" I Feel that a desire to have been more spent and to have suffered more for my beloved Master in this theater of His humiliation is the only thing that could make me hesitate in my longing desire to be with Him who is and has been so abundantly with me."
Letters of Lady Powerscourt.

This is the closing hallelujah, the praise of God in His sanctuary, His upper sanctuary, "the firmament of His power." The preceding was His praise in the lower sanctuary, "the congregation of saints." There, Israel was heard ; but here, the heavens. His acts and Himself, His greatness and His ways, are the themes of this lofty praise. " All kinds of music," as it were, dulcimer, sackbut, flute, psaltery (for loud joy will, in its place, be as holy as once it was profane, Dan. 3:), are summoned to sound it, and to sound it loudly, and all who have faculty to praise, to join the hallelujah. Every verse teems with praise. Every thought is about it. Every object awakens it. Every power uses itself only in this service.

The Levites have changed their service. No longer have they burdens to bear through a wilderness, but they lift up their songs in the house of the Lord, (I Chron. 15:16; 23:25, 26, 30.)

The heavens have changed their bearing also. They have ended their laughter at the proud confederates (Ps. 2:), for such confederates have been answered in judgment; and they are filled with joy and singing, and with that glory which is to break forth from them, and to be a covering over all the dwellings of Zion. (Is. 4:)

These are "the days of heaven upon the earth." (Deut. 11:21.) The kingdom has come, and the will of the Blessed One is done here as there. The mystic ladder connects the upper and the lower sanctuaries.

But these closing psalms, I may observe, do not spread out before us the materials of the millennial world. Jerusalem, Israel, the nations with their kings, princes, and judges, the heavens and the earth, and all creation throughout its order, are contemplated as in "the restitution " and " refreshing," but they are detailed, as there, in their mere circumstances. It is rather the praise of all that is heard. The Psalmist anticipates the harps rather than the glories of the kingdom ; and this is beautifully characteristic.

Praise crowns the scene. The vision passes from before us with the chanting of all kinds of music. Man has taken the instrument of joy into his hand ; to strike it, however, only to God's glory. And this is the perfect result of all things-the creature is happy and God glorified. " Glory and honor are in His presence ; strength and gladness are in His place." (i Chron. 16:27.)

What a close of the Psalms of David ! what a close of the ways of God ! Joy indeed has come in the morning, and struck its note for the " one eternal day." Praise ye the Lord! Amen.

Yes, praise, all praise ; untiring, satisfying fruit of lips uttering the joy of creation, and owning the glory of the Blessed One. This is righteous happiness.

And here, in connection with this, and on closing these meditations, let the thought cheer us, beloved, that happiness, and that forever, is ours. There may have been a path through Calvary, and the scorn of the world, and the grave of death ; but it led to joy and everlasting pleasures. The way for a season lay by the waters of Babylon, but Jerusalem was regained-as our psalms have shown us. The valley of Baca was the way to the house of God. "Tribulation," it may be; but, "I will see you again," said Jesus.
As to our title to it, there is to be no reserve, no suspicion in our souls. It is our divinely appointed portion. To come short of happiness will be the end only of revolted hearts.. Our title to look for it is of God Himself. It lies in the blood of Jesus, the Son of God, the God-man, given for us, in the riches of divine grace ; and faith in us reads, understands, and pleads that title. And there is no reason for hesitating to enjoy its fruit and benefit- none whatever. No more reason than Adam would have had to question his right to enjoy the garden of Eden because he had never planted it, nor for the camp of Israel in the desert to drink of the water from the rock because they had never opened it. The garden was planted for Adam, the rock was opened for Israel; and so has the Savior, and all the joy that His salvation brings with it, been as simply and surely provided for sinners. Our souls are to make it a question of Christ's glory, and not of our worthiness. He made it so when He was here. He never led a diseased or maimed one to inquire into his own fitness, but simply to own His hand and His glory. "If thou canst believe," that is, if thou art ready to glorify Me, to be debtor to Me for this blessing, then take it and welcome.

