Ultimate Aspects of Christ's Priesthood

Efore proceeding to those ultimate aspects, we must remind ourselves of a fact which has received the illustration of history and the verification of human consciousness in such a degree as to have clothed it with something like Divine and final authority. The fact, that life is a series of illusions; it promises one thing and gives another; it is not literal and arithmetical, but ideal and imaginative: Canaan was promised to Abram, but Abraham never got Canaan; not that the promise was broken, but that it was enlarged and glorified, so that no mere geographical bounds could satisfy its terms, and that he who left the far east in the hope of seeking a land that God would show him was so drilled and chastened, so stimulated and ennobled in his sympathies and aspirations, that when he came to that land he declared himself a stranger and a pilgrim in quest of a city founded and built and made by God, — a heavenly country, a continuing city. This would have been too spiritual a conception for him at first: something material therefore was set before him, something which appealed to the then state of his mind. So also in the sacrifice of Isaac: God did not mean that the son should be sacrificed but the father, and not that it should in either case be a sacrifice of blood but of will. We, too, know what is meant by this ilusional training: it seems to be at once the secret and the key of

BoA hes The Priesthood of Christ.

our life; it begins with childhood and continues to the very end of life. We work for the prize, but we get in the very process of the needful discipline something better than the prize we started for: the chase is better than the prey: the intellectual drill is better than the mere letters that we learned. The Book of Ecclesiastes is full of instruction upon this point: the prize itself as a literal possession was “vanity and vexation of spirit.” The man got all he aimed at and it was disappointment to his soul: he aimed at the literal, he got the literal, and the literal drove him out of itself into the spiritual, — “God, fear Him, and keep His commandments!”

We soon come to learn that anticipation is better than realisation, which is but another way of saying that the spiritual is better than the material. A man working towards an object may be made happy by the work and the dream of its coming reward, when the end comes it may be a pain, a care, a mockery: it is less than he expected, less than he meant it to be, less than it might have been; it 1s vanity and vexation of spirit. Then he begins again. He counts not himself to have apprehended, but he presses towards the mark, and that pressure is itself the beginning of heaven!

We have already seen that Jesus Christ bewildered people, and perhaps more than others His own disciples, by using literal terms for spiritual realities; leaven for doctrine, birth for regeneration of soul, water for the Holy Spirit, and many other instances: He said, “The kingdom of God is within you;” instead of a kingdom, in their mean sense of the word, He gave His disciples “power from on high;” for miracles He substituted thoughts, and for Himself He gave the Holy Ghost. This last was the very point He was leading up to; and, properly understood, it means everything that we are now trying to put into words; it means that that which is sown in weakness is raised in power, that which is sown in corruption is raised in glory. Let us, then, be clear upon this point before going farther. This is the key; if we leave it behind all that remains will be mystery and disappointment. Ask yourself this question, and answer it distinctly before going another step: /s tt true that human life rs trained upon what may be called the principle of illusion? Go back to your own childhood, and test the question by experience. Once you found your highest enjoyment in playthings; looking forward to a holiday filled you with delight; to be promised a visit to the seaside was to receive something lke a promise of endless happiness and satisfaction, — where now are these childish pleasures? Yet, observe, you needed them at the time; then, they were what the apostle calls “the present truth;” any spiritual promise would have been lost upon you because you were then as Abram was before he received the word of the Lord. Say to a child that you will show him the finest picture ever painted, and the promise will leave him unmoved; but ask him to ride upon a horse or to sail a boat, and instantly you excite him with true gladness, By and by he will smile at his choice; he will want the picture and the poem, and a new thought will give him rarer joy than “all the treasures of Egypt.” Thus we pass through the material into the spiritual; we start for Canaan, and when we reach it we sigh for a fairer land. Offer the young man the toy which made him scream with delight fifteen years ago, and he will be insulted by the dishonour you inflict upon his judgment and taste. On the other hand, insist that a child shall put aside all toys, and you wound the child by your unnatural discipline. There is a “present truth” at every point in the long line of life, and you must not force it; toys are the “present truth” at fives aspiration and study and service are the P “present truth” at fifty: nor can these truths be transposed; they have a natural place and a natural force, and God is the Author both of the one and of the other. I have elsewhere! traced out this thought with tolerable fulness, and the argument there given must be considered as repeated in this connection as the basis of the suggestions now about to be considered. Especially must I bind any adverse critic to study that argument before assailing what follows. With this understanding let us look at some possible definitions, and then inquire how they should be regarded by Christian teachers.

