page break

Part I.

§ 1. We cannot dogmatically affirm that all men will be restored to God. Unless the ideas of sin and guilt are erroneous, and the belief in moral freedom an illusion, it must be possible to harden our hearts persistently against the love of God, and frustrate the counsel of His mercy. The Calvinistic doctrine of omnipotent and irresistible grace would seem, indeed, to lend support to the hope that God will yet be victorious over all the perversity of the creature: else, were evil a divine choice. However, hard as the reconciliation may be, the doctrine of irresistible grace does not seem to be held in any such sense as hinders our affirming that the sinner may quench the Spirit of God; nor does it mean that grace acts on the spirit of man mechanically: and even Calvinistic divines are content to leave, as an inaccessible region of mystery, that innermost recess in which the Spirit of God and the spirit of man touch and are fused. The idea of hell is necessary at least hypothetically; that is, so must it be, if there be persistent impenitence and rejection of page 14 Christ. The warnings and threats of Scripture are just and right, and could not fail from the practical point of view which we occupy in the flux of time; nor can any earnest preacher avoid using them, even although he may cherish the secret hope that the necessary hypothesis may not be realised as ultimate fact.

Of the nature of that doom which may overtake us, various opinions are held at the present day. The traditional and popular way of conceiving it seems to be abandoned. It is a thing incredible that God should inflict, during infinite ages of time, anguish and tortures compared with which the horrors of a Spanish Inquisition are a trifle; and that He should maintain the wretched victims of infinite vengeance in existence for no reason except to heap misery upon their heads. The feeling of the modern world is definite, that this can on no account be credited; and many feel no scruple in saying aloud or in their hearts, that if the Bible teaches men so it is a proof that the Bible is not true. Most men are contented to leave the question in the general form—the greatest of all possible calamities will befall the wicked and the greatest is simply to be shut out from God: for that is surely "the outer darkness." When sensuous natures are told that hell cannot mean endless torture by fire, they breathe more freely, and perhaps say in their hearts that now they have nothing very dreadful to fear, although they sin. Nevertheless, from the point of view of all holy beings, they are within the grasp of an evil—even loss of holiness and severance from God—so great that no tears could express it: and it remains true, that we are not in harmony with the mind of God, till the mere fact of being a sinner and without God seems to us so great an evil as to awaken in our hearts an unutterable self-commiseration, and a great cry of distress over all who are in such a situation. This general statement, mean while, suffices me. I can form no conception of what may be involved in final severance from God; and I ever form no conception of a state of existence not condition by time.

page 15

The doctrine concerning the doom of the wicked has been complicated by being held in close fusion with the doctrine of the absolute and universal limitation of the day of grace to this present life; and, although no two doctrines can be more distinct, this fusion has been so close that the denial of the latter is still popularly held to be a denial of everlasting punishment. Ten thousand times have congregations been taught that life is the season God has given to flee from hell and rise to heaven, and that whosoever of all the myriads of men has been found un-regenerate at the hour of his death has gone down to hopeless perdition, and found himself debarred from all access to mercy. Theologians have not generally been so severe as to hold that this doom befalls all who have not lived in the light of divine revelation, or known and believed in the historical Christ; for Christ is still the everlasting Logos and the Light of Reason, and the Spirit of Christ may have secretly touched many earnest souls in heathendom, whereby they became as it were crypto-Christians. Still, regenerate all must be in life, who escape at death the doom of hell; for beyond the grave is no forgiveness for any man, and no further bestowal of the spirit of grace. The prevalence and potency of this teaching cannot be denied. The whole air is filled with the echoes of words like those of Jonathan Edwards: "Now, God stands ready to pity you: this is a day of mercy: yon may cry now with some hope of obtaining mercy. But when once the day of mercy is past, your most lamentable and dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain: you will be wholly lost and thrown away of God, as to any regard to your welfare. God will have no other use to put you to but to suffer misery: you shall be continued in being to no other end." The shortness and uncertainty of life, the momentousness of it as absolutely determining heaven or hell for ever, the finality of death as limiting the possibility of salvation, the gorgonising of the soul of man by the incident of physical death—this used to be the peroration of nearly every sermon; and, although in a much subdued form and with bated breath, page 16 may still be heard at intervals here and there. It cannot be doubted that this belief has given, and still gives, impetus to much activity in Church Extension, Evangelisation, and Missionary enterprise. It is a humbling thought that there are still innumerable minds that will earnestly ask, If this doctrine be not true, what use is there in preaching, or in ministers, or in all the zealous activity of the Churches? So selfish, sensuous, and narrow has our popular religion become, that men are not ashamed to say If there be hope of salvation after death, we may as well shut up our churches and recall our missionaries.