Then as to our resources. It is not merely love we have to do with, power is on our side also. Love and power together shall form the scene we are to gaze on forever, as they have from the beginning been " workers together " for us, teaching us our wondrous resources.

See them thus working together in some little instances in the days of the Lord Jesus. Five thousand are fed with five loaves and two fishes. Fed to the full-and twelve baskets of fragments left! This tells the wealth of the Lord of the feast, as well as His kindness. And what satisfaction of heart does this communicate ! If we draw on the bounty of another, and have reason to fear that we have partaken of what he needed himself, our enjoyment abates. This fear will intrude, and rightly so, and spoil our ease while we sit at his table. But when we know that behind the table which is spread for us there are stores in the house, such fears are forbidden. The thought of the wealth of the host, as well of his love, sets all at ease. And it is to be thus with us in our enjoyment of Christ. J.G.B.

BY JAMES ERSKINE. (Published in 1825.)

It is possible that the doctrine of "the perseverance of saints" should be so perverted by the corruption of human nature as to lead to indolent security and un-watchful habits. But this is not the doctrine as stated in the Bible. The true doctrine is, that, as it was God who first opened the eyes of sinners to the glory of the truth, so their continuance in the truth requires and receives the same almighty support to maintain it. It is not in their title to heaven as distinct from the path to heaven that they are maintained and preserves. No ; they " are kept by the power of God, through faith, unto salvation." This doctrine, then, really leads to humble dependence upon God, as the only support of our weakness; and to vigilance, from the knowledge that, when we are not actually living by faith, we are out of that way in which believers are kept by the power of God unto salvation. The reality of our faith is proved only by our perseverance :if we do not persevere, we are not saints.

Any one of the doctrines of the atonement which can make us fearless or careless of sinning must be a wrong view ; because it is not good, nor profitable to men. That blessed doctrine declares sin pardoned, not because it is overlooked or winked at, but because the weight of its condemnation has been sustained on our behalf by our Substitute and Representative. This makes sin hateful, by connecting it with the blood of our best Friend.

There are many persons who may be said rather to believe in an ecclesiastical polity than in the doctrines of the Bible. In such cases, the impression must be similar to that which is produced by political partisanship in the governments of this world. And there are some whose faith extends to higher things who yet attach too much weight to externals.

Any view of subjects, that may be believed or disbelieved without affecting our faith in the atonement, which can produce a coldness or unkindness between those who rest in the atonement and live by the faith of it, must be a wrong view, because it mars that character of love which Christ declares to be the badge of His people. Such a view interferes with the doctrine of the atonement. Love to Christ, as the exclusive hope and the compassionate all-sufficient Friend of lost sinners, is the life-blood of the Christian family ; and wherever it flows, it carries along with it relationship to Christ, and a claim on the affection of those who call themselves His. What is a name, or a sect, that it should divide those who are to live together in heaven through eternity, and who here love the same Lord, and who have been washed in the same blood, and drink of the same river of the water of life, and have access through the same Mediator, by the same Spirit, unto the Father? This is a very serious consideration. It touches on that final sentence which shall be pronounced on the sheep and the goats, " Come, ye blessed ;" why blessed ? " Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me. " Depart, ye cursed ;" and why cursed ? " Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me." It is not a general benevolence that is talked of here; no, it is love to Christ exerting itself in kindness, and acts of kindness, to His brethren, for His sake. This is the grand and preeminently blessed feature of the Christian character. Its presence is the sea of heaven on the soul; its absence is the exclusion from heaven. We should take heed to ourselves; for any flaw in this respect marks a corresponding flaw in our Christian faith. The importance of the blood of Christ is not rightly perceived if it does not quench these petty animosities. God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him. An undue importance attached to inferior points is surely not good or profitable to men.

(NOTES OF A LECTURE.)