1. Take the word Heaven. Probably that word has not the same meaning to any two classes of thinkers. To one mind, heaven is a land, a city, a palace wonderful beyond all imagination; streets of gold, walls of jasper, fountains,. processions, banners, crowns, those are essential to its conception; to another mind, it means release from trouble, from tears, from death, an eternal and ineffable calm; to another, it is higher communion, fuller service, continuous, unblighted, perfect growth. Now every one of these ideas may be true, though the one could not be substituted for the other. The poor sorrowful soul whose daily bread has been dipped in tears, wants a city of comfort and peace and rest; the tired pilgrim, worn and tried with exceeding toil, sighs for home; the student, the apostle, the holy saint, desires “to be with Christ.” Is the one man wrong and the other right? No, Each is right. If a child should picture heaven as a city full of toys, he would be right; if a philosopher think of it as a school where hard earthly problems will be solved, he is right; if a troubled soul think of it as a land of personal joy never to be darkened, he is right. Heaven is what we are at our best, only mul-

1-The PARACLETE: On the Historic Movement towards Spirituality.

tiplied by infinity. The heaven of the child would be torment to the philosopher, and the heaven of the philosopher would be torment to the child. In this sense the Christian teacher is not only justified in becoming, he is bound to become, all things to all men that he may by all means gain some.

2. Take such words as Resurrection and Immortality. The literal and, so to say, physical meaning of these words can alone be accepted by some minds. To them Resurrection means the resurrection of the body, though part of the flesh was buried in India, part in Africa, and the rest was lost at sea, yet bone will come to bone, and the man will stand complete at last: though his arm was amputated when he was an infant, and he has lived to be seventy years of age, yet somehow that arm will be restored, and all difficulties will be overcome by the great power of God, Another man says he does not believe in the resurrection of the body, but in the resurrection of the dead. A third man boldly denies personal resurrection: he says that the resurrection of the body is a figure or parable of a great spiritual fact. He says that men rise again in each other, and are immortal in each other; the parent rises in the child, and the older in the younger; that the teacher rises again and becomes immortal in all who believe his doctrine; that in this sense Milton lives, and Bunyan, the whole army of martyrs and the goodly fellowship of the apostles; he denies the immortality of the individual, and affirms the immortality of the race, — he says men die, but man lives for ever. If we say that this is harsh, he asks if it is harsh for the spring to grow into the summer, and demands whether the spring is dead if it has added its contribution to the strength and beauty of the tree? If we ask what is meant by those passages of Scripture in which the blessedness of the holy dead is described, he answers that they speak of the Ultimate Humanity, redeemed and glorified, and prepared for the prepared place. If we ask him if he always believed this, he says No, he believed in the letter first, and afterwards he came to know what to him is the meaning of the spirit. A man who comes before us with a theory so bold and startling may well be plied with searching questions: —

“Do you mean to say that so great a mind as Shakespeare’s is extinct?” No. Shakespeare lives in his works. He was never so distinctly alive as to-day. He gave us all he had to give, all that God meant him to give, and now, in the fire and splendour, the pathos and nobleness, of his works, he is clothed upon with his house from heaven,

“Do you mean to say that your own dear sweet child who fell into her last sleep in your arms, is now not in existence?” No. She lives in my purified love and in my attempts at unselfishness; she comes to me every eventide and charges me to be wise and tender and good; I remember her gentleness and sweetness and grace, and the memory stirs me like the call of God,

“But why be stirred if all has to come to nothing, — if you have to die out and be no more known for ever?” That is selfishness. That is not self-denial, it is self-afirmation: it is setting up a false standard of judgment; it is narrowing and debasing the purpose of God. My life does not come to nothing; my life does not die out; every good thing I do is rewarded, every evil thing is condemned, Life thus becomes to me a great stewardship and responsibility.