The most earnest advocates of the traditional belief will not deny that it implicates a view of human life beyond measure appalling. There must he already untold myriads in hell; not only a majority of all who have ever lived, but an overwhelmingly large majority. Even now the number of regenerate souls on earth is but an elect remnant; and of the millions now pursuing their course we may well anticipate that those who shall enter heaven are but a little rill, while human life, like some broad and swollen river, is coursing on towards the abyss. I have observed that men do not generally like to hear or read statements of this sort, and use all manner of disguises to veil the inevitable inference. "Who are you thus to dogmatise on the secret characters of men?" "It requires but a cry at the last moment, and divine forgiveness is at hand, and how do we know but that this cry has gone forth from the hearts of myriads whose lives were sinful?" "All infants are saved, so that after all a majority of the race may be in heaven." So they wrap it up; and thus they throw dust in their eyes. No! Of any given time or society, the word of Christ stands true, "Few there be!" Only a relatively small number are now or ever have been living Christians, whose hearts were the temple of God. If no one of all the rase can inwardly possess the redemption of Christ save in this little life, the myriad myriads of the human race have beyond all doubt, perished everlastingly. My brain reels and a horror of great darkness comes down on my heart page 17 as I try to realise what these centuries of human history signify. When I further couple this thought with the doctrine of strict Calvanism, I feel like one struck on the head with a club or pierced with a poisoned arrow. In the successive generations all such as God predetermined to save are saved. In the case of all such as are lost God never cherished any purpose to save them; for them Christ did not die and does not intercede. Now, as history is only fulfilling the purpose of God, it follows that all that has transpired has been with a view to gather out of the race a handful of elect souls, all the rest bring related to them as dung to fruit and flowers. O Father in Heaven! is not every man and woman on earth Thy lost child?

Yet I perceive that there is a danger in allowing one's mind to run on in this vein. Feeling and imagination must not be allowed to dethrone reason. The terrible thought is that this is a lost world of guilty sinners requiring to be redeemed by the death of the Son of God, that perdition is a possibility, and that we fire all within the grasp of appalling facts. The relative numbers of the saved and the lost is but a subordinate issue, and to reason. The moral difficulty were as great were all saved but a handful admitting that the difficulty would not so appal the imagination. Let us therefore put a restraint upon ourselves, and reason the matter calmly. Is it indeed true that death absolutely limits the possibility of salvation? Or, is this an error superinduced on the Gospel of Christ, at once spreading a pall upon the earth and darkening the face of the heavens? "We believe that it is even so, and that it is an error, to such an extent hiding the face of God and obscuring the Gospel of Christ, that to lift its harden, even from a single human soul, would be a recompense for much sorrow.

§ 2. The first great difficulty—equally great to thought and feeling—emerging out of the prevalent doctrine, is suggested by the death of infants. What, then, of the myriads, amounting, they say, to half of the human race, page 18 who die before attaining self-consciousness and proper moral responsibility? The theological doctrine is that we are all by nature children of wrath: and it is clearly inadmissible to seek an escape by denying or toning down the doctrine of original sin, or by affirming our original immaculate purity. Unless infants were regenerated before dying, they must accordingly be universally damned—born for an hour of life, to pass away and open their eyes in hell. This belief has been found incredible and in all ages has been indignantly repudiated, except by a few where deeper nature has been terrified into submission by theological logic. That infants perish even lastingly is a doctrine presenting to belief a view of existence and of the ways of God as repugnant to our moral reason as any grim idol of heathendom. It is as if were asked to tear the heart from our bosom and cast it down upon the altar of some savage deity. It violently contradicts a living faith in God's Fatherhood and universal love; for we cannot call God Father while believing he habitually does acts which we could only regard as fiendish. It summons us to believe that the deep, pure joy in our hearts when a son is born into our home, is no adumbration of the divine heart, but its very contradiction. The instinct of our moral reason, the passion of our human hearts, the thrill of the divine love we have felt, the light of the Christian consciousness, declare that the damnations of infants cannot be true—let theologians look to the adjustment of the matter as best they can. Accordingly it seems now universally held that all dying in infancy saved, that is, are regenerated by divine grace before they pass away.