Read 2 Sam. 15:13-16:14, and Ps. 84:

My object in reading the chapters I have is, that in them we find something that in this day is very rare, and which I am sure, as we look at it a little together, with the Lord's help, we shall say, " Would God I knew more of it! "

What I refer to is simply this, that we have here before us a. man passing through the most trying circumstances, and yet one who looks out of it all and puts his trust in God, and so goes on perfectly calm and at rest, come what will.

Now what we find ourselves constantly saying is, that if this thing were set right that is a trial to me, or if this difficulty were removed, I should be free to enjoy the Lord more.

But change the circumstances, and remove what appears to be a hindrance to our enjoyment, and what will be the result? Shall we be more happy than before? No, we should not; for though circumstances might be altered and brighter, yet what is at the bottom and causes the unhappiness is there still. Whatever I may be, I carry the same heart of distrust with me, and until we have learned to judge that, there is no true rest. How often do we try, and vainly too, to get things right here, and overlook all the time the blessings we might be enjoying where we are. We forget that He has said, " In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world;" and along with this, " These things have I spoken unto you that in Me ye might have peace." And if really in the sanctuary of God's presence,, we should say often, " I would not have it otherwise if I could." Not that our hearts should not feel the state of things around and amongst us, nor that there is not much in ourselves and elsewhere that should rightly exercise us :surely there is, but we have this in God's Word :" Be careful for nothing." What! not careful about anything? No, "careful for nothing" absolutely nothing. And how can this be ? Is it that there is nothing to give us care and sorrow down here ? There is much, surely. But we have in what follows how it can be, " In every thing by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God." (Phil. 4:6.) What a relief ! There is not a sorrow or a burden that I am not privileged to bring there and tell into His ear. And what then ? " The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds by Christ Jesus."

Just look at Paul, and see where he is at the time of his writing this, and how far circumstances are affecting him. We find him in prison at Rome, in bonds for the gospel, shut out from the work which was so dear to his heart, and what effect has it upon him? Does it cast him down ? No; look at what he says in chap. 1:He would have them know that his "bonds had fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel." " I do rejoice,-yea, and will rejoice." He thought of Him who was carrying on His own work notwithstanding all that came in seemingly to hinder; and with all the evil before him fully, and felt by him, he would tell the saints of a joy and rest above all the sorrow. What effect could circumstances have on a man like this? None whatever:circumstances can have no power when our confidence is in God ; but when that is wanting, we are easily affected by them. They only test how far we are leaning upon God, and simply trusting Him.

But we may give up our Nazariteship, and neglect to walk with God; our strength is then gone, and we are" weak as other men," and, just like Samson, say, in view of our enemies, "I will go out, as at other times before, and shake myself." But " he wist not that the Lord had departed from him." The provocation of the Philistines brings out this, but his strength was gone before ; and so with us,-the trials only prove where we are. They do not make us weak ; but if we give way before them, they prove that we have departed from the source of strength. And as we have God, by Jeremiah, when recalling to the hearts of Israel the cause of their ruin, saying, " My people have committed two evils :they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." God is practically given up, and something else taken up with.

We see again with Israel at Sinai the same thing. They had got a golden calf in the camp in the place of God, from whom they had turned away; and when Moses had been in intercession with God, and entreats for their forgiveness, God says that He will not go up in the midst of them, but will send an angel before to lead them into the promised land. His threat of judgment made them mourn ; but the land flowing with milk and honey, and an angel to lead them there, suited very well. But Moses goes deeper. Nothing suits the man of faith but God Himself. Israel may be satisfied with an angel by the way and the land at the end, but faith says, "If Thy presence go not with us, carry us not up hence." Let us not move a step on the way without that. What was the angel's presence and the promised land to him if Jehovah withheld His presence?

And it was just this that brought Israel to Bochim, as we read in the book of Judges, and David into the place in which we find him in these chapters, " passing through the valley of Baca." The place of strength, because of self-judgment, had been left. It was there that the " ark of God " had made a way for them through Jordan. The reproach of Egypt had rolled away, and Gilgal tells of not only deliverance from the "iron furnace," but of entrance into the promised rest, and circumcision is renewed. In all their wars at first, they returned there, to the camp at evening. And where is our Gilgal but at the cross of Jesus, the heart returning there to meditate upon its glories and the results for us of not only deliverance from Egypt, but entrance into Canaan ?