“But if you tell the tyrant, the oppressor, the devastator, that there is no future life of rewards and punishments, you encourage him in cruelty and wickedness.” Wait. Even if I did tell him so, he could not believe or receive the saying in my sense of the truth. On the other hand, though he professedly believes in hell and all the horrors of the coarsest retribution, his hand is not stayed in cruelty. It is not as if the doctrine of personal torture in hell kept him back; he may even believe that he is actually sending his victims to hell, and that he is going thither himself, yet his madness is not attempered by his creed. But apart from this, such a man could not receive the spiritual doctrines of Christ. He must be sent to Moses. In other words, he must be sent to the infant school, and pass through the period of subjection, the rod, the frown, and the whole rigour of the law: he must have preached to him the never-dying worm, the everlasting burnings, the lake of fire and brimstone. In a word, he must hear and receive “the present truth:” he is not ready for the finest of the wheat, nor is he entitled to “the children’s bread,’ — let him, then, be brought through all the earlier baptisms before he can receive or enjoy the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Men must be ¢rained to truth; they cannot have truth forced upon them. He would be a foolish man who would give a barbarian gold when brass pleases him better, but he would be a thief who gave a civilised man brass under the counterfeit of gold. Give the barbarian brass first, then train him in the degree of values until he knows and prizes the fine gold. It must be so in thinking — “instead of the thorn shall come up the fig-tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree,” and thus at last shall appear the “perfect man in Christ Jesus.”

“But is it not hard to give up the idea of personal immortality?” Yes, unless brought to that state of utter self-abnegation which it was Christ’s express purpose to work in us, It is hard for every man to deny himself easy comparatively to give up this habit or that, to live here or there, to mortify a passion or cut off a member, but to deny one’s self is indeed hard; to say, “Let me live or die, be much or nothing, not my will but Thine be done,” is the greatest attainment of Christian discipline.

“But if a man has lived in the sure and constant expectation of heaven, and has died in triumph, believing that he was going to the quiet and beautiful land where sin and death are no more, was he not deceived and mocked?” No. According to the strength of his faith he was in heaven even whilst on earth, and his anticipation of future and everlasting blessedness was a prophecy on behalf of the race in its ultimate completeness and sanctification. It was no idle dream. It was no mocking mirage that tempted his soul. The ultimate and universal expressed themselves through the temporary and personal.

“May we not then say, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?” No. Because it is not true that we die to-morrow, and even if it were true, both the reasoning and the morality of that argument are bad.

“Does not the apostle say that if in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable?” He does, and the doctrine is sound. If there be no future life, this life is both a crime and a blunder. It is wasteful to sow seed that is never to grow. Christianity teaches the glorious doctrine of the immortality of human nature, and reveals processes of growth, development, and progress unknown to every other religion, It says that no good life can die. It foretells a time when man shall no longer be sinful, weak, and incomplete, but shall be as God in purity, strength, and perfection.

“Do you mean to say, then, that the individual life has no immortality?” JI say nothing of the kind. I say something infinitely better, viz, that the Spirit of Christ in a man should lead him to that last point of se//-sacrijice which is willing either to live or to die so that humanity be ennobled and sanctified. This is the sublimity of resignation. This indeed is self-sacrifice, — a term often degraded into meaning merely the surrender of a habit or the denial of a taste. Self-sacrifice is infinitely different, infinitely superior.

“Did not Paul say that there was a crown of righteousness laid up for him?” Certainly, and he wears it now. Compared with Paul’s spiritual influence, any crown that he can possibly be wearing in another state of being is worthless.

“But ought not a man who suffered as Paul did, have some compensation in the way of personal enjoyment?” Paul himself would deride-the notion. As a conception it is dictated by intellectual poverty and moral selfishness. Paul, in his degree as Christ, saw the travail of his soul and was satisfied. It was heaven to him to see Christ glorified in the lives of men. So little did he value his mere personality, that he could have wished himself separated from Christ if thereby Israel could have been saved.

“Are we not taught that we have come to the spirits of just men made perfect?” Yes, and truly. We are encompassed about by a great cloud of witnesses. Abraham lives, and David, and the martyrs, and reformers, and they live for us if we be made alive in Christ. We are enriched by history. The present is the upgathering and the sum total of the past. Not unto themselves but unto us did the holy and illustrious men of old minister. They all died in faith, not having received the promise.

“But the bad man will be worse than ever if you tell him there is no hell.” But I do not tell him that there is no hell. You cannot teach a man beyond his own consciousness. Christ could not have come to the antediluvians. ‘The cross could not have been set up in the wilderness. Paul would have been out of place on Sinai. It is right to tell the sunken and degraded wretch that he will dwell for ever in the lake of fire and brimstone: no other doctrine could reach him; you must adapt your emphasis to his deafness. Always remember Christ’s way of putting the literal for the spiritual. Did He tell a lie to the woman of Samaria when He gave her the impression that He had water of which if a man drunk he would never thirst again? Was He mocking men when He told them He would rebuild the temple in three days? Did He not teach the highest doctrine of immortality when He said that Elias reappeared in John the Baptist? Remember what has been said about “the present truth,’ and you will have no difficulty about the succession of ideas and the true growth in grace.