But where shall we find valid grounds for such as assertion? The doctrine of baptismal regeneration may shelter some Christian homes from a dreadful horror but, just in the circles where the limitation of the day of grace to this life has been most firmly held, baptismal regeneration is viewed as a figment; and were it even true only a relatively small number have had the privilege of being sprinkled with holy dew from a priest's, fingers. The present belief is that all infants, in all space and page 19 Time., straightway become angels,—all who pass away antecedent to the clear emergence of reason, although at what point that happens can in no wise be determined. But the Belief seems to possess insufficient grounding. Parents who have lost beloved infants fondly cherish this faith concerning them; perhaps, when they see surviving sons and daughters growing up without any traces of grace, a misgiving thought seizes them that had the lost ones been spared, they would have been like the rest. If a careless heathen mother by neglect and cruelty cause the death of the majority of her children in their first year, and some of them by reason of special hardihood survive to manhood to live as the heathen do; shall we be told that the former were regenerated and the latter not? The probability is that such as died would have developed like all the rest, had they but lived. A form of teaching which puts a premium on infanticide, makes the massacre of babes the readiest way of peopling heaven, and tempts us to view the nurture of young lives to maturity as the most cruel of injuries, is beset with difficulties. The Brine of the universal salvation of infants will in no piece into the theological system; nor can it be presented in a rational and self-comsistent form. It seems every way a more probable supposition that they pass away info another form and condition of existence, there to awake to self conscious reason, and find themselves even there in a world irradiated by the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Knowing as we do that Christ died for them all—persuaded as we are that our love to them is but a pale copy of the love which is in the heart of God-no parent, called to part with his infant children, can fail, in perfect peace, to surrender them into God's most gracious hands. But is it not a cruel thing to reduce parents even to an uncertainty? We can but ask in return, Is it a cruel thing to ask them to leave their in the hands of Christ? Where else shall we leave them? Can Christ not bring them to Himself there well here?

A difficulty akin to that with which we have been dealing is suggested by the case of idiots and such like; but page 20 it seems unnecessary further to enter upon it, as there can be no doubt, at least, as to the solution of it which is most simple and natural.

§ 3. The next great difficulty of the traditional doctrine is suggested by the consideration of the heathen world What of all the myriads of the heathen nations which flourished before Christ came into the world? Have they all, with the possible exception of a few gifted souls perished everlastingly? The Gospel of Christ has been in the world many centuries, and even yet has shone on only a narrow section of mankind; up to this the majority of men are heathen. It is a hard thought that the myriads of India and China are in hell, with Fijians, Maories, and Tasmanians. Not long since famine swept away 7.000,000 of Chinese in one year; it is hard to think that the pitiless famine swept them to a more pitiless and eternal hunger. There is no possible escape from such conclusions, if there is no possiblity salvation hereafter. We believe that God is the Father of the Spirits of all flesh—that every separate human soul is of an infinite value—that Christ loving all men and every man with an infinite love, offered Himself a sacrifice for the whole world; with this faith embedded in our hearts we bring before our minds a land in which generations millions have lived and died in ignorance, and misery, uncared for by God or man; and we find ourselves asking with a shivering horror, Can our faith be true if hell has devoured them all? Every mind feels difficulty; most seem content to leave it among the unsolved mysteries of God's providence; and nearly all would fair avoid answering with either yea or nay. The day was when theologians pointed to such a spectacle, and said "Behold a proof of our doctrine that God had never meant to save them, but had left them out of His purpose of mercy; otherwise He had sent them His message." There was a hard logic in the argument; but now it satisfies no one. But what a bright light breaks in upon the darkness, when we say, God's mercy is not limited to this life, and the divine purpose of grace follows all men page 21 into the realm beyond. That this idea solves a great difficulty is perhaps no positive or final proof that it is true: but at the same time let no one who rejects it, and is also unprepared to affirm the damnation of the heathen, imagine that he can get rid of the difficulty by calling it a mystery. It is more than a mystery. It weighs on the spirit like the nightmare of a contradiction of our belief in the infinite worth of souls and the Fatherhood of God and without that belief, shining in us lustrous and un-dimmed, we cannot live the Christian life, but stand, like shivering outcasts, at the portals of God's house.

§ 4. A question of a different kind from the previous now suggests itself. Death, we have been told, puts an end for ever to divine grace and its operations: death petrifies the spirit of man into an unchangeable state. I can discover no possible reason why death should have such an effect. There can be no reason in the nature of things why it should he so. Death is only severance of the spirit from material conditions, and introduction of the spirit into self-conscious life under new conditions. The will continue to think, feel, and will as heretofore, and will retain the continuity of its self-consciousness unbroken: and why should it not be still capable of repentance and amendment? So far from anticipating any such pertrifaction from the incident of death, we should rather anticipate that death would bring to many the very emancipation which they require, in order to emerge into a higher kind of rational and moral consciousness. The material conditions of our present existence often clog, darken, and weight the spirit: animal wants and passions drug and stupefy the soul: the bitter, crushing struggle for food and raiment keep many down in animalism, and hinder the emergence of proper moral self-consciousness: many a man has an evil-conditioned body which is a life-lone curse to him, and keeps him living in fever and even a kind semi-lunacy: we seem therefore justified in the hope that death would act as a kind of deliverance, open to them a true door of hope, and start them for the first page 22 time on a true career of rational existence. Certainly we cannot share the idea that man is a sinner only because he has a body, that the root of moral evil lies in matter and in the body of flesh, and that emancipate from the body is ipso facto redemption. This conception is false and shallow. What we maintain is that, so far from there being anything in the nature of death explaining why it should act on the spirit like the head of the Medusa, there are strong reasons for the belief that it would bring to many the first true awakening of ream and introduce them into much more favourable conditions of moral life. Shall we then say, that for reasons not made known to us, or perhaps incommunicable, God has so decreed that every man's death shall limit the possibility of salvation and end the time of probation? This opens out into the question whether the traditional doctrine is taught of Christ and the Apostles; and is mean while postponed.