There must be walking in self-judgment, denying the flesh a place, to walk in confidence with God and consequent strength. If this is not done, another thing will surely come-we shall find, instead of strength at Gilgal, tears at Bochim. ("Baca" and "Bochim" both from the same root, meaning "tears," or "weeping.") And may we not ask ourselves, Am I at Gilgal, and finding there strength through the circumcision of nature, the judgment of it as before the cross ?

But we get when Israel left that, God did not give them up ; they did not gain victories, 'tis true, but God still follows them. What wondrous grace ! and what comfort for our hearts!

So God uses Bochim to discipline and break us down, as he did with Israel, and here also with David.

David had sinned against the Lord, and is here driven from his throne into exile by his son, and he gets to Baca, and what he finds even there is refreshment and blessing, when bowed to the hand of God. He "makes a well, and the rain fills the pools." There is no place in which God cannot bless us, if we are in a state of soul to receive it.

The first thing I would notice here is the unselfishness that comes out in David. He would send Ittai back :he would not have others to go into exile and sorrow with him. But Ittai, true-hearted and devoted, would cast in his lot with him, and share his fortunes, whether in rejection or glory. And such is the path of the Church, sharing with Christ His rejection, as soon His glory.

But it is David under discipline we are engaged with now, and the next thing we have to witness is his telling Zadok and Abiathar to carry back the ark of God into the city. Now why was this ? Was it that David did not value it ? Witness the joy he had in bringing it from Ephratah (Bethlehem) to Zion, type of the journeying of the true ark, the Lord Jesus, from His birthplace to the cross-the place where (or the work, rather, by which) God could find a rest among sinners. Why, then, take back that ark, but to show us that God's rest is undisturbed- remains the same, notwithstanding all the ups and downs of His people, and that rest is where His people look in faith while passing through the trials of this scene ? "How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts!" etc. And therefore he says, " If He find pleasure in me, then will He bring me back, and show me both it and His habitation."

And is it not so for our hearts amidst all the circumstances that summoned us here ! Where can one turn to for comfort and rest in this evil world? Is there one thing not spoiled by sin ? Well, if there is nothing here that the heart can find rest in, think of God's tabernacle being open to you. When man had spoiled all down here, both for God and himself, God opens heaven by the cross to sinners, and says, There is the place I have for you now. And where can our hearts turn from all this scene of failure and ruin? Not to the Church, or things being set right here, either in it or in the world, but to God's habitation, in the blessed assurance that He who has gone to prepare a place for us in there in the Father's house will come and take us to it, that we may be with Himself where He is.

All this with David is, "If He delight in me :" a question we cannot raise who are accepted in the Beloved ; but he adds, " If He say, I have no delight in thee:behold, here am I, let Him do to me as seemeth good to Him." What a blessed state of soul this was ! He says, God's will is best; if I am never brought back, yet He does what is right. What lies at the root of half our trouble is that we are not come to this in our souls-our wills are too unbroken ; the moment we are broken in spirit, we are happy; nothing but self-will hinders our blessing. We like to have our own way naturally, and practically deny God's right to order every thing in our circumstances for us. But God will be God, whatever people make of it; and He does what He pleases and where He pleases and when He pleases ; but what He does is always right. But can we say, " Let God do just what He pleases with me ? " There is this thing that is a trial, and that thing which I should like changed ; but whilst in prayer I can tell Him all these things, and find relief about them thus, my heart should say, " Let God do as seemeth good unto Him."

What we often do in circumstances that try us, and varied pressure that comes on us, is to turn to wretched expedients instead of the living God. But look at David here, his heart pressed with sorrow, his own son driving him from the throne and seeking his life, yet he accepts it all at the hand of God, and looks out to the place of His dwelling, and leaves all to God to order for him.