“But I feed that I am immortal.” So you are; the humanity that is in you cannot die. It is Christ that lives in you. The universal is in the particular. Eternity is ina moment as the sun is in the dewdrop. Is it not a great thing to live for the race? Is it nothing to prepare the way of the Lord, and a highway for our God?

“Could we not have learned all this without Christ?” Never. Self-sacrifice is absolutely the revelation of the Gospel. Self-murder there has always been; self-immolation has been paid for higher self-enjoyments; but in the vital and true sense of sacrifice we find it nowhere but in Christ. Nor is heathenish self-immolation to be derided. It means more than it can tell. It is a yearning, a prophecy, a troubled dawn. We owe all great interpretations to Christ. Our own interpretations draw upon us His rebuke of being “fools and slow of heart.”

“What would be the effect upon the popular mind of preaching such a doctrine as this?” I would not preach it to the popular mind. In the pulpit little beyond elementary truths should be proclaimed, because public assemblies are miscellaneous, unclassified, and undisciplined. Such doctrines should be written, or stated to the prepared few, yet they should give tone and colouring to all public expositions and appeals. The preacher having declared a literal gospel, and affirmed all that is severest in legal requirement, should add, “I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now; grow in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Comforter shall guide you into all truth.” Mark how this is to be the work of the Spirit. It is not written; it is not put into words; it is a mystery disclosed to the heart, a vision shown to the soul.

“How does the whole scheme of written revelation look from the standpoint of this theory?” Like a wonderful unity. Like the succession of the seasons. Like a well-trained human life. The Bible could not have been other than it is, a history, a tragedy, a fierce war, a wilderness pilgrimage, a revolution ending in peace and harmony and heaven. In the Bible you find the gospel for the savage, the gospel for the little child, the gospel for the sorely tried, the gospel for the highest minds — in a word, you find “all truth:” there is hell-fire for the generation of vipers, thunder for the deaf, the hammer of the Lord for the hard heart, the still small voice for the despairing and the faint. Do not cease to preach the terrors of the Lord, nor cease to ask, Have ye received the Holy Ghost? Take care not to give the children’s bread unto dogs, and not to cast pearls before swine; and when you come to the higher truths, speak them in parables and expound them to the disciples apart. It is true that by this theory I seem to depopulate heaven, but I cannot forget that the same theory saves countless millions of my fellow-creatures from fire and brimstone, the intolerable anguish and burning torture of an eternal hell. It would gratify me to know that immediately upon death I shall enter into a land of cloudless and perpetual summer, where sin will vex me no more, and my heart ache no longer, where all dear friends will meet me, where every tender reminiscence will be recalled, where new and high and abiding relations will be formed; but in the height of my anticipations I ask myself the question, Can you sacrifice all these personal prospects if such be the will of God, and become but as a moment in the spring-time which ushers in the summer of universal humanity? Can you slay the dear Isaac of hope? Do you say, Father, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not my will but Thine be done? Rely upon it, my heart is tried to the uttermost by this theory: it often grieves and troubles me; it crucifies my self-love; it abashes the ambition which says it will take of the tree of life and eat and live for ever; and therefore when I adopt it, as a high probability rather than a positive and unchangeable dogma, it chastens my self-laudation, it enlarges my sense of responsibility, it quickens me to work every hour of my short day, and it widens my self-preparation for heaven into a living and glad sacrifice for the progress and salvation of the race. Only Christ could have made such a sacrifice possible to me,

Ultimate Aspects of Chrest’s Priesthood. 235

“What, then, are we to make of such a parable as that of Dives and Lazarus?” Take it just as it stands. That parable is, from my point of view, an integral part of the gospel. It sets forth the future life in the only way in which it could be comprehended by a pampered sot on the one hand, and a man accustomed to poverty and affliction on the other. J¢ is calculated to beget the very feeling which at describes. Herein is its utility. In the one man it arouses conscience; in the other it enkindles hope. Conscience is hell, hope is heaven. The hardened selfworshipper can be penetrated only by fire; the outworn and needy sufferer can be comforted only by hope. Consider this, and you will see that the parable is evangelistic. - You are, however, feeling that from my point of view the parable is not true; but I want you to see that it 2s true, that truth is larger than fact, that spirit is more than letter, that you are measuring truth by an inadequate standard, and are sacrificing the real to the symbolical. Every selfish, corrupt, over-pampered man who has turned away from the prayer of the needy and the dying ought to be made to feel that he deserves to “lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment,” and that if he escape such a destiny it can only be through the infinite mercy of God. And he can be made to feel this. The more truly he is converted the more deeply will he feel it. The exclamation of the Church in its tenderest and profoundest moods is: “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed.” By the outer hell, Christ would create the inner anguish; by the visible heaven He would move the expectation and hope of suffermg men. But if it is to end in nothing? you willsay. But it does not end in nothing, It is the mightiest stimulant that can stir the soul: it is a prophecy; it is a revelation.