While we can find no rational grounds for the common view of the effect of the death of the body on the life of spirit, we are yet met by the fact that men (and far beyond the pale of Christendom) have somehow been led to the idea that death comes to every man like the knell of judgment, and that the future life is not only a continuance of the present, but related to it as a retributive judgment on the earthly life as a finished product. It is easy to understand how this comes to pass. Although most, if not all human lives make on our minds the impression of a fragment, yet it is also true that when a man is dead, his career is finally wound-up—nothing can be added—the chapter is closed—so far as human knowledge and vision reach: and we very naturally translate this into an absolute finality. The full rewards of righteousness and love the full visitations of iniquity, by no means come upon men during their career on earth: if there be a moral government at all, we instinctively imagine that the adjustment is accomplished beyond; and thus the idea of heaven and hell press themselves home upon us in immediate connection with a man's death. It comes page 23 naturally to us to view material things and the body as a screen between us and God, and so we come to speak as if death were the removal of a veil, a kind of ushering of souls into the immediate presence of God: but it is not the fact of having a body which hides God from us, nor would the mere fact of being disembodied give us any vision of God's face: and, in very deed, dead men (simply as such) are no nearer God than we are now. There is nothing which so arrests our imagination as death: it is of all incidents of human experience the most tragic; and it seems natural to us to attribute to it an effect on the destiny of the spirit proportioned to its effect on temporal relations, and the grasp it takes of the imagination and the emotions. Still, it is not necessary to deny all truth in the popular view of the effects of death. Critical changes in the body, in circumstances and relations, induce even now corresponding critical changes in the development of character; there come even now and here days of moral judgment, gathering up into one experience of joy or sorrow the results of long periods of moral life: and we may there-fore well believe that death is to an immortal soul a most critical event, most searching and unveiling and decisive, bringing matters to issues, and slumbering possibilities to quick self-revelation. Nay, the next world may well become to evil men "a place of torment"—even as this earth becomes such to a burdened conscience, when the man at last can no longer escape from his own eye. But, although after death comes judgment, why should it be final judgment? If it be so, in what sense do we speak of the last judgment? Our objection is directed only against the affirmation of the absolute finality of the judgment of character which follows death.

§ 5. The minds of thoughtful men have been always painfully arrested by the seeming contradiction between what man is and what man seems to be. A king walking in filthy rags and living in a hovel would present no contrast so glaring as meets us when we say, Every man on page 24 earth is an immortal son of God, of an infinite value,—and then turn to survey the facts of human life. As a beast is born into the world, so also is a man; and as the beast dieth, so also man. Whether any man shall exist or not exist is a matter of accident: our very existence is surrendered to the blind caprice of lust or mere animal necessity. Nature makes no more careful provision to regulate the number of men born into an existence out of which they can never pass, than it does to determine the brood of the serpent or the number of leaves which any summer shall grow upon an apple tree. Men seem simply products of the mechanism of the universe: their number their circumstances, the length of their days, their joy and sorrow, no otherwise determined. Yet we say, and we believe, that every man born into the world is of an infinite dignity and value,—summoned into being by as immediate a fiat of God's will as Jesus of Nazareth—a son of the Eternal! It is only by a very considerable effort that we disentangle ourselves from the effect produced on our mind by the superficial aspect of things; and, indeed, when once we have been entrapped into the mechanical view of existence, we escape only as the reward of the deepest philosophy. We sec but the surface of things, hear but the roar of the mechanism of nature; but things are not what they seem: this whole visible world has its other and transcendental side, Reason knows itself as the light which lightens all the universe: in the full blaze of Self-consciousness, a man knows himself as greater than the heavens and the earth; and, as the light within him slowly kindles up out of the dark material soil, he recognises himself as a child of eternity and son of God, for whom all things are.