They speak to him of Ahithophel being among the conspirators. Now David knew him to be a crafty man, and one likely to do him much harm ; and what does he do? He turns to God, and says, "O Lord, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel to foolishness." He casts His cares upon God. He goes to the top of the hill and worships, and there receives an answer at once. He finds at once comfort for his heart and rest about the evil of Ahithophel, and there finds the suited man to do the needed work in Hushai.

In coming to the sixteenth chapter, we find what is sorrowful, in the easy way in which David was deceived by Ziba about Mephibosheth, but we pass from this to a brighter part of the scene. Shimei takes advantage of his sorrow to heap reproach upon him, and attributes his suffering to a wrong cause, and openly curses him. Deliverance is easy, and Abishai would go and "take off his head," and the Spirit of God marks out his being "surrounded with all his mighty men." He had power to deliver himself from his enemy. But for David, God is seen in it all, and deliverance must come from the hand of God, and he will have no other. He would have God put him right, and accepts at His hand the chastisement for his sins. God is the One who occupies his thoughts.

And this is what we have in Ps. 84:, which refers to this time. David's thoughts are about God's house, and His altars, and the One who dwelt there, when himself in exile, and passing through the valley of Baca. He is weeping as he goes along. And what about? About failure. And yet David in his palace, a great man, was not half so happy as when driven out into exile and looking to God's house. He was satisfied with the excellency of Him who dwelt there, and longing to be with Him.

David had enough to give him a bad conscience and a troubled heart ; and surely he felt it all, and rightly so. God had forgiven all, according to the word of Nathan, " The Lord hath put away thy sin;" but he was reaping the fruit of his sin, and that fruit was bitter in itself. Yet so gracious the God we know that there is no place in which He will not bless. Even here there is a well springing up in the place of discipline for failure. Have we not found it so ourselves, according to our measure, oftentimes? Peter got his heart into this scene; his self-confidence leads to a thorough break-down, and he denies the One he professed to love beyond the rest. A look from that Blessed One sends him out to weep bitterly and after He is risen, the Lord goes on to restore his soul; and did not he find a well there ? Surely he did. H:had his heart probed to the bottom, that the cause of failure might be seen and judged, and then the well was opened, an abundant spring.

But that is not all, "the rain also filleth the pools," Not only is a well springing up there, but blessing comes down from above, There is no thirst left. It is not saying," My moisture is turned into the drought of summer," but refreshment full to overflowing. May we not mote and more covet this place,-not the failure, of course, but the blessed sense of what God is to us? What He wants to do is, to get at our hearts; and to do that, He must break down our wills. He has a controversy with all that is of the flesh in us, and when our confidence in that s broken, He leads us on from strength to strength; " Every one of them in Zion appeareth before God:' And this is what He is doing with us, teaching us our weakness, bringing our hearts to own it, and then bringing in His strength for us. Now the end is all triumph and praise.

It is in the sense of this that David can say, although the world had spread out its glories before him, "A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand; I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness."

"The Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord will give grace and glory." " He will give grace ;" He has done this, and " He will give glory." You can only have it from Him, and He will give it. What blessedness is this, beginning with grace and ending with glory ! But there is more than that:" No good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly." All along the way we have Him doing this, blessing us at every step. Does He give us every thing we want? Oh, no; but " no good thing will He withhold." He meets us in every need we have, giving, in His love, what is good for us. Are we happy in its being so? "O Lord of Hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in Thee." R.T.G.

In the present time of wide-spread disbelief in the inspiration of Scripture, and when one has so often to sorrow over the surrender of an orthodox faith on the part of those who had professed it, it is good to be able to record on the opposite side the working of God's grace in bringing those into subjection to His Word who have been conspicuous in their opposition to its claims. The clipping from a newspaper given below is an example of this kind in the case of the first contributor to the well-known Essays and Reviews which, published in 1860, aroused so much attention and opposition as to call forth in England alone, it is said, nearly four hundred publications. Dr. Temple was at that time head-master of Rugby school, and his appointment to a bishopric sometime after was naturally strongly opposed on account of the views to which he had given utterance.

