establishes between himself and them leads him, in anticipation of the reality, to submit in a figure to that death which the conscience of his guilty brethren makes them feel that they deserve. Thus it is that he will " fulfil all righteousness " according to the terms of his answer to John. His immersion will be the symbol of his entrance into the death of the cross . So, too, the Jordan will be the emblem of the sepulchre in which his body must one day be laid. Uniting himself to our lot, he shares our punishment, and descends with us into the tomb in order that he may enable us to rise again from it with him. But, as his sojourn in the tomb was to last but a short time, so his stay in the water must not be prolonged . Therefore it is said that he went up straightway out of the water. This word straightway seems otherwise inexplicable. Similarly in the somewhat extraordinary phrase, “ The heavens were opened before him, " the words before him or for him which appear in some important manuscripts would seem useless unless we perceive in the fact so recorded a prophetic allusion to the ascension of Jesus Christ.

The Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove . This apparition recalls the dove of Noah's ark and its pacific message. The dove of the baptism of Jesus would also be an emblem of the pacification wrought by the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ and of the reconciliation of God to men coming, as we have seen, after that ceremony which itself was a figure of the deluge.

Then the voice of God is heard proclaiming that the sacrifice, of which the baptism was the anticipatory type, has rejoiced the heart of the heavenly Father : " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. " Jesus takes care him self to give us the key to the meaning of those words. He says that he is loved by the Father because he lays down his life, and having voluntarily abandoned it, takes it again.1

In the Gospel story there are only three occasions on which the voice of the heavenly Father is heard, and on each occasion it is to celebrate the praise of the Son who is about to sacrifice himself. It is heard first at the baptism of Jesus, then at the transfiguration, when the Saviour talks with Moses and Elijah of his coming death, and lastly three days before the death of

Jesus, at the time when he compares himself to the grain of wheat, which except it die abideth alone, but if it die it beareth much fruit. " Jesus adds, speaking of his death : " But for this cause came I unto this hour "; at the same moment was heard the Father's voice responding to his.

To return to the words that were spoken after the baptism, may they not be considered as a prologue to the apostles' preaching ? What say Peter and Paul, heralds of God himself, if not, in effect : Jesus is the only and well-beloved Son of God ; hear ye him " ?

The expiatory death of Jesus Christ, his prompt resurrection, his ascension, the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit, the preaching of the Gospel in all the earth, in a word, the whole Gospel appears to be contained in the story of the baptism of Jesus, like the oak in the acorn . At the same time, our own history as disciples of Jesus Christ is to be found there recounted in symbol, as we shall proceed to show.

Prescribed for all Christians, baptism has even to the present day kept the entrance-door to the visible Church ; but, thanks to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the rite has been enriched by a new element. The emergence from the water no longer signifies merely that the baptized sinner obtains a respite ; it is

1 John x. 17 , sq.

2 Exodos, Luke ix. 31. Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Christ are the only three men mentioned in Scripture as having fasted forty days. The religious fast is a symbol of a renunciation of life for the service of God. 3 John xii. 28.

the symbol of a double renovation : moral resurrection in the present life, bodily resurrection in the life to come.

The baptism of the primitive Church was, then, the emblem of a salvation wrought through death. Submerged and, so to speak, executed, the old man was considered to have perished in the water, from whence arose a new man, destined to a new life of holiness and righteousness. Christian baptism presented at first a sort of summary of the vital doctrines of Christianity. For the believer it was a symbol of his faith and a preparation for the supreme trial of death.

He would say : " My body is plunged in the water, it will soon be deposited in the earth ; it is about to arise out of the water, it will one day arise out of the midst of the dust. Meanwhile I am going to prepare by a new life for the life of the glorified saints. " Thus understood, the ceremony of baptism, a touching symbol of the most consolatory realities, was the source of profound joy.

If the sentiments of Jesus in his baptism become our own ; if our faith, responding to his love, unites us spiritually with him ; if, while suffering every day the deleterious consequences of our faults, we bear them with resignation ; and if, like Jésus, we consent to suffer with and for others, we, too, shall receive the Holy Spirit, that is to say, a new and higher life. There will come into our hearts an infusion of righteousness. A spiritual resurrection will anticipate the final resurrection of our bodies.

Such was the teaching of the apostle Paul :

What shall we say then ? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound ? Far from us be such a thought. We who died to sin, how should we live any longer in sin ? Are ye perhaps ignorant that as many of us as have been haptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into the communion of his death ?

If, then, we have been buried in the waters of baptism and assimilated to Christ in his death, it is in order that like as Christ was raised from among the dead through the glorious power of the Father, so we also might rise to live a new life. If in order to die a death like his we have become, as it were, the same plant with him, we shall doubtless remain united, to rise again with him.

We know that our old man was crucified with Christ, in order that that organ of sin might be destroyed, and that we might no longer be in bondage to sin ; for sin has no power over a being that is dead. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.1

Elsewhere the same apostle says : “ Baptized with Christ, you have been buried with him, that you may rise again with him." Paul compares the water of believers' baptism to the sepulchre wherein the body of Jesus lay between the time of his death and that of his resurrection. In another place the apostle declares that the Israelites were baptized in the Red Sea . The sea swallowed up the Egyptian soldiers ; the

Israelites themselves went down into the bed of the sea as into a sepulchre, from which they went forth alive only in consequence of a miracle.

The water threatened them on all sides.3

The apostle Peter, too, after having spoken of the deluge, immediately adds : " Whereunto correspondeth the figure whereby we are saved, that is baptism . "4

Unhappily, the symbolism of baptism has been lost in the practice of the traditional Churches. The immersion of believers has at last been replaced by a drop of water moistening the face of a little child. This alteration of the rite appears to us to be deeply regrettable, not because we attach a superstitious virtue to any sort of ceremony, far from it, but because the alteration of the rite has involved the alteration of important teaching embodied in it.

It is generally supposed that the purpose of baptism is to symbolize the washing away of a stain, and this, indeed, is one of its symbolic lessons ; but the accessory has been made to

1 Rom. vi . 1-8.-The translation of the passage here given is to a slight extent paraphrased. A perfectly clear and expressive translation cannot be always absolutely literal. A certain freedom, for instance, explains the remarkable success of M. Henri Lasserre's translation of the Gospels. Limpid and spirited, it is even in some respects more exact than the versions which boast of their literalism. But be that as it may, paraphrase is admissible, provided that, while acknowledged, it remains concise and, above all, faithful to the thought of the author ; this is the principle that we have sought to carry out in this work, here and elsewhere.

2 Col. ii . 12. Cf. Luke xii. 50 ; Mark x. 38, 39.

3 1 Cor. x. 2 .

4 I Pet. ini. 21 .

supersede the essential : as we have seen, baptism was first of all a symbol of death and resurrection. Besides, this debased form of baptism imposed upon mere babes is an unwarrantable interference with their future liberty. The spontaneity of the believer's act in asking for immersion gave to the rite its chief value. If its spontaneity be suppressed, baptism itself might just as well be abolished.¹

As now practised in the traditional Churches, this ceremony has the disadvantage of favouring in a greater or less degree the superstitious idea of a magical salvation. The Anglican liturgy supports this mischievous notion. In the Reformed Churches baptism is little more than the symbol of a Pelagian idea. Man is born good, a new birth is not at all necessary. Besides, the soul is born imperishable ; why, then, bring out these ideas of death and resurrection ? There is no question of putting to death the old man, let him live ! an ablution will suffice .

We are thus brought back to the lustral water of pagan ceremonies ; and thus does the traditional baptism pervert the principal teaching of the Gospel.

This abuse has been so painfully felt that many Christians have joined together in order to combat it. Under the name of Baptists they have founded numerous and flourishing Churches. In each of their temples there is a large cistern, into the water of which the neophyte is completely plunged after having declared that he wishes to die to the world and to be born to a new life. There was good reason for the protest of the Baptists, but, forced to create a new sect, they have erected a barrier which isolates them .

We believe it to be

1 The baptismal liturgy of Neuchâtel contains this sentence : " Parents of this child you pray God by his Spirit to produce in the child that new birth of which baptism is the seal." To affix the seal to a blank sheet is hardly a normal mode of procedure. Cf. Acts viii. 12.

2 In England the isolation referred to in the text is very little felt. Not only is there much fraternal intercourse between the Baptist Churches and other Free Churches, but in a large number of Baptist Churches, probably now the majority, the question of baptism is not made a bar to communion.

[Note by the Translator. ] much better to practise the immersion of believers while avoiding as far as possible a separation from the various evangelical communities .

We hope that the Churches will have the wisdorn henceforth to cease excommunicating those of their members who practise baptism by immersion.

Our hope in this matter rests upon the fact that a long controversy has at last led most evangelical theologians to the same conclusions on the two following points relating to ecclesiastical history :

Ist. In the primitive Church, baptism was practised by immersion.

2nd. Believers only were baptized .

To which we will add : those who, out of respect for the instructions of the founder of the Church, desire to conform strictly to the rite as established by him, ought at least to be tolerated, if not also imitated.

We now quote some authorities in support of these conclusions :

Baptism being administered by immersion, says M. Reuss, entrance into the water would represent the death and burial of the old man. The rising up out of the water would correspond to the resurrection of the new man . The believer being thus baptized into the death of Christ, entered upon a phase of existence that marked the transition from the former life to that which was to follow, as the tomb had done for Christ 1 It is evident that in presence of this conception of baptism, that of infants is excluded from the apostle's thought and horizon.2

The learned theologian and philologist, Hermann Cremer, does not hesitate to translate the word baptism by immersion or submersion.3

In the primitive Church, as we read in Dr. Schaff's Encyclopædia, baptism was by immersion, except in the case of the sick (clinic

1 Col. iii. 1 ; Gal. ii . 19 ; Rom. viii. 10 ; 2 Tim. ii. 11 . 2 Epîtres pauliniennes, vol. ii. , p. 64.

3 Eintauchen, untertauchen.-His explanation is, nevertheless, very incomplete.

baptism), who were baptized by pouring or sprinkling. These latter were often regarded as not properly baptized.

Of sprinkling we read : the practice first came into common use at the end of the thirteenth century, and was favoured by the growing rarity of adult baptism.

In the same article it is stated that there is no trace of infant baptism in the New Testament.¹

Mosheim , Gieseler, Hase, Neander, Dean Stanley, and most of the ecclesiastical historians who belong to evangelical Protestantism, are unanimous on this point. As an example we will cite the statement of Professor Chastel, who says :

In describing the ancient rites of baptism we have almost constantly supposed it administered to adults. At the beginning, in fact, it seems to have been only to them, since they only were able to give account of their belief, and with full understanding to make the moral engagements suitable to the Christian vocation. One passage of St. Paul seems even positively to exclude the contrary usage, for in that case the sanctification of Christian children which Paul treats as depending upon the fact that they are the issue of believing parents would have been guaranteed by their own baptism . It is true that in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles the baptism of whole families is spoken of, but there is nothing to prove that infants were comprised in them, and the less so because the profession of faith in Christ is there always required. Besides, the words oikos, oikia, as well as familia in Latin, designate the assembly of masters and servants, rather than that of parents and children.

The custom of baptizing none, or scarcely any, but adults, evidently prevailed until nearly the end of the second

1 A Religious Encyclopædia, based on the Real-Encyklopædie of Herzog ; edited by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., etc.; Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark,

1883-at the word Baptism.

" In the ancient Church, before the establishment of the custom of deferring baptism, sometimes even to the death-bed, the rule was to baptize by triple immersion. As Tertullian says : ' Non semel, sed ter ad singula nomina in personas singulas tinguimur' (Adv. Prax., c. 26). But when the sick and dying (clinici) had to be baptized, that rite was no longer practicable. In these cases baptism was administered exceptionally by pouring or sprinkling three times. This custom, however, was not established without considerable difficulty, and was for a long time regarded as insufficient (Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., lib. vi., c. 43). See Suicer, Thesaurus ecclesiasticus, at the word klinikos."-Eug. Picard, Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, article Baptême, vol. ii., p. 62.

2 1 Cor. vii . 14.

3 Acts xvi. 30-34 ; xviii. 8 ; 1 Cor. i. 16.

century. Tertullian, who mentions the baptism of infants as then already introduced, speaks of it only to condemn it, because of the importance of the engagements that accompanied it, which could not be entered into by infants. If the need was alleged of assuring to the child the divine pardon, he alleged in reply the innocence of that age. He therefore did not hesitate to advise the postponement of the sacrament until adult age.1

A learned theologian of the Anglican Church, the late Dean Stanley, Chaplain to the Queen, expressed himself thus :

The change from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the larger part of the apostolic language regarding baptism, and has altered the very meaning of the word.

The practice of immersion, apostolic and primitive as it was, had the sanction of the Master, of the venerable Churches of the early ages and of the sacred countries of the East it is still continued in Eastern Churches though peculiarly unsuitable to the tastes, the convenience, and the feelings of the countries of

• the North and West.2

The reformers maintained in principle the true notion of baptism . Let us listen to Luther, who endeavoured, but in vain, to re-establish immersion .

He said :

The immersion in water signifies that our old man ought every day to be drowned, with his sins and passions, and, added the reformer, he ought to be kept under the water, for the fellow can swim.

So, too, Calvin :

Baptism is a symbolic representation of the blood of Christ ; it shows us that we are crucified with Christ, and that in him we possess a new life.

The word baptize signifies to immerse ; immersion was the custom followed by the ancient Church.4

Let us now consult the most ancient monuments of the primitive Church.

1 Chastel, Histoire de l'Eglise, vol. i., p. 140, sq. See Tertullian, De

Baptismo, c. 18.