But why do we say these things here? We have mantioned the discrepency between the appearance and the higher truth concerning man with which thought has to contend: but what is this compared with the contradiction between the real value and significance of this life and the actual circumstances of it, with which theological thought has to contend—if, indeed, eternal destiny is page 25 absolutely determined for every man in the years lying between his birth and death. The former can be mastered by thought: the more we contemplate the latter the more it masters us. God, the Father of our spirits, cannot possibly treat his children with a more cruel neglect than the most depraved and unnatural parents; cannot have meant this life to supply the conditions of human probation for eternal life and death, and yet so arrange those conditions that they shall be for countless thousands the worst conceivable, and make their perdition almost inevitable. That child of depravity there, wrapping up within its nature the accumulated results of generations of moral degradation, with disease in its bones and nerves, with madness in its blood, with the drunkard's taint in its breath, born into a home of squalor and ignorance, trained to vice and impiety—a few years of dreariest existence here—then hell for ever! Yet God is its Father! And there are myriads of such, in ail degrees and varieties. What a mockery is the Gospel we preach! If such have no Father, the world has no Father; and as we ponder over the dark side of human existence, from the point of view of the common belief, we feel the horror of a great darkness come over us; our faith in God sinks beyond the horizon, and night wraps our heart within its folds. But courage! A light breaks in upon the gloom when I reflect that this little life is but a passing incident—but a day's weary march on the way home.

There are two points of view from which every individual man may be regarded, nay, must be regarded. He at once a product of the race, gathering up in himself the results of antecedent life and experience, and he is a unit complete in himself, himself alone responsible for all he is and does—a self-enclosed, separate being. The claims of solidarity and individuality will no doubt be adjusted, although no visible adjustment is effected in this life; for we find that both are facts, and we can ignore neither without falling into errors. In the case of the degraded specimens of the race, who inherit only evil and whose circumstances are all noxious, individuality and personality page 26 seem hardly to emerge; they seem simply unhappy victims, products, scapegoats of humanity; and the severest censor can scarcely conjure up in his heart any feeling towards them but pity. But their hour is coming; and we can well believe that in God's all wise providence the very bitterness and wretchedness of their lot may subserve their evolution into proper moral personality; for even now we know that many come to themselves under the crushing weight of sin and misery and at the swine's trough are first visited by true thoughts of God and of themselves. We need not try, however, to unravel the long, slow, intricate ways in which God leads human souls. Enough for us that we can plainly see that for innumerable of our fellow creatures this little life is no proper sphere of final and complete probation; that it is, and can be as it is, nothing but a dream, a stupor and a delirium; not only totally inadequate to decide eternal destiny, but inadequate even for the development of reason and self-consciousness, or bringing to pass that inversion of the spirit of a man upon itself which is the indispensable condition both of morality and religion. If God them truly loves every man with an infinite love, and attaches to every human soul a priceless value, and His spirit broods over every spirit, however dark and chaotic, with an, ineffable yearning hope and patient pity, there must be light and love for all beyond! With what peace and tranquillity of heart we can survey this dark abyss of human life when we view it all in the light of God's eternal mercy, and consider that this little life on earth is related to every man's eternal being as the dream of infancy to our whole career, or as a dark day of winter to the revolution of the seasons of the year.

§ 6. In the above paragraph we have indicated that the emergence of Christian piety in a human soul is dependent on certain natural conditions—that the latter failing, it is as vain to expect it as to expect the fruit of the vine in arctic regions. This statement, properly qualified and explained, conducts us to a new line of argument in support page 27 of our position; for, in many cases, these conditions are not supplied.

For some time back it has been a favourite theme to expand the Bible statement that Christ came in the fulness of the times—exhibiting how the previous history of the race had been a progressive preparation of the human mind and heart for the Gospel. Those who fondly dwell on this truth by no means deny that Christ came down from heaven, nor do they for a moment imagine that there is any contradiction in affirming the supernatural origin of the Gospel and its emergence as the ripe product of ages of development. Had Christ come a thousand years earlier he had come too soon, and his message would have vanished as too early blossoms do; and had he longer tarried the favourable opportunity of grasping the human reason had been lost. Had He come and selected India or China for the sphere of His manifestation, He had addressed himself to the blind and deaf, and had found no soil of apostolic souls in which His word could take root. It was necessary that He should appear in Judæa and die on Calvary; necessary that the Greek language and philosophy should have prepared a mould for His doctrine, and attuned the human mind into affinity pith His message; necessary that the Roman arms should have civilized and unified the nations, and prepared a highway for apostolic feet; necessary that men's souls should have been wearied and made hungering and thirsting by long experience of the curse resting on all life. Only when the fulness of the times had come did God send forth His Son. But as it is with the race so it is with the individual. "The City of God lieth four-square, and the length is as large as the breadth." The laws which rule the whole of God's ways rule every part of them. Christ can come to no man except in the fulness of the time. Christ could not any sooner have come to Paul or Augustine, or Luther. There is ever a prepratory work of grace and of providence. There is a previous attuning of the soul, deepening of the soil of the part, ploughing up of the furrows of the mind, an inten- page 28 sifying of the moral consciousness, an elevation of the reason, an awakening and purification of the heart by sorrow and waiting; then Christ is formed in us, and the Son of God revealed.