Dr. Temple's essay was indeed one of the least offensive in the unhappy volume, where it appeared, however, shoulder to shoulder with the most pronounced and destructive rationalism. Yet in his own essay on "The Education of the World," he makes Scripture only a means of exalting man's " conscience " to a place above it, which is characteristic of the world's manhood, when, he says, "the spirit or conscience comes to full strength, and assumes the throne intended for him in the soul. As an accredited judge, he sits in the tribunal of our inner kingdom, decides upon the past and legislates upon the future, without appeal, except to himself . . . He is the third great teacher, and the last." So supreme is he, indeed, and so strange is the manner of his adjudication, that even " Christ came just at the right time "* to escape it ; " if He had waited till the present age, His incarnation would have been misplaced, and we could not recognize His divinity; for the faculty of faith has turned inward, and cannot now accept any outward manifestations of the truth of God." (! !) *I quote from Hurst's "History of nationalism" here.*

These are published statements, and they are brought forward now only to magnify, as we may be sure Dr. Temple would wish us, the grace of God which has changed all this for him. The Churchman says,-

It is curious, as a piece of intellectual history, to compare the writer of " The Education of the World " with the Bishop Temple who has recently been lecturing on the Scriptures in London. In that number of Essays and Reviews, the conscience of the individual reader of the Scriptures was exalted above the written Word, and given the power to correct it. The dangerous admissions of this essay were recognized and condemned even by Bishop Thirlwall in his charge of 1863. In the Bishop of London's recent Polytechnic lecture, we find a complete and genuine palinode to his earlier utterances.

It is said, only fools cannot change their minds. The Bishop had no hesitation in saying, on the occasion referred to, that the more he read the Bible through from end to end, the more the things in it seemed to be master of him; so that if he differed from it, he was driven to the conclusion that either he did not understand it or that he was in the wrong. The spirit of it was so supreme over all that he could think or imagine of the purest and holiest things that it was absolutely necessary that he should accept Us authority. When, too, he studied the unique Figure in humanity which stood unapproachable by all philosophers or heroes, his conscience, which bowed before the Book, bowed still more before that majestic Royalty which spoke with authority, not as a learned man, not as a philosopher, not as a guide or a teacher who, having gathered knowledge from various sources, communicated it-with a voice which bore eternal truth with no qualification, and which was plain for every one to hear and to understand.

The italics are our own, and this lecture should be read by doubting minds of to-day as one of the most striking examples of a recantation from previous latitudinarianism which have ever been volunteered by a mind at once honest, strong, and thoroughly devotional.

May God in His goodness raise up many such witnesses ! and may it encourage prayer for those who as leaders in the present day unbelief may be all the more to the praise of that grace in their being turned from darkness to light, and to Him in whom that light has shined !

The question of the Lord's having been a priest on I earth is one to which, now that the attention of many is being drawn to it, should be given due and patient consideration. Mistake on this point may easily lead to further error, as should be plain to us, and there needs no apology for another review of the subject here, in which especially it is my desire to look at some things which as yet have had but brief and unsatisfactory notice in these pages, if any. I shall, however, briefly state the whole argument.

1. The main ground for the belief that the Lord was not a priest on earth is certainly Heb. 8:4, which, however, says nothing of the kind. Speaking of Christ as " a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man," it say's, " If He were on earth, He should not be a priest." And why? " Seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law." That is, the place is occupied already ! Well, but what place ! Plainly that of offering gifts according to the law. But would any of the Lord's work on earth have interfered with that? The question is idle, of course. So, then, is the argument which needs to raise the question :for it is this, and only this, from which the apostle argues, that there are priests already installed in the legal sanctuary, and doing the legal work. Could the work of the cross come in here ? Nay, if you will observe, with the perfect accuracy of Scripture, while in the third verse the apostle says that "every high-priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices," when he goes on to the argument of the fourth verse, he drops the " sacrifices," because in the Lord's present priestly work there is no sacrifice, and only says, " Seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law." Backward he does not look:he does not say, " When He was on earth He was not a priest"-how would that look in connection with what follows?-and to import this into it is surely unallowable. Put in its connection, the whole statement is, "If He, a minister of the sanctuary, were on earth, He would not be a priest, for there are priests that are already fulfilling that office as to the sanctuary on earth." This is surely clear, and we may pass on.