2 Nineteenth Century, October, 1879, pp. 697, 698, passim.

3 Cat. min., iv. 12. Luther, as we have seen, understood the word Taufe, baptism, to be derived from the adjective tief, deep, in accordance with the primitive character of the Christian rite. 4 Instit., lib. iv. 15, §§ 1-6, 19.

The stones of the Catacombs cry out against the debasement of baptism . The mural paintings of these subterranean galleries show us what this ceremony was for the Church of the first centuries .

There is to be seen Noah at the door of the ark, which might be considered as a floating coffin upon the waves of the deluge. Upon the ark an egg signifies the resurrection, or a tree rises out of the vessel as a symbol of new birth in the midst of universal death .

Often, too, may be seen a dove carrying an olive leaf or branch in its beak.

Beside the ark may be observed sometimes Lazarus coming forth from his tomb ; sometimes Jonah cast forth by the seamonster and standing erect on the shore, with the word anastasis (resurrection) inscribed in full at the bottom of the painting.

The picture of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea also reminds us of baptism. But the emblem most frequently met with is that of fish, sometimes painted, sometimes modelled in little figures of bronze, bone, or baked earth. The great fish is the emblem of Christ. The little fishes (pisciculi) are symbols of the believers, because, as Tertullian says , " Our birth takes place in the waters of baptism ." The dolphin, the saviour fish , carrying on his back a basket of loaves, represents Jesus Christ, who procures for man the living bread. In pagan antiquity the dolphin is known to have been looked upon as a friend of man ; it brought into port those who had been shipwrecked .

In other frescoes, the water springs from the mystic rock, stricken by the rod of Moses. " This water forms a river, wherein swims the Christian, that diminutive of the sacred ichthus, which is the Christ. The fisher of souls casts his line and takes him ." 3

The earliest Fathers apply to the ceremony of baptism the names regeneratio, innovatio, carnis abjectio, unda genitalis, nativitas secunda : new birth, renovation, putting away of the

1 This fact may confirm the meaning that we have attributed to the appearance of a dove after the baptism of Jesus, p. 173 .

2 The Greek word ichthus (IΧΘΥΣ), which signifies a fish, contains the initials of the name and titles of the great Chief of the Church : Iesous

Christos, Theou Uios, Soter ; Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour.

3 Th. Roller, Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, at the word Catacombes.

flesh, birth water, second birth. Gregory of Nazianzen goes so far as to call baptism " communion of the Word, " because this rite unites us to the eternal Word by making us members ofhis body.

In the early Churches it was the custom for the deacon to present the catechumens to the bishop on the eves of Easter and Pentecost, before the first dawning of the new day. Wrapped in a shroud, they were plunged three times into the water. This triple immersion was the figure of a complete death, as well as of the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day. Then were offered to the neophytes milk and honey, the nourishment of babes, and white clothing, symbol of virginal innocence. Christian names were also given to them, which they adopted instead of their former pagan names. This custom originated the use of the word baptize in the sense of giving a name. Thus the twilight hour, the new clothing replacing the shroud, the refreshment offered to the neophytes : everything in this ancient ritual spoke of the death of the old man and the birth of the new man .

frame was worthy of the picture.

The

How all that has been changed !

The triple plunge was maintained among the Greeks until the eighth century, and in the West until the sixth. Even at the present day, in all the Greco-Russian Churches, baptism is still administered by immersion. It is so, too, in the

Armenian , Coptic, and Nestorian Churches .

In the West, Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, recommended immersion as the safest practice. Sprinkling did not prevail until later than that. In 1311 the Council of

Ravenna allowed a choice between the two rites .

At Rome, in the early centuries of the Church, the neophytes were taken to the Tiber. In England, the monk Augustine baptized the new converts in the rivers or in the sea . Sometimes the immersion took place in cisterns or wells, where no running water was available .

These tanks or reservoirs were often made in the form of a tomb. The baptistery received the name of piscine, a pond peopled with fish, or of natatorium, a lake for swimming in. It was by preference dug in the immediate neighbourhood of a

CHAPTER VI.

SECTION VII.

spring or a stream, so that the water might be both fresh and abundant.

These archæological details, which we take from the Abbé Martigny's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities evidently lend their support to the signification that we have recognized in baptism . Other archæologists, as Augusti, De Rossi, Garucci , De Vogüé, etc., have shown that the baptisteries, of which vestiges in a more or less complete state of preservation are still to be found in the three continents of the ancient world, are so many proofs of the fact that baptism was administered by immersion .

As for the baptism of infants, it is impossible to quote a single example earlier than the third century. Even in the third century only one mention of such baptism has been discovered . Born in the fourth century, Augustine, son of the pious Monica, was instructed by her in all the truths of the

Gospel ; yet he was baptized only at his own request after he had passed his thirtieth year. So, too, Gregory of Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, Basil, Ephrem, Ambrose, all brought up in the principles of Christianity, were baptized only after having attained adult age.

Let us recall a clear testimony rendered to Conditionalism by the baptism of the ancient Church.

M. Picard says :

This singular idea, that the soul mortal by nature acquires immortality by baptism, is found already in Hermas : " Handed over unto death, men enter the baptismal water ; they come out thence destined unto life." In baptism man receives afresh the Spirit of God, received a first time from the breath of his mouth and lost by sin. He thereby becomes immortal.2 Gregory of Nyssa attributes to the soul alone the mmortality that results from baptism : " The body remains mortal because of sin, but it becomes capable of resurrection by union with the body of Christ in the holy supper."3

To sum up : the traditional rite is a grave departure from the primitive baptism as it was instituted by John the Baptist, adopted by Jesus Christ, and by him prescribed to his dis-

1 Lib. iii., simil. ix., c. 16-18.

2 Tertull., De Baptismo, c. 5. See Irenæus, Adv. Hæres., lib. iii. , c. 17. 3 Article already quoted, Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, vol. ii., p. 59.

ciples. This conclusion is evidently forced upon us by a careful study of the texts of Scripture and of the customs of the Church in the first centuries.

Let us, however, examine an objection that has been raised against the primitive rite.

It had, no doubt (says Dean Stanley) the sanction of the apostles and of their Master.

It had the sanction of the venerable Churches of the early ages and of the sacred countries of the East .

still continued in Eastern Churches.

The practice is

But he adds : The practice of immersion ... is peculiarly unsuitable to the tastes, the convenience, and the feelings of the countries of the North and West.

That which Dean Stanley speaks of as a motive of convenience is often nothing more than laxity or weakness . Moreover, there is nothing to prevent the warming of the baptismal water. The argument used by Dean Stanley cannot therefore be sustained, and we cannot but subscribe to the protest of M. Steinheil :

Have Christians the right to debase a sacrament by despoiling it of its divine symbolism ? Would they not do much better to invoke a blessing on infants, as Jesus did, and to administer baptism under normal conditions rather than mutilate it by a premature administration.¹

Experience has proved that the solemn presentation of the little child in a Christian assembly would have all the advantages of pædobaptism without its disadvantages. If the child becomes the object of the prayers of the family and friends present, the purpose of the pious parents is surely attained.2 Pastor Alfred Porret has expressed views very similar to those of the venerable M. Steinheil.

He has thus written :

Either we are greatly deceived, or there is here one of the questions which will come to the front in the near future. In our opinion it is difficult to avoid being struck by the poverty ofthe arguments from Scripture in favour of pædobaptism, and by the factitious and sophistical

1 Tel baptême, telle Eglise, p. 52 ; Paris, 1879.

2 The Christian World of 16 Oct., 1890, on page 522, under the heading

A Dedication ofInfants, contains an interesting account of a presentation of infants in a Baptist place of worship. This innovation is thought likely to promote the projected union of the Baptist and Congregational Churches.

character of most of the reasoning by which it is upheld. We believe that no impartial historian will traverse the statement of the illustrious Neander to the effect that infant baptism obtained a footing gradually in the second and third centuries as a consequence of the disastrous idea that the sacraments are necessary for salvation, but that such baptism was unknown in the apostolic age. We cannot avoid also asking ourselves in the name of experience whether the sense of the importance of the new birth is not seriously diminished by the value that is attributed to baptism when received in a condition of unconsciousness, and whether anything could be worse than the sad state of things, compounded of superstition and formalism, in which we now live, or, rather, in which we are now perishing.1

While awaiting the general abandonment of the baptism of infants, it is exceedingly desirable that, as a measure of transition, the pastors and ministers who preside at the baptismal ceremony should warn the parents against the dangers and the abuse of that ceremony. Every time when it is observed , those present should be informed that the modern rite is defective, and that in principle it would be preferable to replace it by the imposition of hands, reserving the ordinance of baptism for adult age. It is the fact that when the parents are Christians, the children who have been baptized have no greater privilege than those who remain unbaptized. The salvation of the children depends upon the prayers that may be offered for them, the education that they may receive, and in the end upon the decision which they will themselves come to when they have reached the age of reflection.2 1 Evangile et Liberté, 12 Sept., 1884.

From the debasement of baptism to its entire suppression there are but two steps ; one of these has lately been taken by the National Church in Zürich. Henceforth all the pastors of that Church are enabled to receive unbaptized persons as effective members of the ecclesiastical community. 2 With regard to the age of reflection, it is of the greatest importance to make the children understand that that age begins very early. Ostervald's catechism contained a statement likely to lead to pernicious error on this point. In the chapter entitled Ofthe confirmation of the baptismal vow this question may be read : What is the difference between the state in which you have been in childhood and that in which you will henceforth be ?

ANS. The salvation of infants is assured ; but those who have attained the age of reason are responsible to God for their conduct.

The ratification of the baptismal vow is usually made at the age of from sixteen to eighteen years. The child, not yet a catechumen, who might read

The symbolism of the Lord's supper makes a kind of pendant to that of baptism. Baptism being a figure of the birth of the new man, the supper represents the maintenance and developement of the new life.

The new man receives as his nourishment the words, the example, the life of Christ, his

Spirit ; in a word, the Christ himself as figured by the broken bread in the supper and by the wine poured out into the cup .

The communion continues the work of our immortalization .

" I am the bread of life," said Jesus, " the bread that cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die. " Is the bread a symbol of happiness ? If it had been a question of happiness, Jesus would more probably have spoken of milk and honey, perhaps of the fatted calf.2 Is bread a symbol of holiness ? Equally little . To specify holiness, Jesus would have spoken of unleavened bread.

The image chosen had, then , reference only to the maintenance of existence, pure and simple. Such bread might have a disagreeable taste, or even be mixed with impurities ; but in any case nutritive meal must have entered into its composition, it prevents death from hunger ; that is its sole destination, and the reason of its existence. The notions of happiness and holiness remain in the background. On the other hand, the notion of duration is brought into prominence in the same context . Jesus is the food that abideth, the living bread which gives imperishable life. We find on the lips of Jesus the expression used later on in the first Epistle of John with this question might well conclude from that word henceforth that he was provisionally irresponsible. Officially declared irresponsible, he might think it safe to let his evil propensities have free scope until the time when, arrived at the age of reason, he would become " responsible before God for his conduct." We would replace the answer quoted by a declaration somewhat in these terms : As soon as they can distinguish between good and evil, children are responsible to God for their conduct ; but considering the instruction that we have just received, the responsibility that we now assume will henceforth be increased .

1 John vi. 27, 48, 50, sq. 2 Cant. iv. II ; Luke xv. 23 . 3 John vi . 27, menousan, in contrast with the earthly food, which becomes decomposed (apollumenên) and perishes. In 1 Cor. xv. 6, menein has the meaning of survive.

relation to the believer who abideth while the world passeth away .

" He that .

drinketh my blood hath eternal life, " said Jesus.

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. " Is the blood a symbol of happiness ? No, still less so than the bread ; it would rather be a symbol of horror and disgust. The very thought of drinking blood, and most particularly human blood, is repugnant to the imagination. It revolted, and still revolts, the Jews especially, to whom blood is forbidden under heavy penalties ; and so it was after this saying of Jesus that many of his disciples left him. Is blood a symbol of sanctification ?

Still less is it so, since such a drink was a defilement ; but it is the symbol of life properly so called.

Moses had said, " The blood is the life ;" to drink it was for the Israelite a strong, clear, and precise image of the transfusion of a vital fluid. Desiring to inculcate a most important truth, Jesus did not shrink from a metaphor that must have been truly shocking to Jewish ears .

As with baptism, so it has been with the Lord's supper. Under the influence of Platonic ideas, the meaning of the symbol has been obscured. The meaning of the practice having been lost, the supper, too, became a magical operation, a sort of fetish .

Notwithstanding the Reformation , a remainder of fetishism has survived in the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation .

Calvin approached nearly to the primitive conception : he saw in the supper a symbol of the spiritual communion of the human soul with the invisible but present Christ. Still, by retaining the notion of an inalienable immortality, Calvin did away with the absolute necessity for this communion. A man who is by nature imperishable can, if he will, do without communion with God.

It will be possible for him to be reconciled to God and to love him without exactly seeking in him the alimentation of his being. That being so, logic asks what can be the great utility of the supper, and it is easily explained why in many Protestant Churches this ceremony has so nearly fallen into desuetude. Abandoned to a great extent by the masculine portion of the flocks, its tendency is, alas !

to disappear. It is with it as with baptism : the ancient and veritable significance of these august ceremonies must be re-established, if they are ever to resume their proper position. They are the armorial bearings of which the degenerate Church has lost the meaning. Lest they should lose their nobility and vitality in the ritualism, the sacerdotalism, and the sacramentalism of certain sects, the evangelical communities ought to seek in the primitive doctrine of ontological life in Christ the key of these important symbols. The question is worth the trouble ; it is a question, as it seems to us, of the future of those communities.