“It is so hard to give up those whom we love, and to think of them only as contributing to the final and universal good.” So it is, unless we have the spirit of Christ: then the yoke is easy and the burden light. It is hard, too, at the tome of the loss. But in a year, in ten years, in fifty, we get a wider outlook and see life in its proper proportions: there is a moment of anguish in which life is reduced to individualism; a time of intense and awful pain; but life recovers itself by the tender mercy of God, and the soul is mellowed and ennobled, and the very agony of the sacrifice is its unutterable joy.

“What are the advantages of this view over the view that is ordinarily held?” The view that is ordinarily held is right; I do not, therefore, seek to disturb it by way of contravention, but by way of completion. Only notice again and again that what may be chronologically right may be morally incomplete. It was right that Christ should suffer, but if He had suffered only, we should never have received the gospel; it was as necessary that He should rise again from the dead, as that He should “pour out His soul an offering for sin,” for “if Christ be not risen from the dead, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.” It is right that every individual Christian should claim individual immortality, and rejoice in its present possession; as it is right that every day should be thought of as the last, and that the second coming of the Lord should be expected every moment: to calculate that the Lord will come in a hundred years from this day is profane curiosity, to expect Him any moment is piety, though we may die “without receiving the promise.” The apostles expected the second coming of the Lord in their day, and they were right. All generations have died without receiving the thing looked for, Personally I expect the Lord, I watch, I wait, in one moment more He may be here, ahd yet I know as a truth, a ne. not as a fact, that He will never come in the body, but that He is always coming in spirit and in power. Understand, therefore, that I include what you call the ordinary view, I do not deny it; I include it as the summer includes the spring. With this explanation I will give you an outline of the advantages which accrue. (1.) All the analogies of consciousness, history, and nature, are satisfied. I do not get the literal Canaan I go out to seek, but another and better land. The bliss which satisfied me as a child dissatisfies me as a man. Out of national revolutions comes national progress. Nations, like individuals, are born out of one state into another and a higher, evermore higher and better. This year is the sum total of centuries of civilisation; it is not a single year, it is centuries, it may be millenniums. Before me is an oak sixty years old; when it comes to leaf and bud, it is not one sprine’s work I see, but sixty. The individual man rises, flourishes, declines, in mind as well as in body; fancy fades, memory gives way, Judgment falters, but the life remains in society a contribution to general progress. Thus, all analogy seems to favour this fuller view. (2.) The infinitely painful mystery of hell is mitigated, if not dissolved. It is easy for men to say that it is not for them to think of the destiny of the wicked. I venture to suggest the contrary, and to suggest farther, that not to think of it is to mistake blindness for veneration, and selfishness for piety. Think of countless millions of our fellow-creatures in anguish for thousands of years: pierced by the undying worm; scorched by the unconsuming fire; tormented night and day without cessation or relief, and this for fifty years, a hundred, a thousand, — picture it, make it real to your thought, and then contrast it with this theory. In speaking of the deserts of sin, I would keep every line of the distressing picture in intensest vividness, and I would bring it to bear upon the consciousness of the guilty man until he sees it, feels it, owns it just, and flees from the wrath to come. And in doing this I should have the support of his conscience, and the more so as he sees the exceeding sinfulness of sin. (3.) The preparation of humanity for a heavenly existence is explained. There is a common saying about heaven being a prepared place for a prepared people, a saying full of probability and good sense. Christ said, “I go to prepare a place for you,