There is a false supernaturalism which will know nothing of all this, and flouts the idea of the necessity of natural conditions and a historical development and evolution of religion, or to religion. Is not the Gospel to be preached to every creature under heaven, adapted to man as man, and therefore to every man just as he is, and whatsoever he is? Is not every man to whom the message comes even here and now bound to receive it? Do not facts witness that it finds entrance among all sorts and conditions of men in all stages of culture and civilisation Wheresoever the Gospel is received, do we not ascribe the result to grace alone? Must we indeed send the printing press or the plough first, and the missionary afterwards?

It is difficult to adjust matters here, because we cannot sharply distinguish between the natural and supernatural, nor have we any means of determining where one ceases and the other begins. God and Nature are to our vision fused and blended, and God's activity is not known by us otherwise than as the process of Nature. The action of the Spirit of God in us and on us is never known or traced by us otherwise than as an intensified activity within our mind and heart. We insist, therefore, on the plain fact that as Christ did come and could only come to the race in the fulness of a natural preparation and under favourable conditions, so is it even now with individual souls; and if we are to deny in the case of individuals the need of certain natural antecedents, we may as well affirm that Christ might equally well have come at any point of space or hour of time. It is not possible that the Gospel can be received by minds which are as undeveloped as those of babes even to comprehend its ideas, and whose language supplies no equivalents; or by such as have been for ages inured to habits of thought and ways of viewing all things, and forms of emotion which are as different page 29 from those of the Gospel as an ellipse from a circle. Nor need we hope to reverse all this and adjust their mental focus to ours, except by long and patient effort continued through generations, and by allying the schoolmaster with the missionary. It is notorious that where Christianity is seemingly received by unprepared peoples, it is instantly converted back into a transformed superstition, never fits their mind aright, and is ever in danger of being tossed away to leave them worse than they were. The Gospel has never yet found true lodgment in national or individual minds, unless it come in response to the cry of prepared hearts, "Come over and help us!"

We have been leading up to the assertion that in the case of many the favourable conditions for the emergence of Christian piety and the reception of Christ are not found, nor is the natural preparation ever completed in this life. Their hour has not come; and meanwhile the Gospel passes them by, finding no affinities in their moral and intellectual life. It is as rain upon the desert, or music to the deaf. "But is not this their sin and guilt; why regard it as calamity?" It is at once their sin and their calamity. The pre-Christian heathens were sinfully apostate from God, yea sinners exceedingly; and yet was their whole history a discipline of God's providence, preprint them for Christ, gathering up results through the centuries till the hour had come. So is it with individuals; and in dealing with them, as well as with nations, to God a thousand years are as one day. So many, through this whole life, scarcely open their eyes to the light of thought, or awake from the stupor and passivity of childhood; so many are immersed in wildest ignorance; so many grasped by error and superstition that time enough is not given them for self-emancipation; so many are made to hate the Gospel, and prevented even coming face to face with it, through the sins and errors of its representatives and the human incrustations hiding its true meaning, and thus become infidels by mistake; so many, even gifted minds, have to work their way by such intricate paths and painful circuits; so many have to take so long a journey into a page 30 far land, and sink so very low before they come unto themselves; so many sons of Ham and Japheth are there who have so great a way to wander before they can make the circuit back to the God of Shem: but is not the Father's eve upon them? Are their names not written in His book? They die and pass away from sight, when as yet the discipline of God's Providence and Spirit has achieved no definite result; but what are three-score years and fen in God's eternity? What a thousand years to God's patient mercy? Their passing by is no eternal passing by; it is simply God's wisdom and prudence, and the calmness of God who never hastens and never tarries: he knoweth that the fulness of the time will come.