CHAPTER VII .

I. Sin, a guilty revolt, tends towards the subversion and suppression of the conditions of human existence-II . Biblical symbolism of the fire and the worm, two agents of destruction- III . Principal characteristic of punishment in general and of future punishment in particular. Punishment essentially deprivation of a faculty ; the supreme punishment will be the deprivation of all faculties-IV. Accessory and minatory character of suffering-V. Admissions of several generally esteemed theologians-VI .

§ 1, Spiritual or metaphorical death ; § 2, Virtual or proleptic death ; § 3,

Putative or presumed death ; § 4, Everywhere and always in Scripture death indicates a suppression, never a manifestation of life-VII . Morality and efficacy of this notion of future punishment. In the first place, far from being too mild, it is of a nature to inspire a salutary terror-VIII . In the second place, it is not barbarous ; although terrible, it leaves room for mercy. The divine compassion is present and dominant even in the depths ofhell.

AT the Creation every substance, organic and inorganic, received from God its characteristic properties, by which it is constituted, and which it must needs retain, otherwise it changes its nature and loses even its name. For example, water if it loses its liquidity becomes ice or steam ; a temperature between 32° and 212 ° Fahr. is the condition of that liquidity. Exposed to the action of fire, wood ceases to be wood and becomes smoke and ashes.

No creature can escape from these conditions of existence, which in science are called laws.

aim of science is the knowledge of these laws .

Man, the king of nature, is himself subject to laws.

The

Of these some are physical or physiological, chemical or dynamic, understood by the hygienist and the physician ; some, too, are psychological, governing the spiritual part of man's being, and it is the business of the moral philosopher to study and to define these higher laws.

The possession of immortality is also dependent upon obedience to certain laws ; unhappily, as we have had occasion to show, philosophy left to itself has failed to discover these laws. In order to become acquainted with them we have had to consult revelation.

What does the Scripture teach as to the conditions of a permanent life ? It presents to us a saying from Deuteronomy and a saying from Leviticus, brought together by Jesus Christ in the Gospel : To love self, to love

God more than self, and to love the neighbour as much as self, that is the triple basis of the laws by which “ man shall live ." 1

Man was intended, by a supreme love to God, to maintain uninterrupted communion with the source of life, and so long as that communion existed he could not die. But in the day when, by an act of rebellion, man broke the bond of love that united him to the Creator, the perishing process began.

This bond is for him like the fibrous root of the plant whereby it draws sap and life from the soil in which it grows. For man, to live is to be united to God ; so soon as that union ceases he is like the river cut off from its source. Sin carries death in itself, as the grain of wheat carries in itself the ear, as a principle carries its consequence. Essentially it is death, because it separates us from the author of all grace, from him who said, " I am that I am," who is the absolute Being, the Being without whom nothing can exist. James has admirably exhibited to us this genealogy of evil in the profound saying, " Lust when it hath conceived beareth sin, and sin when it is full grown bringeth forth death."2

There is a law, universal, necessary, sovereign, which destroys all who resist and vivifies all who conform to it." 3

The docile subject of that law continues and grows ; he who transgresses it, compromises his own existence, withdraws himself from the source of being and brings about his own

1 Lev. xviii . 5 ; Ezek. xx. II . Cf. Luke x. 27, 28 ; Deut. vi. 5 ; Lev. xix. 18. 2 Edmond de Pressensé, Essai sur le dogme de la Rédemption, p. 73 ; Paris, Meyrueis, 1867.

3 A. Gratry. La morale et la loi de l'histoire, vol. i., p. 297. Paris, 1868.

See also in Supplement No. IV. the observations of Prof. Charles Secrétan.

decay in the proportion of his deviation ; he becomes liable to complete destruction if he persists in his aberration.

When a branch, broken by the tempest, is detached from the tree that bore it and falls to the ground, it yet retains for some days its rich foliage. It is full of sap, and the fruit that is on it may even ripen in the soft rays of an autumn sun ; but its maturity will be imperfect, and whilst the branches that are left on the tree will be covered with leaves and flowers in the ensuing season, the branch separated from the trunk will be nothing but dry wood, the prey of worms or fire.

Worms and fire, these are images frequently employed in

Scripture.

Separated from the source of life, the sinner is advancing by a slow and funereal march towards eternal death .

" The soul that sinneth, it shall die," says the prophet Ezekiel. “ If ye live after the flesh ye must die ; the wages of sin is death," says St. Paul. " Sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth death," says St. James, the death which kills only the body, then that which will kill the whole man, the second death spoken of in the Apocalypse.1

The ruin of the body, according to the Scripture, is but a symbol and a sort of prelude of the destiny of the impenitent sinner. It is a progressive and irresistible decadence, a continuous diminution of the two factors of human life, sensation and action. The dimmed eyes wander in increasing darkness , the dull ears have only an indistinct perception of sounds, the enfeebled stomach refuses nourishment, the knees give way under their burden, all the vital functions are retarded, a moment arrives when they are altogether interrupted and the man is no more .

But all does not perish with the body. The Old Testament

1 Ezek. xviii. 4 ; Rom. vi. 23 ; viii. 13 ; James i. 15 ; Rev. ii. 11 ; xx. 6, 14 ; xxi. 8. What is death but the cessation of life, and what is life but a combination of action and sensation ? Death, in its absolute sense, must, then, be the cessation of all action and all sensation. That such is the meaning of the word appears from the use made of it by the apostle when he exhorts the believer to mortify or make dead the lusts of the flesh or sin, in themselves : thanatoō, stauroō, nekroō (Rom. viii. 13 ; Gal. v. 24 ; Col. iii. 5). These passages relate to " the annihilation of the evil element in man, of sin and the flesh ." p. 163 ; 1852 .

Professor Reuss, Histoire de la théologie apostolique, vol. ii. , in more passages than one, the New Testament in the most explicit manner, reveal to us a prolongation of existence beyond the tomb .

According to the Bible, souls after death fall into two principal classes, the first of which includes those who have had faith in the divine pardon and have lived in the practice of good works . These, reconciled with God, confiding in his great love, especially as manifested in the sacrifice of his only Son, regenerated, having returned to the constituent principle of their being and submitted themselves to the rule from which for a time they had departed, live for ever in happiness.1

The second class is divided into two categories : irreconcilable sinners, and those who have never heard or have not understood the good news of the remission of sins. These latter naturally find themselves on the way to perdition, but various declarations of Scripture allow us to believe that they will be subjected to a new test, and that a special gospel message will be addressed to them. We shall have occasion to recur to this point in our tenth chapter. For the present we need only consider what will be the fate of the incorrigible sinners .

According to Scripture, it is fire that in the end is to destroy God's enemies, fire, the symbol of utter destruction, which converts the diamond, hardest of substances, into a subtile vapour, breaks the granite, melts the rocks and transforms them into lava. With these terrible natural phenomena in view, Isaiah, when speaking of the fire that will consume impenitent sinners, might well exclaim : " Who among us can dwell with the devouring fire, who among us can dwell with the

1 Hina zōēn echēte, John v. 40 ; xx. 31 -that ye may have life. Such is " the final aim of the divine economy, and, as it were, the keystone of John's theology. " Reuss, op. cit. , vol. ii ., p. 453. It may be added that the whole biblical revelation tends in the same direction.

2 The water of the deluge, whereof baptism is a memento, is, as we have seen, another symbol of destruction often employed in Scripture. Water and fire are, in fact, two kinds of environment incompatible with human life ; but while water buries the dead who have perished therein, fire causes a yet more radical disappearance of its victims. We believe that the fire of hell spoken of in Scripture is only an image of the destructive effects of sin.

eternal burnings ? "1 The implied answer is " None !" There is no life that is compatible with fire ; but, according to the Scripture, the final lot of the wicked is destruction by fire, for " behold, the day cometh, it burneth as a furnace, and all the proud and all that work wickedness shall be stubble ; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch . " 2

To the horror of this burning the Apocalypse adds the suffocating vapour of brimstone, another agent of destruction that would hasten the end of living beings exposed to it.

In a dozen passages of the New Testament the last sojourn of impenitent sinners is called Gehenna, a word which, as is well known, means the valley of Hinnom, in allusion to the ravine below the southern wall of Jerusalem. It was in the part of this valley called Tophet, or the valley of burning, that some kings of Judah had burnt alive their own children in honour of Moloch. Josiah , when he came to the throne, devoted this valley to infamy ; he made it the sewer of the city, a place for refuse into which were cast all the abominations of the capital, the dead bodies of beasts of burden and of executed criminals. A fire constantly burning consumed these corpses ; hence the expression " the Gehenna of fire. "

Such were the images evoked by the expression Gehenna employed by Jesus to make his hearers understand what a terrible final destiny was threatening impenitent souls. He said, " Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna . "

Total destruction is then, according to the Scripture, the final lot of obstinate sinners . They are sheep which, having

1 Isa. xxxiii. 14.

2 Mal. iv. 1 [iii. 19] .

3 Gehenna tou puros. See 2 Kings xxiii. 10 ; Jer. vii. 32, 33 ; xix. 2, 6 ;

Mark ix. 48. This same valley became a field of battle when the Romans besieged Jerusalem. Afterwards the victors heaped up in it the dead bodies which were strewn over the ruins of the city. Josephus, Wars, vi. 8, §5 ; v. 12, § 7. Cf. Jer. vii. 32. The French word gêne (constraint), which at first meant torture, is derived from the Hebrew substantive Ge-hinnom, in

Greek Gehenna.

4 Kai psuchēn kai sōma apolesai. Matt. x. 28. It has been said that although God can destroy a soul, he will never do so, That is to change the solemn warning of Jesus Christ into an empty threat. Philosophy suffices to show that God can destroy a soul that he has created. " I am not able to demonstrate that God cannot annihilate it [the soul], but only that it is of a nature entirely distinct from that of the body."-Descartes.

strayed away from the shepherd, are exposed to the wolf's jaws , to the pangs of hunger and thirst, to the agony of a miserable death. Authors of their own ruin, the rebels will " perish as mere animals destined to be taken and destroyed. "1 " They shall be as though they had not been ; "2 as a vanishing cloud ; "3 " as a dream when one awaketh ; " " like a potter's "5 " vessel dashed in pieces ; "5 as ashes under the feet ; "6 " in smoke shall they consume away. " 7 " The workers of iniquity shall be destroyed for ever. "

Jesus compares them sometimes to fruitless vine branches, sometimes to bundles of dried tares, which are burnt up.

This punishment is eternal insomuch as it is definitive. Those who have neglected the poor and afflicted will go, Jesus says, into an eternal punishment.10 We note in passing that the expression eternal sufferings (Fr. peines éternelles) is not biblical ; there is nothing to warrant the introduction of that plural, which inaccurate revisers substituted for the singular eternal chastisement, as retained by Olivetan.11

It should be observed that when the word eternal qualifies an act, the eternity is the attribute not of the act itself, but of the result of the act. It then denotes the perpetuity of the effect produced by the act or by the agent. Thus, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus is said to have obtained an eternal redemption ; a redemption eternal in its effects, although the act by which it was obtained was accomplished in one day upon the cross.12 In the same Epistle an eternal judgement¹³ is spoken of ;

12 Pet. ii. 12.

2 Obad. 16. Cf. Job x. 19.

4 Psa. lxxiii . 20. 3 Job vii. 9.

Psa . ii . 9 ; Rev. ii. 27 ; Rom. ix. 22 ; Matt. xxi . 44.

6 Mal. iv. 3. 8 Psa. xcii . 7. Cf. 2 Thess. i. 9. 10 Kolasin aiōnion. Matt. xxv. 46 .

7 Psa. xxxvii. 20.

9 Matt. xiii . 30 ; John xv. 6 .

11 This alteration is as old as the Geneva version of 1588. Estienne's edition, 1556, rendered the words eternal torment, another error which has reappeared in the version of J. N. Darby, where we find eternal torments. 12 Heb. ix. 12. Cf. ver. 25, 28 ; v. 9 ; vi. 2 ; vii. 25. On this point Alford remarks that aiōnian, eternal, here answers to the preceding ephapax, once for all, in the same verse. Grimm æternum valens.

13 Heb. vi. 2. A nearly similar expression occurs Mark iii. 29, an eternal sin." This rhetorical figure which assigns to an act the perpetuity of its effects is also found : I Kings ix. 13, " He called the cities the land of Cabul unto this day ;" Deut. xi. 4, " The Egyptians destroyed unto this day;"

evidently it is only the effect of the sentence that is eternal. In Jude the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are named as permanent witnesses of the divine vengeance, being the prey of eternal fire.

The waters of the Dead Sea cover the site of the guilty cities, which were destroyed in a moment ; but the fire that consumed them has been eternal in its effects, having destroyed them for ever.

The Dead Sea is the eternal witness of an historical catastrophe. So, too, in the passage of

Matthew that is under review, the chastisement will consist in a gradual destruction, and this chastisement will be irremediable.

This is a mode of speech by no means foreign to our modern languages ; it is found in the expression an eternal farewell, " dire un éternel adieu, synonymous with a final or supreme farewell ; the chastisement spoken of by Jesus is likewise supreme and final.

We therefore do not limit the duration of eternal punishment, as is sometimes supposed, but we believe that it implies a final destruction.

" The worm that dieth not " is, like the " unquenchable fire, " a symbol of definitive death. So long as the corpse, which , moreover, is perfectly insensible, is gnawed by the worm it cannot live again.

If the worm never dies, there will be no more possibility of life for the being symbolized by the corpse .

We shall deal more fully with the meaning of these emblems in the eleventh chapter.