and if I go I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there ye may be also.” That is what He is doing now. He told the disciples He was going to prepare the place, which was the most delicate way of teaching them that He was going to prepare themselves, This is the guarantee against human apostasy in heaven. What other guarantee is there? Not God’s power, for that is exercised now upon earth; not mere beauty of place, for it was in the most beautiful spot in the world that Adam fell; not merely noble companionship, for there are angels that kept not their first estate. What, then, is the guarantee? A prepared humanity; a humanity tested, tried, disciplined, pruned, chastened, through long centuries of manifold Divine visitation and culture; a humanity which has been refined as gold is refined, and perfected in the hot furnace. To such humanity there can be no temptation; it is strong in grace, it is incorruptible in spirit; temptation would die upon it as a brand thrown into the sea, (4.) It assails and destroys the subtle selfishness of our very religion. Analyse the religious talk of the day, and at the core of it you find selfishness. To many (to most?) religion is an escape from terror, or a price paid for what they call heaven: they are going to bliss: they are going to be happy for ever, — and in many other phrases they set forth the advantages of their piety. What do you hear of submission to the will of God, of hard work, of self-oblivion, of daily sacrifice? Think of this view of the case dispassionately, and say whether my charge is untrue or ungracious. (5.) It enables me to see the meaning of the history of the world. That history is one of transition and development. All providences have enlarged with the growing world. In human history we have had infancy, youth, middle age, and next will come the ripening, the autumnal fulness and wealth. These, then, are roughly some of the advantages which I derive from this fuller view. I expect you to be shocked by the theory, but I have none the less hope that you will ultimately receive it. I myself shrank from it. All my cherished traditions arose in resentment against it; but now it is to me a great confidence and a very tender joy. Before you condemn and renounce it let me beg you to consider deeply two things: (1) The analogy of consciousness, history, and nature; and (2) The fact that all the highest truths in whose possession we now delight have come to us after passing through the crudest and sometimes the grotesquest forms. This view has so come to us. So has the true doctrine of Inspiration, of Hell, of the Resurrection. Look back to the old illustrations of the Resurrection, and see if they could be presented now. They were marked by a literalness often coarse, sometimes utterly revolting, and distorted in the most grotesque and ludicrous way. Yet the doctrine is true, though the illustrations were absurd. So with hell-fire. There have been godly and learned divines who have insisted that the fire was literal, that the pain was bodily, and that the execrations of the damned were drowned by the Alleluias of the saved. “Now,” as Mr. Robertson says in his wonderful sermon upon the Pharisees and Sadducees at John’s baptism, “all this we believe no longer: the circles of hell and the mountain of purgatory are as fabulous to us as the Tartarus of the heathens,”

One thing more before I close. You remember that in the Gospels some persons were raised from the dead. Consider what Christ might have said, and ought to have said, if the common view is true. Hear His speech: “My friends, I can bring your child back to life, but remember at what expense of feeling to the sainted dead; your dear one is in heaven; she is singing the hymns of the blessed; she has a diadem on her brow and palms in her hand; if I were to bring her back she would be unhappy, and if you wish to have her back you are selfish and mad.” No such word did He utter. He simply brought back the life, He did not impoverish heaven, or startle its inhabitants, by the sudden withdrawal of one of their number.

This is my theory. It gives unity instead of confusion; it throws light on the darkest problems; it glorifies the mercy and patience of God; it explains the apparent slowness of the Divine movement; it quickens me to work whilst it is called day; it makes me no more a stranger and foreigner, but part of the great household and commonwealth of Christ.

This theory, by no means destitute of ingenuity and even of some excellent moral qualities, cannot but awaken the strongest opposition, for —

(1.) There is no support to be found for it in the letter of Scripture.

(2.) There is much in the letter of Scripture which directly contradicts it.

(3.) The human mind is so constituted that it cannot
accept such a theory by way of instruction; if
embraced at all, it must be by silent spiritual
expansion and illumination: therefore if the
theory were preached boldly and universally, no
living soul could probably ever receive it.

(4.) If it could possibly be received intellectually by a man of low moral nature, it would do that man, and all like him, infinite mischief, because that which is now at least partially checked would become unrestrained and unmanageable.

On the other hand, there is a ground upon which the - theory is worthy of respectful notice. If a man honestly say, as has been said in the foregoing argument, that his study of the method of the Scriptures, and of the fact that life is i#lwsory rather than literal, and especially that his prayerful and long-continued study of the spirit of Christ, has convinced him that the final point of Christian experience is willingness to be nothing, and to work his “little day” in the spirit of absolute self-sacrifice, for the sake of” generations yet to come, and that this is a truth which he never learned until he knew Christ and was crucified with Him, — if a man can honestly come by this process to this result, nothing less than the supreme miracle has been accomplished in the subduing of instincts, intuitions, and yearnings, which seem to be absolutely inseparable from our very being.

CONCLUSION.

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