A new conception here dawns on us of the true meaning of election and pretention. There is and must needs be in each generation an election of grace. There are those in every age who represent the ripest fruits of generations of culture, who embody and express the culminating points to which humanity has attained in specific departments. They are the world's lights, leaders, kings, and priests; sources of life and inspiration, alluring men on wards and upwards, serving to all who know them as prophetic harbingers of day, revealers of the possibilities latent in every spirit. The election hidden in Israel and in heathendom who knew the Christ when he came, were simply the souls in which all the preparation culminated and in every nation and in every age the Gospel acts like a magnet, drawing the kindred spirits to its light. The regenerate are indeed privileged ones—a chosen generation—the elect of the earth; but elected, not to the eternal exclusion of all others, but in advance of all others, and serving to God as an offering of the first ripe fruits of redeemed humanity. There are in every age and nation those who are passed by, to whom the Spirit suffereth not to preach the word, but it is simply that their hour has not yet come. For every human spirit, here or hereafter the high hour of God's call comes: and there is not an hour in the course of time in which souls do not kindle up into a true existence, as God's voice pierces the page 31 recesses of their being. As the law which rules the movement of planets, determines also the shape and movement of the dewdrop, so the mighty purpose of grace which presides over humanity guides also every separate human spirit, and will not desert it through ten thousand waiting years.

§ 17. We proceed now to consider the ethical and religious effects of a real belief in the limitation of probation to this short life, along with its necessary implications and inferences; and it will serve us as an additional argument if we can succeed in showing that the traditional view bathes the spirit in a pestilential miasma. Fortunately it is not believed with a realizing faith, else it would convert the world into a madhouse and fill all places with weeping and wailing. It may well excite astonishment that so many good and true men who accept the traditional doctrine are well and hearty, marry and are given in marriage, laugh and drink their wine with a merry heart, and take a warm interest in politics, commerce, and art. They are not monsters of heartless depravity; but they do not realise what they say they believe, do not think of it except at wide intervals, have learned a trick of turning away from it as "a mystery" when it threatens to come in upon them too powerfully; and more than that, they have still in the depths of their hearts a faith in a divine love brooding overall existence, under which they shelter themselves, leaving the incompatible theory to look after itself and right itself some future day. But it behoves us with a very steady gaze to contemplate our creed, weigh its significance, and suffer its whole ethical effect to pass upon us; and if we do so, we shall hardly avoid the conclusion that a doctrine which wraps all life in deepest gloom and involves the wildest pessimism can be no part, either explicit or implicit, of the glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.

If it be true—and true it must be on the traditional view—that the overwhelming mass of all the myriads who have ever lived have gone down to hell forever, then the page 32 past history of humanity is the ghastliest of records.; We delight ourselves in the heroic story of ancient Greece and Rome, and our whole present existence is enriched by their achievements; but we are haunted as if by the spell of an evil conscience, thus sitting at a banquet and making ourselves glad with the tears and blood of souls. When we read the pages of Grote, Niebuhr, and Gibbon, and the old belief sends its hot breath over our face, we are startled as if we heard the tramp of armies of men marching on to eternal perdition. We have to turn away our eyes as if there were a lurid glare of hellfire on all the literature and works of art of the whole ancient world. I know that by means of all that ancient history God was preparing the way for Christ; but had those individual men and women no share in the blessing which they were used to prepare? Were they simply used as manure to prepare a harvest of blessing for us? The brain reels and staggers under the weight of an impossible belief.

But it is when we turn our eyes on the contemporary world, and realize the fact that, if grace is limited to this life, the overwhelming majority of the myriads now living will soon be in hell—it is then we realise the frightful character of the current creed. The mighty populations of India and China, and other lands, are simply pouring their torrents of souls into hell? We are surely then nothing but monsters of inhumanity. Beyond getting bread and raiment enough to keep death at arm's length every form of human interest and activity whatsoever, except evangelism, seems worse than vanity—even a kind of hideous wickedness. The man who earnestly busies himself with literature, art, or science, is infinitely worse than a Nero fiddling while the Christians burnt in their tar shirts. The extremest form of the ethical sentiment of what would be called ultra-evangelicalism is only irrational in not being sufficiently extreme. The only consistant Christians are the wildest fanatics; their shriekings are wisdom; they frown on all pleasure just and right; and those whose creed has made them tenants of lunation asylums, alone are tenderhearted and true. If it be even page 33 as men nave said, we must curse the day in which we were born, hate all existance, view human life and history as a huge error, and judge it to have been infinitely better that the world had never existed.

Let us bring the matter even a little closer to ourselves. Hell will soon have swallowed up the great mass of all who are alive! and of all with whom we are in daily contact! So has it been;. so will it be at least for this and many generations to come. It must then be an infinitely evil thing to have sons and daughters, and yet we do not (as same ancient people did) clothe ourselves in mourning when a child is born, no wild wail proceeds from us, although it is more than probable that a new victim of hell has been ushered into being. Why do we not shudder with horror whenever we look upon a crowd? Why does not a sea of human faces send up a lamentable and exceeding bitter cry—not of sorrow, but of despair—from the depths of our hearts? Why is not every bride attired in sackeloth? Why does the bridegroom come forth from his chamber with a face shining like the morning light Were the secret effects of the common belief revealed, many a tragic tale would come to light—of mothers raining scalding tears over their sleeping babes, pitying them for the woeful earth into which they had come—of fathers standing over a sleeping infant son wondering in the bitter anguish of their spirit whether it were not good and a sublime act of self-sacrificing philanthrophy to quench the little life, and send his soul to heaven—aye, of frantic mothers and fathers who have done such deeds. A creed, logically involving such hideous suggestions, cannot possibly be true. No such pessimistic doctrine has ever been presented to mankind; and O! merciful Christ! as part of thy glad tidings! We cannot wonder that the joyful enthusiasm of the New Testament has passed away from the Churches, and that their atmosphere has become see of sombre and oppressive gloom.