If we now endeavour to determine the essential character of future punishment, the way may be indicated by etymology.

and bound him a thousand Rev. xx. 2, " He laid hold on the dragon years ;" then he cast him into the abyss, to remain there shut in until the end of the thousand years. This principle of interpretation has been recognized by one of our honoured opponents : " When the Scripture qualifies redemption and the last judgement as eternal, the term applies to the consequences of those acts, and not to the acts themselves. " E. Arnaud, Manuel de dogmatique, p. 567.

1 Hupechousai, Jude 7. So also Libanius, speaking of Troy : Keitai paradeigma dustuchias puros aiōniou. Declam. v., p. 289.

2 Lam. iv. 6 .

3 Cf. Matt. xviii. 8 ; xxv. 41 ; Mark iii. 29 ; Dan. xii. 2 .. 4 Æternum vale, Ovid. See, too, 2 Thess. i. 9, olethron aionion, eternal destruction, synonymous with irremediable destruction. " One day is still left to us in which to change the severity of our eternal sentence."-Massillon.

The six dictionaries of Passow, Planche, Alexandre, Wahl,

Grimm, and Liddell and Scott are unanimous in deriving the Greek word kolasis, chastisernent, from a root signifying to break by striking, to cut off, curtail, dock, prune, mutilate, dismember ;¹ whence our word iconoclast, one who breaks or destroys images. Kolasis, therefore, designates chastisement by means of deprivation.

On careful consideration, it will be seen that chastisement most frequently involves the idea of a loss, a deprivation : a fine is loss of money ; imprisonment, loss of liberty ; death, loss of life. The signification is exactly that of the Latin term castigare, the etymological meaning of which is to prune or lop, and so of the French châtier, and the English chasten.

It is to cut off the sterile branches : Castigatio, amputatio, quæ arboribus luxuriantibus adhibetur, according to the definition of Estienne's

Thesaurus, the very operation spoken of by Jesus himself in the similitude of the vine and the branches , where he says :

" I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh it away, and every branch that beareth fruit he cleanseth it, that it may bear more fruit

If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a sterile branch, and is withered ; these are gathered up and cast into the fire, and they are burnt. " The wicked will be for ever cut off from the trunk of humanity, their destruction will be total and final : that is the eternal chastisement.4

1 Kolazō, frequentative of kolouō, poet., whence kolasis, mutilatio, Wahl ; kolos, maimed. In the LXX. the terms kolasis or kolazō are used in relation to capital punishment, banishment, confiscation, or imprisonment, all these sentences implying deprivation. I Esdras viii. 24. Cf. Ezra vii. 26 ; Ezek. xviii. 30, Greek. When the chastisement does not imply deprivation, as, for example, when it consists in the infliction of strokes, the New Testament and the LXX. employ the word paideia, admonitive correction ( 2 Chron. x. 14 ; Prov. iii. 11 ; xxii. 15 ; Luke xxiii. 16 ; Heb. xii. 6, 7), or sometimes the words epitimia, elegxis, ekdikēsis. An attempt has been made to distinguish between kolasis and timōria, as though the first of these words would designate rather a correction and the second a vindictive punishment ; but it does not seem possible always to maintain this distinction. In French peine, punition, and châtiment are sometimes confounded, although usually châtiment is in order to the amendment of the guilty subject.

2 In the same sense is used the phrase to chasten a composition, prose or verse .

3 John xv. 1, sq. To be in accordance with the traditional dogma, Jesus ought to have said : " They are cast into the fire, and are not burnt." 4 " In view of the contrast established in this verse between life and

According to the Bible, life is a loan, which God takes back from him who misuses it. The Creator does not oblige anyone to remain seated at the banquet of existence ; to the righteous he grants immortality; but those who presumptuously endeavour to change the laws of their being exclude themselves, they attempt an impossibility, as would a man who should attempt to live with his natural position always reversed. The wicked will not succeed in destroying the laws, which are unchangeable, but they may use their liberty as an instrument for their own destruction. Spirits, like bodies, last only so long as they deserve to last. The unregenerate soul will not eternally survive physical death ; the rust that eats through the scabbard will end by eating up the blade. There is no useless torment, but the gradual destruction of an individuality that is hastening back into the nothingness out of which the divine goodness had brought it forth ; a terrible agony, and then a night without a morrow. This soul has no more power of perception or of action : it was, it loved, it lived ; it loves no more, it is dead , it is no more ! ¹

In the sacred text there are not to be found any such expressions as " perpetual torments," " endless sufferings, " an " eternal hell, " as there is no such phrase as " immortal souls ."

On the other hand, an " eternal life " for the righteous is the subject of frequent declarations. This life is " endless "; righteousness, mercy, joy, and salvation are everlasting.2

But what is to be our answer to a certain would-be wisdom which, assuming to be wiser than the divine word, is disturbed at the prospect of a punishment without eternal sufferings, and calls it laxity ? True wisdom would urge a reform of the traditional notion of chastisement. It is thought, erroneously chastisement, the chastisement would seem to consist in an annihilation.". De Wette upon Matt. xxv. 46. We may add that if suffering were the special characteristic of the chastisement, the second part of the verse would have spoken of the eternal happiness of the righteous.

1 On the ontological relation between moral evil and the biological decay of the creature, see Chap. XI., sect. v., and our separate Study of Evil in

Supplement No. V.

2 Heb. v. 9 ; vii. 16 ; Psa. cxviii. 1 ; Isa. li. 6 ; lxi. 7, etc.

in our opinion, that suffering is the essential element in punishment.¹ A millionaire, upon whom a fine is inflicted, is punished, but far from experiencing any suffering, he perhaps laughs at the loss, for him altogether insignificant ; he may even be proud of it as a display of his riches. Suffering may or may not accompany chastisement ; it may even be said that, as compared with chastisement proper, suffering is a benefit for him who is willing to profit by it. A vigilant sentinel, it protects the infant in the cradle and the wounded soldier on the field of battle.

It awakes them, provokes their cries, and procures for them a salutary help. It is, moreover, the providential tocsin which makes the sinner aware of the imminence of his danger.³

Anyone foolish enough to fix his eyes upon the sun would at first feel a sharp pain ; if, deaf to the warning of suffering, he persists, the pain will cease, but he will have lost his sight ; thus blindness will be the chastisement of which the passing pain was only the prelude.

By the prevalent notion that conscious suffering is the essence of punishment, the axis of the sphere of divine retributions has been displaced .

The total destruction of the human soul will doubtless be

1 French : peine, from Latin pana; properly a ransom paid as damages or compensation for a crime ; from the Greek poinē, originally a penalty paid for homicide, and so chastisement, expiation, sometimes retribution, price, recompense, occasionally sorrow, pain.

2 As an example of a chastisement without suffering may be cited the old English law that punished the suicide by causing him to be buried at night without any religious ceremony. So, too, by the old French law, the body of a suicide or one killed in a duel was doomed to be publicly and ignominiously dragged along on a hurdle.

In certain states of North America criminals about to be executed are made insensible with chloroform.

And even without chloroform decapitation and hanging, as now practised by civilized peoples , are in themselves deaths less painful and terrible than the agonies of many that are called natural. If suffering were the essence of chastisement, great criminals ought to be made to suffer tortures proportioned to the number and atrocity of their crimes. Yet in most civilized countries the law appoints one only punishment for murderers of every degree of guilt-viz., deprivation of life. Is it so that theology, which should be a guide of the legislator, has now to receive from him the teachings of divine wisdom ?

3 See the considerations of Professor Ernest Naville in support of this view.

Le Libre Arbitre, § 108.

CHAPTER VII

.-- SECTION IV.

preceded by sufferings proportioned in duration and intensity to the native vitality of that soul ; the more richly a soul is endowed, the greater the mass of its vital forces, the more poignant will be the anguish of its dissolution. In this sense, “ to whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required ; " but we do not see that the Bible makes the chastisement to consist mainly in the suffering.

It is worthy of note that Paul, the most didactic of the apostles, who protests that he “ has not shrunk from declaring the whole counsel of God, "I never employs an expression, even in his most terrible threatenings, which implies the pretended eternal sufferings of the damned. He seems , indeed, to have carefully avoided every image that might have been misleading in that respect. He never speaks of hell, but he has tears for those who are perishing.2

Is a sanction required for the law that has been broken ?

That sanction is guaranteed by the infallible correlation between the sin and the partial or total death which overtakes the sinner.

It is not written : The soul that sinneth shall suffer, but : " The soul that sinneth it shall die."

Death is the wages of sin, death with its fearful and painful accompaniments, but especially and above all death itself, the king of terrors, whose eternal silence renders to the violated law a homage worthy of its eternal majesty. The evil, the contempt of the law, is destroyed in the person of the evildoer ; the serpent dead, dead is the venom ; sufficiently vindicated, the law lives and triumphs for ever.

The Creator, jealous of the conservation of man, the creature of his predilection, and with a view to man's restoration, in his fatherly care has placed suffering in the dark and narrow passage that separates sin from death. It is the mission of suffering, as a vigilant guard, to make the victim of evil aware of his danger. In man, too, there is remorse, in addition to the physical and psychical sufferings of the animal world. The sinner, refusing to accuse himself, only too often makes the mistake of cursing the suffering, which is but the crook of

1 Acts xx. 20, 27. Esoteric teaching is contrary to the spirit of the Gospel.

Cf. John xviii. 20 ; Matt. x. 27.

provisional only.

2 Philip. iii. 18, 19.

The reserve indicated in John xvi. 12 was the great shepherd who is recalling to the fold his wandering sheep.

Suffering usually forms part of chastisement ; yet it is so far from being confounded with chastisement, and even from forming its principal element, that either of them may exist without the other. A criminal ignorant of his condemnation to death, to whom a soporific poison should be administered without his knowledge, would undergo his punishment, capital punishment, without being aware of it. He might die with a smile on his lips, but would it be said that he had not been punished ? No, the shortening of his life, independently of the punishment beyond, would surely constitute a certain measure of chastisement.¹

But pain always denotes the existence of an evil ; that is, a destruction, partial or total, in course of accomplishment.

The pain of a violent blow is an indication of a contusion, or, in other words, a beginning of local death. The pain, which is essentially symptomatic and preventive, tends to disappear when the evil is cured or becomes incurable .

Sismondi, in his journal, tells of an officer of his acquaintance, Major de Besançon, who at the battle of Wagram was knocked down by a sword stroke, and then during two hours trampled over by horses ; although his head was " pounded to a jelly," he said that he did not begin really to suffer until he found himself in the tent and in the hands of the surgeons.

Sismondi thus concludes :

Providence has arranged the swoon as a remedy against the most excruciating pain ; all grave wounds cause a loss of consciousness, and intense suffering is hardly ever felt except when the patient has the courage to suffer ; that is, when the healing begins and personal effort is made to preserve the life.2

1 There are dramas in which an evildoer escapes the due chastisement of his crimes ; but suddenly he falls, stabbed to death, and the spectators applaud this finish ; the public sense of justice is satisfied, yet the death has been so sudden that there could be scarcely any suffering on the part of the criminal. As for the future punishment, the spectators do not think of it.

Perhaps, without any clear perception of it, they recognize the chastisement in the deprivation of life, the cutting off of the days which the criminal might have passed upon earth.

2 J. C. L. de Sismondi, Fragments de son journal et de sa correspondance, p. 73 ; Geneva, 1857.

To sum up, Conditionalism is a consolatory doctrine, which presses forward joyously towards that epoch when death will be no more than a distant memory.

On the other hand, we believe that suffering will not fail to play a terrible part in future punishment. It will be the preliminary phase of that punishment. The supreme chastisement will put an end to the individual only after a painful decay beyond the tomb. In accordance with the scientific law of continuity, the impenitent sinner will become the prey of a long and lamentable decline.

There will then be " weeping and gnashing of teeth," as there is even here below, to be followed in the case of the still rebellious by that dismal silence which the Scripture calls " the second death," the death from which none returns, and which kills even that which the first death had left alive.¹

Notwithstanding the long tyranny of the Churches, the notion here presented has found more than one partizan .

The

Bible and logic have extorted some admissions from theologians the most orthodox. Our first quotation shall be from the pious and profound theologian Beck, of Tübingen, who has been praised for his wise reserve ; this praise will give all the more

1 M. George Godet sees in the second death " the definitive separation of the soul from God, the source of its life " ( Chrét. évang., 1882, p. 559) . But he could not deny that sin is itself a separation from God ( Isa. lix. 2), and he admits that sin is a spiritual death (Chrét. évang., p. 505, sq . ) . The second death would then be only a first death continued ; this is equal to saying that it has no right to the title of second death. If, on the other hand, it should be maintained, as is done by M. Geo. Godet, that the first death is physical, and that the analogy between that and the second death consists in this, that while physical death separates the body from the soul, the second death separates the soul from God, we have to make two objections : first, that physical death does not merely separate ; its principal effect is to kill all activity of the body, and the analogy would require that the second death should kill all activity of the soul; second, that to make the second death synonymous with moral separation from God is to make the second death begin here below ; while the Apocalypse, which alone tells us of the second death , places it at the end of the world and after the last judgement. The definition given by M. Geo. Godet is therefore inadmissible, whether regarded from the point of view of analogy or from that of the texts.

Geo. Godet, Chrét. évang., 1882, p. 563 .

value to his assertions, those here quoted being taken from the very book in which he recommends reserve. If he speaks, it is doubtless with deliberation and full perception of the force of his words .

He says :

There is a death which dissolves the union of soul and spirit. . . . When death thus pervades the whole being, the personality comes to an end, apõleia ( Luke ix. 25). It is not absolute nonentity, but absolute passivity in the powerlessness and misery of death, a cessation of the soul's personal and spiritual independence and power of activity, nothing being left but a life of dependent and powerless impulse and sensation, and that materialized as mere animal existence.2

We need not inquire what would be the use of a perpetuation of this impersonal residuum, nor what could be the eternal usefulness of these bacilli and vibrions of moral decomposition .

It is enough for our purpose to show that in Professor Beck's view the personality no longer exists. The personality is the ego, and it is with that alone that we are concerned. Therein we see the very image of God, a reflection of the divine ego. When that image is obliterated, whatever remainder may be left is beyond the range of our present inquiry, and it matters little to us whether it consists of destructible or indestructible elements .

We have been asked what we mean by annihilation. We answer : the gradual diminution of the faculties possessed by the individual ego, and the final extinction of that master faculty by which we take possession of the other faculties.³

Once more : without the conscient ego there is no immortality worthy of the name ; who can wish for a life without

1 On this distinction between soul and spirit see Chap. V., sect. i., and Chap. III . , sect. iii. , p. 86.

2 " Als Auflösung des seelisch-geistigen Verbandes ... In dieser Durchdringung des ganzen Seyns vom Tode geht die Persönlichkeit ( Luke ix. 25 )

im Sterben auf (apõleia) ; es ist nicht absolutes Nicht-seyn, aber absolute

Passivität in Todes-unmacht und Todes-jammer, ein Ausleben der geistig persönlichen Selbstständigkeit und Selbstbethätigungskraft der Seele, wobei ein unselbstständiges impotentes Trieb und Empfindungsleben fortdauert, aber materialisirt als blos animalisches Existenz. Matt. x. 28 ; xvi. 25, 26 ; Luke ix. 60 ; James v. 20 ; Heb. x. 39 ; Off. ( Rev.) xx. 14, 15 ; xxi. 8 ; xxii.

14, 15 ; xiv. 10, 11 ; Mark ix. 42, sq."-Umriss der biblischen Seelenlehre.

Stuttgardt, 1871 , Kap. I., § 15 .

3 See Chap. I. , sect. vii. ; Chap. III ., sect. iii . ; and Supplement No. III.

personality ? The perception of ourselves is that which raises us from the animal to the human sphere. The infant has not the perception of his personality, and it is only in adult age that it acquires distinctness.

In its nature precarious, it vanishes every day in the time of sleep ; it becomes perverted in dreams, in the hypnotic trance, in mental aberration, in drunkenness, in second childhood. Without the loss of reason it is possible for an individual to possess alternately the consciousness of two distinct identities apparently independent of each other.¹ If the ego, which has been thought to be essentially indivisible, can thus become twofold, and by that very fact be for a time eclipsed, there can be no great difficulty in admitting that it might also definitively disappear. That which has had a beginning may also have an end ; that which comes to an end may not begin again. Suppose that a human ego has deliberately involved himself in a state contrary to the conditions of his existence ; that he has both perverted and consumed himself in a persistent rebellion against God ; that the last effort of his expiring will has rejected the gracious offer of help ; in a word, that he has by degrees lost all moral and even biological reason for his existence : how, why should he arise out of that inconscient state into which he has plunged himself?

Is it conceivable that God will recall into rational existence one who has voluntarily thrown away his reason ? Is there to be found an argument in support of this hypothesis of a magical restoration ? We have not succeeded in finding one.

From the point of view of the moral sanction, the shipwreck of the personality might be considered as punishing the abuse of a conditional prerogative.

But let us now return to the admissions of theologians.

It has been said of Professor Nitzsch that " never was an exquisite delicacy of religious sentiment united to a judgement so solid and so sound. "

The following lines will show to how great an extent he, too, departed from the traditional theory.

He says :

The sinner invokes, provokes, and invites death. It is certain that

1 M. Azam. On the duplication of the personality in somnambulism.

Revue scientifique, 2 Aug., 1890. [ See also an article by F. W. H. Myers on Science and a Future Life in the Nineteenth Century for April, 1891, p. 636.] the question is not one of purely spiritual death, but of the fact that evil tends towards non- existence, to the violation and suppression of all life. The soul is dependent upon the Creator, it has not an absolute immortality.¹ It is certain that it has been created and constituted with a view to obtaining an eternal life ; but it loses the life that is personal to it in the measure in which it becomes a stranger to the truth, to love, and to salvation. It follows that with the progress of sin the soul advances towards the destruction that awaits it in hell ; in other terms, towards its death.

There is nothing in the Word of God, or in the conditions of the kingdom of God, to require the admission of the perpetual existence of the damned, the indestructibility of an individual incapable of becoming holy and happy.

The notion of annihilation is evident in the passage which represents death and hell as being cast into the lake burning with fire and brimstone. There, in fact, death and hell cease absolutely to exist .

Further, as the first death puts an end to the existence of the body, the analogy implies

• that the second death is the cessation of the existence of the soul.

Nitzsch concludes by setting forth a fourfold alternative :

Eternal damnation is an hypothesis that supposes either the absolute necessity of universal salvation, or an absolute nonentity, or, thirdly, an inconceivable existence in nonentity, or, lastly, an individual existence accompanied by a purely passive and privative sentiment of redemption and of the kingdom of God. Incapable of action, either right or wrong, the sinner would be nothing but a ruin.2

When the ruin is complete it puts an end to the existence of the ruined object.³

According to the celebrated commentator Delitzsch, the wicked who " return to Sheol " return very nearly to the state of passivity and inertia that is anterior to existence here below. Professor Twesten, who was a colleague of Nitzsch in the University of Berlin, admitted for the lost a state of suffering,

1 Tim. vi. 16 ; Eccl. xii. 7.

2 System der christlichen Lehre, 5th edition, §§ 121, 122, and 219. 3 This may serve as a reply to Professor J. A. Beet, who, in his articles on New Testament Teaching on the Future Punishment of Sin, in The

Expositor for 1890, insists strongly on this notion of dilapidation, which he places in opposition to that of destruction. The traditional dogma being dislodged from its old positions, tries to find a refuge in the midst of these " eternal ruins ."

Commentary on the Psalms, ix. 18, sq.

of internal corrosion, resulting in a sort of consumption, a dulness, and finally an annihilation of the personal consciousness . The punishment would become eternal through its definitive and irreparable character, but it would not at last cause any sensation.

Rothe, the famous dogmatician, Ritschl, and their followers have reached analogous conclusions ; the same may be said of a large number of Conditionalist theologians. Such is also the case of several representatives of traditional evangelism . Among the chief of these may be mentioned Professor F. Godet, who has paid special attention to the point in question.¹ The Roman Catholic clergy are unhappily in bondage under the heavy chain of tradition. All the more significant, therefore, is the avowal of a priest of the Oratory. It is Father

Gratry who says :

Since man does not exist by his own power, is not his own origin, has not in himself the source of his life, but, on the contrary, needs always to be sustained by God, if he should separate himself from his source, so as to have no source outside himself, it is clear that he must speedily be exhausted, must decrease and go down towards nonentity. Therein lies the whole question of life and death. 2

This conception is in such close conformity with the nature of things that it sometimes slips into the writings of those even who are opposed to it, as for example in the following passage from the last work of the late Frederic de Rougemont :

The spirit, seduced by the flesh through the allurement of sensuous enjoyments, vegetates in a deadly powerlessness, which would result in its death and annihilation if it were not indestructible.3

Does it not seem that this pretended indestructibility comes in at the end of the sentence like a deus ex machinâ in order to rescue the eminent author from the claims of logic ?

1 For quotations which leave no doubt as to the view of the venerable Neuchâtel theologian, see Chap. XI. , sectt. i. (at end), iv. ( § 2), and ix. 2 Connaissance de l'âme, vol. i., ch. 6. See also our Chap. I., p. 38, note 2 .

3 Un mystère de lapassion, p. 397.

§ 1. SPIRITUAL DEATH .

We are now about to penetrate the principal entrenchment of traditional exegesis. It opposes us with certain passages of the New Testament wherein death seems to mean a life, since those of whom it is predicated still exist, perceive, and act. This state has been called spiritual death. This death, which is treated as synonymous with perverted life, is the condition of impenitent sinners, and it is said that it may be prolonged to eternity. Eternal death, which is not a biblical phrase, would designate a perpetual life in endless sufferings . For example, the words of Paul to the Ephesians are quoted : " Ye were dead in your trespasses, "¹ and it is argued thus :

" The death of the unconverted Ephesians was a spiritual death ; that death had not destroyed them ; therefore the victims of spiritual death may live for an indefinite time. " To this we reply : Every death is the cessation of vital functions, every death kills . Spiritual death kills the spiritual life. When that life is extinguished, physical and psychical life may still exist, but only provisionally ; having no guarantee of immortality, the physical and psychical life will perish in their turn. Man without spiritual life is an incomplete being ; if sin destroys in him the aptitude to receive that life, man becomes a monstrous being, and nature teaches us that monstrosities are incapable of long life. Tortoises have been seen to move some time after their heads were cut off; but decapitation was certainly not for these reptiles an assurance of longevity. The palm-tree of which the top withers will surely die ; so, too, spiritual death, so far from excluding the complete death of the individual, is really its sinister prelude.

Spiritually dead, the Ephesians were on the way to absolute nonentity.2

1 Eph . ii. 1 , 5 ; Col. ii . 13. These texts, and others similar to them which we shall presently mention, were embarrassing to Olshausen and Nitzsch, who were otherwise very favourable towards Conditionalism.

We shall soon see that at the bottom of their latest scruples there was in reality only the subtile and tenacious à priori of inalienable immortality. To many a theologian habit has become a second nature.

2 As to the ontological consequences of spiritual death, see Chap. III. , sect. iii.

It is high time to renounce that traditional illusion which, by a fatal confusion of categories, makes life a synonym of happiness, and death synonymous with suffering. It will have to be admitted that these terms never lose their specific and ontological meaning. Everything allows, and even commands, that their fundamental notion should be left to these words . It will never be " absurd," nor " quasi disloyal," it will always and everywhere be reasonable, honest, and obligatory, to respect a rule of interpretation which is the basis and the very reason of the existence of evangelical Protestantism . What, in fact, is death ?1

In Scripture, as well as in ordinary language, death designates primarily and habitually the cessation of bodily life, and when it relates to inanimate existences their destruction .

This is its proper meaning.2

There are also figurative meanings of death, but these retain everywhere and always the fundamental notion of the proper meaning : they all imply the end of an action and a sensation'; if the word relates to a sentiment, the suppression of that sentiment ; if it relates to a habit, the suppression of that habit. In relation to human life there are, as it seems to us, six of these figurative uses, viz . :

1 Etymologically the French word mort is a branch from the Sanscrit root mrita, mri, to die ; Zend, maretan, mortal man ; English, to mar.—A contemporary thinker defines physical death as " The last degree of bodily weakness. "- " The second state of death, that of putrefaction, reduction to powder, is designated in the Celtic tongue moër, in Latin mors, mortis, in French mort, in Italian morte, in Spanish muerte ; Mars is the god who kills according to Mommsen. From mar the French has made marais, English marsh, German moor, morast, marschland. The moor is a boggy and unhealthy place. The Greeks called a swamp helos, from the Gallic noun hel, English hell. A swamp or marsh has always been looked upon as the abode of the death principle, the resort of hideous monsters, whose fetid breath poisons the whole surrounding region . Satan is the prince of the lower, infernal region. Hercules destroyed the hydra (hudōr) of the marsh of Lerna ; this poetic fiction recalls to the mind the benefits of drainage and hygienic works.-Mur, ripe, formerly meur : ripe abscess, ripe age ; in relation to fruits : arrived at the stage of pectic fermentation. Thus death, mort, means in fact putrefaction."

See Lenglet-Mortier, Nouvelles et veritables étymologies médicales, tirées du gaulois. The Dictionnaire de la conversation defines death as " The complete and definitive cessation of organic acts in animated beings."

2 Philip. ii . 27 ; James ii. 26. In speaking of things, to die is to cease to exist : a dying industry, the fire is dying out.

1. Spiritual death, of which we have already spoken.¹ 2. Proleptic death.2

3. Putative death.³

4. Death personified as a destructive power.4 5. Ethical or salutary death, synonymous with the annihilation of sin in the believer's heart.5

6. The second or definitive death, whereof the physical and spiritual deaths are only the forerunners.6

By spiritual death is meant the cessation of the functions of the spirit, the pneuma." This expression is somewhat hyperbolic. In fact, men spiritually dead are often referred to as having still a spark of divine life ; but this spark is so diminutive, so hidden under the ashes, so nearly extinct, that it is often treated as a quantity that may be neglected. Hence the expression of death for a state that is rather a lethargy, sometimes compared in Scripture to a heavy sleep.8

We will proceed to a further study of proleptic and putative death, because the texts that speak of these, not having been properly understood, have unhappily been invoked in support of this contradiction : a living death , or death a special manifestation of life.

§ 2. PROLEPTIC DEATH . In contrast with physical death, spiritual death might be called metaphorical.

It becomes proleptic when contrasted with the second and final death. By anticipation the sacred writers sometimes use the word death to designate progress towards death . In establishing this proleptic meaning we shall not turn aside from the historic principle of interpretation. It is suffi-

1 Matt. viii. 22 ; John v. 25 ; Rom. vi. 13 ; Eph. v. 14 ; 1 Tim. v. 6 ;

1 John iii. 14.

2 John v. 24 ; Rom. vii. 9, 10 ; Eph. ii. 1-5 ; Col. ii. 13 ; Rev. iii. 1, 2.

3 Luke xv. 24, 32.

4 Rom. v. 14, 17, 21 ; vi. 9 ; vii. 5 ; 1 Cor. xv. 54-56 ; Rev. xxi. 4. 5 Rom. vi . 2, 11 ; vii. 6 ; viii. 136 ; Gal. ii. 20 ; v. 24 ; vi. 14 ; Col. ii, 20 ; iii. 3, 5 ; 1 Peter ii. 24. To this ethical death may be joined the death towards legalism of Rom. vii. 4, 6 ; Gal. ii. 19 ; v. 18.