We must be able to believe that God bestowed a great and precious gift on us in calling us into being, and be able to find the joy of our hearts justified when we rejoice over page 34 a new man born into the world; that is, we must be able to believe in an infinite and eternal love resting on the world, on all human life, and every separate individual life. We must be able to take a calm and rational joy in all the activities of men under the sun, as all co-operating to the slow but firm and sure evolution of the purpose of Divine love to all the sons of men; and must so believe as to be able to survey all things with the calmness and peace of God. We must be persuaded in our hearts that no doctrine can be a gospel which with inevitable logic and moral necessity wraps the heart in dismal gloom and dreariest horror of existence as accursed. But it does not seem possible to attain to this calm gladsome thought and feeling except on the supposition that the Divine mercy to men is not bounded by this little life, and the Divine purpose of grace does not exhaust itself within the fleeting years which hem our vision and form but a chapter of the eternal life of souls.

§ 8. We now adduce as a concluding argument that the extension of human probation into the future life is an inevitable inference from the universal Fatherhood of God as manifested in the universal death of Christ. There was confessedly a hard and stern logic in the strict Calvinism of the 17th century divines. They said that out of the whole mass of sinful and guilty human beings, all present before the divine mind, God had, for wise and holy but inscrutable reasons, selected a numerically definite number whom he purposed to save, and does infallibly save, gathering them out of the successive generations till the elected number is made up; the rest he passes by, and leaves to perish, having never had any purpose of grace towards them, Christ having made no oblation for them, as charged to execute the Father's purpose only, having no such intention. Nothing could surpass this doctrine for consummate logical finish, viewed, so to speak, as a theory of the moral universe. But shall we really pretend to believe that this is any longer the living faith of the Church? or pretend not to know that, while we slept and page 35 waked, it has passed away like an evil dream? Or, shall we say, It is indeed still held—only another series of propositions is written against it, which are also true, and which, although contradictory, only seem to us to be so; that these latter propositions are the more important; the former to be held but the latter to be believed; the former to be kept for theological purposes, the latter for all practical uses of life. Anyhow, men have decided to have their doctrines as loose unhewn stones rather than shelter them pelves under the savage and gloomy masonry of unsupplemented Calvinism. The doctrine of the present hour, so-called Calvinistic, is much diluted; and at risk of whatsoever logical incoherence, those who call themselves after Calvin claim right to affirm without qualification the universal Fatherhood of God and His equal love to all men, that Christ died for all men and every separate man, and that God unequivocally wills that all men should be saved. But Logic will master us, and the movements of thought and feeling will in no wise escape from its grasp. We must needs advance a stage further in our reconstruction. We cannot bring this new and better way of thinking into harmony will the ways of God in Providence and the facts of human life, if death puts an absolute limit to the possibility of salvation. Is God Universal Father—and summons myriads into a wretched existence of a few years without furnishing them either help or light, or once reaching a hand to shelter or bless them? Did God indeed love these generations of Patagonians and Tammanies even as Christ loved John? Did Christ indeed shed His blood for myriads who by no possibility could once hear his name all the days of their life on earth? Let us go back if we will to the stern attitude of those who pointed to these things as proof of God's eternal decree of præterition; but if not, let us not shrink from inevitable inference that here we see but a part of the ways of God with men, and that the message of mercy must needs resound in both worlds.

We find, then, the traditional doctrine arbitrary, fraught with difficulties of every kind, oppressive to page 36 reason, deadly to wholesome ethical feeling, destructive of religious joy and elevation of heart, beclouding faith, and wrapping all things in intolerable gloom. We reject it as a poisonous error and a parasitical growth; we abhor it is a falsehood against the love of God and the mercy of Christ; we tear it from our minds as the enwrapping of the mouldering garments of a superstition. We believe, in a Divine Love, which is from everlasting to everlasting; in the Mercy of God, which endureth for ever; in a Divine Grace, bathing with sunlight the visible and in visible worlds; and that to the end of time the heart of God remains open as a refuge to every creature whom His hands have fashioned.