6 Matt. x. 28 ; Rom. i. 32 ; vi. 16, 21, 23 ; vii. 5 ; viii. 13a ; James i. 15 ; v. 20 ; 1 John v. 16, 17 ; Rev. ii. 11 ; xx, 6, 14 ; xxi. 8,

7 See Chap. V., sect. i. 8 " Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from among the dead," Eph. v. 14 ; cf. I Thess. v. 6.

cient to open a grammar, or a manual of practical lexicology, otherwise called a dictionary ; that of Littré, for example, where we read : " He is dead, sometimes has the force of the future, he will die :"

If in Aulis my daughter but once sets her foot

She is dead

This simple remark will be the key that will open doors of which the traditional interpretation seems to us to have forced the locks. By anticipation or prolepsis the fruit is seen in the flower, and that is looked upon as already accomplished which is about to be performed, is in the course of execution, or is merely probable. Thus it may be said, for example : “ He is a dead man, " for : " He is, or appears to be, in mortal danger ; " " Do not stir, or you are a dead man ! " instead of, “ You will immediately die. " In Genesis, God, appearing to Abimelech, says to him : " Thou art but a dead man ; " literally, " Thou , dead ! " Yet Abimelech survives. So, too, Isaiah, speaking to

1 Si ma fille une fois met le pied dans l'Aulide

Elle est morte.

Racine, Iphigénie, Act I., scene I.

2 See Winer's Grammaire du Nouveau Testament, sect. xl., and Bescherelle's Grammaire, No. 544. It is by prolepsis that one of La Fontaine's personages of an optimist disposition speaks in the past of that which he desires to possess :

It was, when I had it, of size reasonable. This figure of speech is frequent in the Bible : John xvi. 21, " a man " for the child " born into the world " ; xvii. 4, Jesus declares that he has " finished the work " of which a most important portion remained to be accomplished. He adds : " I am no more in the world had not yet quitted his disciples.

the notion of time vanishes.

I was with them," at a time when he

In the ecstasy of prayer eternity begins,

I John iii. 9 : " He that is born of God sinneth not," a prolepsis of thought, virtual holiness ; cf. I John i. 8, 10 .

See also in the original Matt. xvii. II ; xxvi. 2 ; xxviii. 18, 20 ; John xiv. 3 ; xvi. 10 ; 2 Tim. i. 10 ; 1 Cor. xv. 54, etc.

In commercial transactions there is an implied prolepsis in the drafts with which, before being turned into cash, debts are discharged.

A prolepsis is also to be found at the heart of the controversy as to the relative value of faith and works, as to imputed and infused righteousness : " God calleth the things that are not as though they were." Faith implies the works of which it is the germ. Faith is like the direction taken in pursuit of an object. The march is indispensable, but it occupies the inferior position of a mere mechanism, as compared to the direction which implies knowledge and will. The two theories of salvation by that which we do and by that which we believe are reconciled and united in the idea of salvation by that which we become.

Hezekiah, says : " Thou shalt die ;" literally, " Thou , dead ! "

Yet Hezekiah was to have time to set his house in order, and, in fact, he had still fifteen years to live.¹

Death , indeed, always designates a destruction ; but it is important to distinguish between partial and complete death, death in progress and death at its term, death at work and death finished, death latent and death patent, between virtual and actual death. It has been said that we are dying all through life, that a preacher is a dying man speaking to dying men. Death may mean a slow or sudden disappearance of life, the time during which a person is dying, or a certain mode of dying. Sometimes it is an agent, sometimes a result. The death of plants and animals is generally gradual ; analogy would lead to the supposition that the death of souls is also gradual.

The sinner leads a dying life, ending in the second death, which is complete and definitive.2

1 Gen. xx. 3 ; Isa. xxxviii. 1. 1. 24 ; and Hos. xiii. 1.

See also in the Hebrew Gen. xxiv. 13 ;

2 " To die is sometimes synonymous with to cease gradually;" Littré, seventeenth use of the word mourir. In Latin this twofold meaning would be clearly expressed by the phrases mors moriens and mors mortua, mors hrocessus and mors eventus, the march towards a destination, and the final halt there. In his recent Manual of Dogmatics (p. 549), M. E. Arnaud identifies spiritual death, eternal perdition, the separation of the soul from God, and the second death. Like M. Geo. Godet, he forgets that the second death takes place only after the last judgement, when the rejected are to be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, a symbol of final annihilation. Rev. xx. 6, 14 ; xxi. 8.

As we have seen, if the death of the soul were that which is asserted, the second death would be found identical with the first, which it would only perpetuate. But it is said that the rejected will be " cast into the lake of fire," which " is the second death " ( Rev. xx. 14, 15). That which is already there needs not to be cast in. From our point of view, the image is quite plain : physical death having taken place, a final and terrible chastisement will put an end to the dying life of the obstinate sinner. The two deaths are not identical, but they have a common character which our opponents are not able to indicate. There is nothing to prevent the second death being for the soul just that which the first death is for the body, namely, the end of action and sensation .

The confusion of M. Arnaud's statements is in contradiction not only with the texts in the Revelation, but also with many categorical declarations of both the Old and the New Testament. According to the Scripture, moral separation from God constitutes not death, but sin. Isaiah says, " Your iniquities have separated between you and your God." " If ye live after the flesh, ye must die " ; " Sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death " ; " There

From this point of view let us return to some of the passages that are brought forward as designating a spiritual death, and let us see whether they do not rather speak of creatures that are on the way towards death.¹ The Ephesians before their conversion were on the way towards eternal death ; they were virtually dead, moribund. Their activity was all morbid ; they were in the way of perdition, lost, and, as it were, already dead .

Paul indicates the end to which sin would have fatally led his readers if they had not received the Gospel. Meyer says : " The expression is proleptic, and ought to be taken in its natural sense ; the death will become complete in the world to come. "2 In Germany the name of Meyer carries considerable weight, especially in relation to Paul's epistles . Our interpretation is further supported by the following considerations :

In the same passage there is another case of prolepsis, forming a kind of pendant to this, representing the same men as already raised up with Christ and sitting with him in heaven.

" God raised us up with Christ and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places . " " A magnificent anticipation,"

• is a sin unto death ;" these are the statements of Paul, James, and John. To sin is to die ; it is not yet to be dead. Sinners are dying men, not corpses . Sin leads to death ; it is mortal ; it is not death itself. Death is the wages of sin ; the wages are paid after the service. We should observe and respect the distinctions that are made as by a common accord by the Bible, nature, and reason .- See Isa. lix. 2 ; Rom. vi. 21 , 23 ; vii. 5 ; viii . 13 ; Phil. iii . 19 ;

James i . 15 ; 1 John v. 16, 17 ; and 2 Cor. iv. 3, “ The Gospel is veiled in them that are perishing," not in them that have perished.

1 In truth, metaphorical death and proleptic death seem sometimes to be confounded. At bottom they are both nearly related to hyperbole, and that is the reason why it is possible to recover from death of those kinds. The essential point is to remember that no kind of death has power to immortalize any person or thing ; and secondly, that so far from immortalizing, every death suppresses, or is held to suppress, provisionally or definitively, one or more kinds of activity. In order to live for ever, it is not sufficient to die spiritually.

2 Proleptisch so gut wie todt gewesen. So, too, Cremer in his Lexicon at the words thanatos and nekros. Cf. Rom. vii. 9 ; viii. 10 : “ The body is dead because of sin." Physical death is looked upon as an acquired fact. The body is mortal (vi. 12) ; it must die ; it is virtually dead. " The body is adjudged and devoted to death."-Bengel. " Under the power of death."-Alford. " Mortal, and will certainly die."-- Cobbin. Hyperbolice et per prolepsin quasi jam mortuum. -Grimm, Clavis Novi Testamenti.

" Irrevocably doomed to death."-Professor Fred. Godet.

writes M. Louis Bonnet ; " a taking possession of the heavenly glory by those whom Christ has redeemed, who are still living and striving upon earth ! "1 None the less does the apostle declare to be heretics those who affirmed that the real resurrection had already taken place. He writes elsewhere : " Those whom God justified, them he also glorified." But according to the same epistle : " We rejoice in hope of glory. " To the

Colossians the apostle says : " For ye died," that is to say, ye have broken with evil ; and he adds :

Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth ; or, in other words, the sin which still lives .

“ I was alive apart from the law once, but when the commandment came sin revived, and I died . "

Placed in presence of a law which I did not succeed in fulfilling, I recognized my guilt. I saw myself condemned and lost. Paul uses an expression similar to that of Isaiah when he saw the Lord : " Woe is me, for I am undone ! " 5

We may also quote from the Second Epistle to Timothy (i. 10) this declaration :

" Christ abolished death," while according to the First Epistle to the Corinthians (xv. 26) : " the last enemy that shall be abolished is death. " In the former passage the apostle treats a future triumph as though already attained.

The angel of the Church in Sardis is said to be " dead " ; the commentary quickly follows : " Stablish the things that remain that are ready to die. "7

Another apparently decisive proof : Jesus sometimes calls " sick " those whom he elsewhere calls " dead "; and Paul

1 Le Nouveau Testament avec notes explicatives, 1852, in loco. 2 2 Tim. ii. 18.

3 Col. iii . 3, 5.

4 Rom . vii. 9, 10. " I received a mortal blow ;" " I saw myself a dead man. "- Fausset. " The passage of sin from the latent state to the state of an active force was for Paul a mortal blow."-Professor F. Godet, Commentaire, vol. ii., p. 106.

5 Isa. vi. 5, nidmeti, it is all over with me ; I perish.

6 So, too, believers are then and there saved (Eph. ii. 8), and elsewhere they are exhorted to work out their salvation (Phil. ii. 12 ; cf. Heb. ix. 28).

In 1 Cor. ii. 6, " The princes of this world are coming to nought."

1 Cor. xv. 27 ; cf. 25.

7 Rev. iii. 2.

$ Matt. viii. 22 ; ix. 12 ; Mark ii. 17 ; Luke v. 31 ; John viii. 24.

See, too,

speaks of them not indeed as " dead" but as " them that are perishing, " or as " without strength. " 1 " He that believeth," says Jesus, " hath passed out of death into life. " Here, again, the meaning may be regarded as proleptic. He who by faith is united to Jesus passes at once from a dying state, from a beginning of death to a beginning of new life, or, as Professor F. Godet has put it, " from the sphere of death into that of life. " There is, then, in this passage nothing that requires us to banish from it the ontological notion of life. Jesus speaks of the true life that endures ; the dying life of the unconverted sinner is in his view only an anticipated death. The believer, on the contrary, while awaiting the resurrection of his body, receives within himself the principle of an endless life .

" The mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the spirit is life, " says the apostle.

The prolepsis is evident. As Professor F. Godet says : " The end is on one side death, on the other side life." M. Stapfer translates : " Leads to death to life."

In these passages there is nothing to hinder us. The same may be said of the threatening addressed to Adam with reference to the forbidden fruit : " In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die " (Gen. ii. 17). In fact, Adam did not entirely die in the day of his disobedience. Unless we admit that it was an empty threat, we must have recourse to

1 Apollumenoi, 1 Cor. i. 18 ; 2 Cor. ii. 15 ; iv. 3 ; 2 Thess. ii. 10. Asthencis,

Rom. v. 6.

2 John v. 24 ; cf. vi. 50, 51 .

3 As we have previously shown, the terms " life" and "death" never lose their ontological meaning.

For example, in this passage, " The Son giveth life to whom he will " (John v. 21). M. Geo. Godet objects, exclaiming : "What !

give the life of sense and volition to people who already have it ! What can be the meaning of such a saying ?” (Chrét. évang., 1882, p. 506). We reply that to substitute an eternal life for one that is dying, to engraft a new life, is to give life. Jesus elsewhere calls himself the bread that gives life ; to whom does he give that ? Surely to those who already have life. The assimilation of the bread implies an already existing life, but to maintain, to perpetuate it, is not that one way of giving it ? Besides, the sinner's life is not only precarious ; it is incomplete, meagre.

That which Jesus confers is normal, full, harmonious, abundant (John x. 10). It is none the less essentially and primarily always a prolongation of existence.

4 Rom. viii . 6.

the proleptic interpretation. When he sinned the first man received a mortal stroke. Physical death, which was its consequence later on, would eventually be followed by an absolute death.¹ Even if, with Julius Müller, we take the day of disobedience to mean an epoch including the whole time of Adam's survival, the death will still have the same fundamental meaning. That continued life, even though prolonged beyond the tomb, would end in the cessation of all life. reason to suppose the life to be interminable.2

There is no

§ 3. PUTATIVE DEATH .

This is the presumed death of the prodigal son, who has long been supposed lost and defunct ; not having sent any news of himself, he had passed for dead. Here, again, the fundamental notion remains, since from the subjective point of view of the father who speaks, the absent one had ceased to live.

A similar remark applies to the sheep that had wandered, which the shepherd might easily suppose altogether lost. So, too, the value of the piece of silver in the other parable in the same chapter did not exist for the proprietor so long as the coin was not recovered.5

In fact, it would be the value of the coin, and not the mere piece of metal, that the poor woman would care about.

In all this there is nothing to invalidate our definition of death.6

7 See Auberlen, Le Prophète Daniel, translation by H. de Rougemont, p. 160, sq.

2 This interpretation of the word " day " has in its favour the fact that the adverbial expression rega', berega', or keregd, would have been much more suitable to indicate an instantaneous death. Num. xvi. 21 ; Job xxi. 13 ; xxxiv. 20 ; Ps. vi. 10 [ 11 ], etc.

3 Luke xv. 24, 32.

4 Luke xv. 3-6. Cf. I Sam. ix. 3, 4, 20. " The sheep lost to the shepherd."

Cremer's Lexicon at the word apollumi.

5 Luke xv. 8, sq.

6 Dr. R. F. Weymouth has made an examination of classic literature similar to that with which we have been occupied in respect of the New Testament. In view of an attempt to attenuate the meaning of the verb apollumi, which was said not always to signify destroy, but only to remove certain attributes of a being, Dr. Weymouth has carefully reviewed the texts quoted to prove it. By his kind permission we reproduce in Supplement No. XIV.

the results of his inquiry.

§ 4. EVERYWHERE AND ALWAYS DEATH MEANS THE CESSATION

OF AN ACTIVITY .

To sum up, it is our right and our duty to maintain everywhere and always the historical and grammatical meaning. Interpreted in accordance with this principle, the New

Testament as a whole teaches us that death is at its work in every one of us. The body is first to succumb, the soul surviving ; but the soul being deeply tainted, sick unto death, will not survive for an indefinite period. Left to itself, it advances by a slow and painful process towards a final destruction which will be the second death , complete, absolute death, the end of the whole individual .

The definition which explains death as " life under a different aspect "

is first obscure and then inexact.

There is not merely difference, but radical opposition between life and death . And such a definition is not in harmony with the texts. On the other hand, we affirm, after having put it to the proof, that the biological meaning is not merely admissible, but is required in every Scripture passage in which the terms occur that have been the subject of our study. It is a skein which is easily unwound when begun at the right end of the thread. The confusion resulted from a preconceived idea which perverted the natural meaning of the words.³

Nevertheless, it is not enough to set free the biblical doctrine from the accretion of ages ; it is needful to penetrate its deep meaning, and to justify it from a moral and rational point of view, otherwise it would be no more than a sterile formula. Arisen out of its tomb, it demands its due place in the preaching of the Gospel ; but it is treated as a stranger, it is said to

1 Chrétien évangélique, 1881, p. 22, and 1882, p. 559. 2 The apostle exhorts to " make dead " or " mortify " sin under its various forms ( Col. iii. 5, etc.). Is it possible that this death of sin can admit of its revival under a different form ?

I Thess. iii. 8 has been quoted against us : " Now we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord ;" and we are asked, " To live, is it not here to rejoice ?" Be it so, but let us take the contrary idea, which would be a mortal sorrow.

The ontological idea remains latent. See, too, Chap. XI., sect. iv , § 2.

interfere with the harmony of revealed truths, and to be contrary to the analogy of the faith.

In its defence we shall show that its claims, based upon exegesis and history, are ratified by conscience, by reason, and by experience, and that the charges brought against it are really applicable to the usurping dogma that has supplanted it.1

FIRST

CHARGE .

It is said that by mitigating the penalty the doctrine of Conditional Immortality would " diminish the fault in the eyes of many.

Annihilation is not so much a penalty as a favour for the wicked ; the frequency of suicide is the evident proof of this . Those who kill themselves hope for nonentity. To preach annihilation would be likely to benumb consciences . The new dogma might produce baneful effects . Care should be taken lest, in attempting to dissipate the mystery, we

• should at the same time get rid of that salutary fear which is produced in our minds by the unknown much more readily than by evil which is foreseen . " 2

We remark, to begin with, that this last assertion is diametrically opposed to the experience acquired in the administration of penal justice. There was a time when in England sheep-stealing involved hanging as its legal consequence, but the penalty was very rarely applied. Witnesses were not to be found, and juries would not convict. The severity of the law overshot the mark ; it introduced uncertainty, " the unknown," into the case. Sheep- stealers became all the more confident. At that time they swarmed ; they have nearly disappeared since the penalty has been reduced.

It has been recognized that it is not so much the extreme severity of the threatened punishment as the certainty of its execution that imposes a respect for the law. Now, it is a fact

1 We have not succeeded in separating dogmatics from morals. We console ourselves, like M. Charles Bois, with the thought that the distinction is not obligatory ; Calvin, Sartorius, Nitzsch, Rothe, Vinet, and other great theologians have not made it. Martensen admits that the contents of the two sciences are the same,

2 Chrét. évang., 1881 , pp. 59, 70, sq., passim.

that such a certainty does not exist in respect of eternal torments .

No one believes in them without some reserve .

They are like those bars that are fixed too high, so that the horses pass under instead of leaping over them. M. Bost , senior, compared them to an elastic band " which stretches to a certain extent and then breaks and recoils ; " when faith is in question the recoil is unbelief.

To threaten with eternal torments is to use the rusty weapons of a former age ; their proper place is the museum of the history of dogmas. In its contact with paganism, traditional theology has received an impress of barbarism ; it will do well to follow the incontestable progress of human jurisprudence.

" At heart, without being conscious of it, those who preach eternal torments do not really believe in them," said the eminent pastor, A.

Rochat.

" Saurin preached them,”

observed one who was present. Rochat's reply was : “ Saurin did not really believe in them ; when anyone believes in them he confines his statements to our Saviour's own words as to judgement to come, and he trembles . "¹

One of our honoured opponents has acknowledged that the revival of the doctrine that we are defending is a reaction against the enervation of the traditional teaching : " On one hand the present-day advance of immorality, on the other hand a certain enfeeblement of preaching, have led to a study of the means by which Christianity may recover its moralizing influence and activity, which are on the decline." 2

It is this moral side of the doctrine of attainable immortality that has won the adhesion of one of the most illustrious English preachers. Dr. R. W. Dale says : " There is a general avoidance of the appalling revelations of the New Testament conconcerning ' the wrath to come .'

The appeal to fear is

But the menaces of Christ mean being silently dropped something. The appeal to fear had a considerable place in

1 This declaration has come to us from a venerable witness who was present and heard it. We presume that Rochat meant to say that the dogma in question would not bear examination. In order to admit it, an implicit faith is needed in mysterious words of which it is not sought to discover the true meaning.

3 H. Berguer. Article Conditionnalisme in the supplement of the Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses.

his preaching ; it cannot be safe, it cannot be right, to suppress it in ours."1

Seeing that eternal torments are no longer preached, and that there is nothing put in their place, the sinner may take what he thinks an advantage of this doctrinal uncertainty ; he will say : " In the condition of suspense in which I am left, I see nothing that is undoubted except the divine mercy. The tacit consent of our spiritual leaders allows me to hope that after a period of trial the heavenly Father will bring about a complete and general amnesty. Let us then eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ; or if we survive, as we are assured, there will be no lack of time in which to solicit a pardon which God's goodness could not help granting. If there be a morrow after death, that morrow may take care of itself. What matters the time of the return of a prodigal son ? The longer his absence lasts, the deeper and more lively will be the Father's joy when he sees him return."

Thus it is seen that the combined dogmas of compulsory immortality and God's eternal mercy provide the most favourable pillow for the sinner's sleep.

It is high time for the traditional doctrine to be opposed by the biblical dogma of the immortality of the righteous and the gradual annihilation of the wicked . We are told that annihilation is too mild a penalty, one not likely to inspire a salutary terror. We would ask in reply, Is the death penalty too mild ? does it not inspire any terror ? On the contrary, it is because it appeared to them too severe, too frightful, that Victor Hugo, in " The Last Day of a Condemned Convict," and other philanthropists, have demanded the suppression of capital punishment. The death penalty has always been looked upon by legislators as the most terrible of sanctions, and it is very rarely that a convict fails to plead for a commutation of the

1 See in Supplement No. II. the preface to The Strugglefor EternalLife. For some years we inhabited a village in which there was a very zealous pastor. Most of his evangelical colleagues of the Canton of Geneva have at one time or another occupied his pulpit. Neither the pastor nor his colleagues have ever to our knowledge preached eternal torments. Hell, in the traditional sense, has probably not been once mentioned. One of our honoured opponents, when he preached in that same church, did not care to expound, still less to defend, the dogma in question.

2 See H. Freuler, Rapport de la majorité de la Commission du Conseil des Etats on the subject of capital punishment, p. 66 : Berne, 1879.

death sentence to one of perpetual penal servitude. Death looked in the face makes the bravest turn pale. How, then, will it be with annihilation, that aggravated capital punishment, that second death without a ray of hope to soften its long and terrible agony ? If there is a truth that is commonplace, it is that of all instincts self-preservation is the strongest, the most persistent, the most indestructible. Stifle it, it speedily revives ; witness so many unfortunates who, after having plunged into the river, strive earnestly by swimming to regain the bank.

Rather suffer than die Is the motto of men.1

But it is objected that in capital punishment that which strikes terror is not so much death as the fear of a mysterious unknown. The objectors may be reminded that an element of the unknown forms part of the prospect of gradual extermination, and that this doctrine has the right to claim for itself all that is really efficacious in the teaching that we oppose. We do not teach an immediate annihilation when this life is over ; final extinction does not constitute the whole of the penalty.

But is it, therefore, not a penalty ? If it is considered that self- preservation is the most imperious of all instincts, it will be seen that of all morally admissible penalties the final deprivation of existence is the most dreadful .

Shall we be told of a suicide committed with a light heart on account of a mere thirst for nonentity ? In order to provoke a voluntary death, there must be extreme suffering, a deluge of troubles. Moreover, a suicide is always accompanied by remorse and bitter regrets. The fear of death and the love of life are the strongest motives in the world. In our days, as in the time of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the fear of death holds many in hard bondage.

are free from its shackles.

1 La Fontaine.

There are but few who

Against this desire of existence

Fable of Death and the Woodman.

The condition is understood that the suffering be not at the same time excessive and unending.

The French words are :

Plutôt souffrir que mourir,

C'est la devise des hommes.

2 Heb. ii. 15. 3 Look at Prado, a criminal executed at Paris the 28th Dec., 1888. His attitude is most insolent. He repulses with disdain the prison chaplain, " will be shattered that materialist doctrine called nihilism , a senseless philosophy which the German speculations of Schopenhauer and Hartmann will never enable sound reason to accept. "1

In the depths of the heart of those who commit suicide there is always the vague hope of obtaining mercy.

It is privation of happiness, not existence itself, that is insupportable. The man who kills himself wishes a happy life; if his suffering were removed he would eagerly plunge into the joys of life. The act of suicide repudiates only an accidental mode of life, not life itself.2

An unfortunate is about to plunge into the river, believing that her lover has betrayed her ; prove to her that he is willing to marry her, she will at once recover a passionate desire for life.

To the insolvent banker who is about to shoot himself, hand over a sufficient sum of money : he will forthwith throw aside his murderous weapon .

Death is terrible ; the second death will be doubly so. Only exhibit it as it is, logical, natural, certain, imminent, irremediable, painful, infamous ; exhibit it with its anguish, its disruption, its terrors, as the loss of all good, the accumulation and climax of all evils ; some very strong minds may perhaps make a mock of it all, but their bravado will hardly conceal the trouble that actually fills their soul. A legitimate emotion will spread through your audience. " The thought of sufferings that will end only with existence, a thought attainable although terrible, is very much more efficacious than one that loses its power, either because it brings about its own prompt rejection or because it is simply incomprehensible. ”

Carelessness in relation to death may pass for a natural instinct among the sleepy and dreamy Orientals, but it makes our nature shudder as would a monstrosity. " Everything that is most calculated to persaying : " I do not believe in the existence of a God who has not cared to deliver me. " But in presence of the guillotine his face became frightfully pale. " The livid hue of his features at that moment could not be depicted."

1 G. A. Hoff, Journal du protestantismefrançais, 31st Jan., 1880. 2 E. Caro, Le Pessimisme au dix-neuvième siècle, p. 229 ; Paris, 1880. 3 Ami Bost, op. cit., p. 30. As to the fearful fate of the impenitent, as set forth in the Gospel, see a letter of Rev. Edward White in the Christian

World of 12th Feb. , 1891 .

suade that death is not an evil has been written yet I doubt whether any sensible person ever believed it, and the trouble taken in order to persuade others as well as the writers themselves of it shows Every man who can see death plainly that it is no easy enterprise. as it is finds it a terrible thing." That is the truth. I am more grateful to La Rochefoucauld for this loose and careless expression of a sentiment so natural than for all the brilliant polish and conciseness of his most celebrated paradoxes. Apart from faith in the individual immortality of souls,¹ every really living man who says that he is not terrified by the idea of death either lies or deceives himself; so, too, do those writers lie or deceive themselves who pretend to have no care as to their future life.2

There are cases of mental derangement ; there are also cases of moral derangement ; there are sons of perdition whom the eloquence of Jesus himself will not save ; there are “ seared consciences, " souls corrupted to such an extent that in them the instinct of self-preservation itself succumbs in the ruin of all their faculties.

There is no doctrine that can be in itself a restraint all-powerful to prevent such abuses of human liberty. Jesus Christ teaches us that it is in man's power to " destroy himself. " It is worthy of God's character to abstain from imposing his benefits ; beneficium invito non datur. God will not force an unending life upon beings who reject the normal conditions of existence. He leaves to man the possibility of suicide, which he punishes not with eternal torments, but with the second death ; as the apostle says : " Your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and if any man destroyeth the temple of God, him shall God destroy. "4

Those who have hitherto committed suicide have not heard of an attainable immortality, which as yet is unhappily but little known ; they have been brought up in the hereditary

1 " In our day it is no longer possible to conceive of immortality except as happy, or as expiatory with happiness in prospect, and therefore not terrible. The idea of an eternity of sufferings is too repugnant to reason and to the modern conscience for the imagination to continue to be terrified thereby, as in the middle ages. All the terror is now in the idea of nonentity."--

P. Stapfer.

2 Paul Stapfer, De l'amour de la gloire et du désintéressement littéraire Bibliothèque universelle, 1890, p. 564. 3 Heauton apolesas. Luke ix. 25.

4 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17 ; vi. 19.

belief, and that has not prevented them from causing their own death .

Exaggeration has rather tended to lull conscience to sleep. The Conditionalist on his part unreservedly believes in Christ's threatenings, because for him they have not the false and excessive character that is assigned to them by the traditional interpretation. Himself a candidate for immortality, an heir presumptive of the crown of life, he will not by suicide plunge himself through a dismal period of weeping and gnashing of teeth into the fearful abyss of eternal death .

Our opponents would probably be considerably embarrassed if we were to ask them where and when our point of view has exerted a baneful influence ; can they bring forward any examples that justify their fears ?

Too often the fact stated in the following remark of one of our predecessors is overlooked ; we reproduce his words in order, if possible, to dispel all misunderstanding :

Wehave never said that the fate of the wicked would be only to die for ever, A chastisement may end in death after having begun with strokes causing weeping and gnashing of teeth. So it was, too, with the martyrs, who were made to endure frightful sufferings and were afterwards burnt. The punishment will not consist only in death, nor only in strokes and sufferings ; and that is why the Lord did not say, " These shall go away to eternal death," nor, " These shall go away to eternal torments, " seeing that the punishment consists in strokes, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and then death.1

In other terms, final extinction does not by any means exclude the sinister train of woes by which it is preceded. The two notions are combined in the expression " death-agony." The lay writer just quoted added by way of conclusion :

Are you still really convinced that the torments of the lost will be eternal ? If you are no longer fully convinced of it, teach it no more without loyally announcing that it is contestable.

Ah ! if you will but rather declare to the man who has not the happiness of believing, that if he is not converted that which will be eternal for him will not be torments, but the second death, after strokes, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, according to the just measure of him who

1 Fin des méchants d'après la Bible. Pamphlet in 8vo. The author was the late advocate, Frank Burnier.

Lausanne [1866] .

will judge in all righteousness and equity, you will see that such a man will listen, he will become serious, thoughtful, will hang his head and answer nothing, for, in fact, there is no answer.

And why should this not be to the full glory of God, who speaks of a thousand generations when it is a question of mercy, and only of three or four when it is a question of punishment ?

If rightly considered, the penalty of final extermination is so grave, so distressing, so dreadful, so dismal, that it has sometimes been thought too severe.

In order to the acceptance of its rigour the following four considerations may be urged : First, it is just ; second, it is categorically taught in the Scripture ; third, it is in conformity with the laws of nature ; fourth, it is compatible with the notion of the divine goodness.

This last characteristic will enable us to meet a second charge that has been brought against our conception of future chastisement.

SECOND

By a contradiction difficult to understand, M. George Godet speaks of the penalty as " brutal," which he has only just treated as too mild. He says : " It is the solution of an impotence that crushes those whom it cannot persuade ... a useless cruelty, an act of vengeance.... Suffering which results only in nonentity is without purpose ; it appears cruel because useless . " 2

We may say that by this rule it would be necessary to charge with cruelty all the benefits that God bestows upon the wicked, for their wickedness renders these gifts useless, and even baneful. In our view suffering is a benefit, the supreme remedy of the heavenly physician ; a remedy that is bitter, but worthy of the divine wisdom, which undoubtedly adapts it to our needs. In the gradual extinction of the guilty soul there is neither constraint nor brutality ; there is only the Creator's respect for

1 Such was the sentiment expressed by the natural philosopher, H. B. de Saussure in his lectures on metaphysics : Forsan dicunt : Annihilatio malis foret sufficiens poena. Respondemus hanc esse nimis magnam. We owe this unpublished quotation to the kindness of Professor Ernest Naville.

2 Chrét. évang., 1881, pp. 58, 60, 64.

his creature's liberty, with a door remaining constantly open to repentance and healing so long as the sinner does not close it with his own hand. The sinner destroys himself, according to the Scripture ;¹ he spontaneously makes himself the blind executor of the chastisement that he suffers.

In the ruin of

Jerusalem, for example, and in order to chastise that greatest of crimes, the murder of his only Son, God does not directly intervene, but he leaves to itself the cherished nation which in misguided folly rejects its Saviour and rushes on to be shattered against the Roman colossus.

The useful purpose assigned by M. Geo. Godet to eternal sufferings , viz., the salutary terror which they might inspire in those creatures who should witness them, is equally attained without interminable sufferings in the doctrine that we are defending. The remembrance of the terrible end of the wicked will remain as a perpetual menace for free beings who might be tempted to rebel against God.

The " useless cruelty " is then only in the hypothesis of endless torments which he who inflicts them knows certainly and declares will never result in the conversion and salvation of the victims .

It is morally reasonable that there should be retribution beyond the tomb, that the test, which here is sometimes suddenly interrupted, should be completed, and that the free agent who persists in evil-doing, and rejects the last appeals of divine compassion, should in the end perish miserably and definitively. It would, on the other hand, be unreasonable and shocking to imagine a revolt as eternal as God himself and torments prolonged for ever.

M. Geo. Godet tries to defend what he calls the mystery, which we prefer to call the fiction, of eternal sufferings by invoking the " equally insoluble " problem of the apparent injustices which shock us here below. We say that this is not " equally insoluble, " for by our opponent's own admission the injustices of this life may be adjusted hereafter. He says : " There will be infinite compensations in another life," but on the hypo-

1 Psa. vii. 15, 16 ; xxxiv. 21 ; xciv. 23 ; Prov. viii. 36 ; xiii. 6 ; Isa . ix. 17, sq. ,; Jer. ii. 19. But there is nothing to prevent us from supposing the possibility of salvation so long as there is conscient suffering.

thesis of unspeakable suffering, beginning immediately after death and never coming to an end , there can be no compensation .

The two cases are not alike .

As it was said by Clement of Alexandria, " The divine goodness prevails even in chastisement. " It is with a view to the sinner's salvation that God inflicts suffering ; it is also in mercy that he causes that suffering to result in death when it becomes useless as a warning. The wicked man himself is thus the object of the heavenly Father's compassion even to the end of his existence ; and thus are fully justified the Scripture declarations : " The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works .

He will not keep his anger for ever.

The Lord is gracious in all his works. "1

The divine love penetrates, even to its lowest depths, a domain from which that love had been too long banished by traditional dogmatics and popular belief.2

Terrible will be the penalty of the obstinately wicked ; every sensible man will tremble at the prospect of such a lamentable fate ; yet although it is verily dreadful, there is nothing in it incompatible with the notion of the divine goodness . The most perverse and corrupt of men will at last be, as the Scripture expresses it, " as though they had never been. " Lacking the good news of the Gospel, five hundred millions of Orientals make this final extinction the goal of their most strenuous efforts ; they desire it, indeed, because they have not, like the Christian, the notion of an existence free from sin and pain ; and this extinction is desirable only in a condition of hopeless misery. We may well admire the bounty of the true God, whose supreme chastisement, following the longsufferings which are the last appeals of fatherly solicitude, inflicts upon his most guilty creatures a destiny which is the very ideal imagined by the principal heathen religions. Their paradise does not rise above the lowest depths of the Christian hell.

The Nirvana, which to the Buddhist seems the chief good, is

1 Psa. ciii . 9 ; cxxxvi . ; cxlv. 9, 17 ; Micah vii. 18.

2 One day we asked a traditionalist theologian whether the divine love had any place in hell. He replied : " No place at all." It would follow that God, who is love, would not be everywhere present ! Does not this frank avowal, which ends in a contradiction, plainly indicate the falsity of the ecclesiastical dogma ?

but the last of evils in the revealed religion. And God in his mercy confers this benefit upon those who have obstinately refused to accept from him a higher boon.¹ The Gospel is thus superior to the pessimist religions and philosophies by the whole height of heaven and of the joyful immortality promised to the disciples of Jesus Christ.2

Future punishment remains severe without ever ceasing to be merciful. The suffering which accompanies it is fearful, but so long as it lasts it is an appeal to repentance, and therefore an occasion for hope, the indication of a possible salvation. At last it vanishes, when the moral perversion becomes irremediable.

Then the reason for the suffering disappears. To assert its continuance with a merely vindictive purpose would be to slander the God of the Gospel, by attributing to him a malignity worse than that of the Etruscan or Mexican divinities .

But it is not so ; unconsciousness will put an end to the existence of the incorrigible individual, and the suppression of that focus of infection will be a benefit for the moral universe. By the operation of pre-established laws the senseless suicide of which the wicked man is guilty will definitively rid the world of an element of disorder .

Together with all the best motives of action at the disposal of traditional Christianity, the doctrine of Conditional Immortality possesses resources which are superior. Life in Christ, the love of that which is good, beautiful, true, the eternal delights of communion with God and with his saints, the splendour of heaven, the pains of hell so far as they may be conceived of without offence to the supreme love, all these chords are made to vibrate by the Gospel, rightly understood ; it banishes the false notes, and replaces them by new harmonies.

The Conditionalist Christian sitting by the bedside of a

1 Rev. S. Cox, D.D.

Quoted from his article in Good Words in a letter by Rev. S. Minton, M.A., reprinted from the Christian World in a pamphlet entitled Life and Death ; London : Elliot Stock, 1877 ; p. 77.

2 Compared with the blessedness promised in the Gospel, extermination is a terrible fate, and the way that leads to it is fearful too ; yet final nonentity is better for man than an eternal life in the continual practice of sin. The divine goodness will thus be manifested either in conferring a new life upon the repentant sinner, or in finally abandoning the obstinate sinner to that definitive death which will put an end to fruitless sufferings.

dying man, who has been revolted by the traditional dogma, says to him : " My friend, my God is not the one who exasperates thee ; deign to listen to an affectionate appeal : my God loves thee, and will always love thee, do what thou wilt. Thou mayest reject him, thou canst not legitimately hate him ; death is not his work if he does not exist. But he does exist, and Jesus, his living image, reveals to thee in his own person a divine unreserved love ; he has suffered more than thee, before thee, and for thee. God chastises only with regret ; he did not owe to thee the present life, he offers to thee a better life gratuitously. If thou preferrest nonentity, he will respect thy freedom ; if the prospect of eternal death seems pleasant to thee, I will not begrudge thee the only consolation of thy absolute wretchedness. My tears shall flow without giving thee offence. I will be silent, but remember that so long as a breath of life remains to thee, or a ray of personal consciousness, thy heavenly Father's arms will remain open to receive thee, open still the well-spring of his compassions, open, too, all the treasures with which he can still endow thee ! "

If there are sinners who would be moved to suicide by such an appeal , we believe that they belong to that class of desperate men who are perishing, " for whom, the apostle says, the Gospel is a savour of death. He did not look upon that as a motive for ceasing to preach the Gospel.

We conclude by saying that in our view a life eternal is the greatest of benefits ; an eternal death is the greatest of evils ; sin, the mother of death, is that which is most odious. What more can be said ? Is it possible reasonably to adduce arguments more powerful than these ?

Thus it is that, in spite of formulas, an instinct which is the voice of God himself has restrained the lips of many of the most orthodox preachers, as, for example, those of Rochat, that apostle of the revival, of whom Vinet said : " Oh ! if I could but speak like him ! " He is addressing a last appeal to hardened sinners ; does he speak to them of endless torments ?

Not at all. Without being aware of it he expresses himself as though he were a veritable Conditionalist ; and who, to-day, among non- Conditionalist preachers, would have the courage,

1 Tois apollumenois.

2 Cor. ii. 15.

we do not say to blame Rochat, but even to replace the " death eternal, " of which he speaks by torments eternally renewed ?

In leaving you, the traveller towards eternity is moved by the deep feeling of sadness which is felt by one who is obliged to abandon a wretch whom drunkenness and the icy breath of winter have plunged into a state of lethargy from which nothing can rouse him . Neither entreaties, nor offers of help, nor pictures of the threatening danger, nor anything else will move him ; he only stirs to repulse the helping hand held out to him ; and in his delirium he takes as sweet repose the slumber which is for him the forerunner of death. The traveller, seeing the uselessness of his efforts, regretfully and with a heavy heart quits the poor fellow. As he goes away he calls out to him once more : "Are you, then, determined to perish ?"

And I, too, call out once more to you poor sinners who have rejected all my words, you who are taking pleasure in a slumber which will quickly lead you to eternal death. I, too, hold out my hand to you once more saying : Are you really determined to perish ?

Will you not come to Jesus that you may have life ?

Will you not listen to the kindly voice that calls to you : Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from among the dead, and Christ shall give thee light ?1

Is there any conception of future punishment which, without wounding the Christian consciousness, can inspire a more salutary fear ? Can the terror produced by a superstition be called a salutary fear ? No ; for the reaction that follows upon the dissipation of a superstition produces unbelief.

While it commends itself to the Christian consciousness, the prospect held out to us in the Bible maintains the terrible notion of that which is irreparable. We await the proposal of a better solution ; if a better be not found, by what right shall this one be set aside, which seems to reconcile so many elements of the difficult problem ?

1 Sermons of A. Rochat, p. 34, sq. Paris, Delay, 1846. See, too, p. 217.