2. A second objection to the doctrine of the Lord's having been priest on earth is derived from the fifth chapter, where it is stated that being " made perfect "… He was " called of God a high-priest after the order of Melchizedek :" thus it is urged, if He were made perfect through the things which He suffered, as all will allow, then it must be after His sacrificial work that He became high-priest.

Two things need, however, to be considered :first, that the word for "called," in this case, is not that for calling to an office, and that the actual word for that occurs before, where His calling seems clearly grounded, not upon His work, but upon His person:" And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron ; so also Christ glorified not Himself to be made high-priest ; but He that said unto Him,' Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten Thee ;' as He saith also in another place, ' Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.'" Then there can be no just doubt that the call to office is implied in the acknowledgment of Sonship. Otherwise these words would be irrelevant, and the last quotation would be the true and sufficient one. On the other hand, it is really His being the Son of God in humanity that constitutes His fitness for the priesthood,-that is, for the mediatorial office. Aaron's anointing without blood shows that His work was not needed for this ; and the acknowledgment of Sonship would thus be tantamount to the call, and the two quotations exactly harmonize.

It is after this that His sufferings are introduced ; and then, "being made perfect, He became the Author of eternal salvation. . . . saluted of God a high-priest after the order of Melchizedek." The work is done, and God greets the Victor by the title under which He has done the work. How suitable this when we know that every thing, with the great High-Priest Himself, had been under the cloud from which He has just emerged ! That here there should be the reaffirming of a title which was before His own, need cause no difficulty.

But it is affirmed that " perfected " means " consecrated," as it is translated in chap. 7:28, " consecrated for evermore." If, then, He was only consecrated as priest through the sufferings He endured, it is plain that He could not have been priest before His sufferings.

Yes, it is plain, if the basis of the reasoning be true :but is it true ? As to the word, " perfected " is truly the sense, as every one the least competent will admit; the margin and the Revised Version have it even in chap. 7:28. As to application, of course the force may vary according to this, and abstractly, the perfecting of a priest may be his consecration to office-may be not must; and the
application and the force are alike open to question here.

The application :-for the passage itself does not say " being made perfect as priest," nor is this connected in this way by the structure of the chapter ; and the strictly parallel passage (as it would appear), chap. 2:10, substitutes (if we may speak so) for priest, "the Captain of salvation :" " it became Him …. to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." Is not this very like :"And being made perfect, He became the Author of eternal salvation " ?

But if the connection be admitted (and I for one cannot be unwilling to admit that the Priest is as priest the Author of salvation), the conclusion does not follow that is supposed. It must then be asked, In what sense are we to take "perfected"? If as consecrated through sufferings, was that not at least on earth? and if He were consecrated through sufferings on earth, is not that inconsistent with the thought of a consecration by His being saluted as High-Priest after death, or perhaps resurrection ?Take it as " perfected,"-the Scripture word- and you may say as Priest, and I for one have no question and no difficulty. I believe there was such a " perfecting" of our blessed High-Priest, and that the lack of seeing it occasions much of the perplexity that many are in to-day. For since the apostle is addressing Christians, who have their place as Christians as the result of His accomplished work, it is necessarily a risen and ascended High-Priest with whom we have to do, and whom we need ; and thus his words are very simply applicable to Him as He now is :" Such a High-Priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens." (Chap. 7:26.)Yet even such statements show that he does not mean to deny that Christ was not High-Priest before He was " made higher than the heavens," or " passed into the heavens"
even (chap. 4:14), but in fact affirm that He was:for his language would be, otherwise, that He was passed into the heavens, and become Priest ; but this he never says.

3. But does not the apostle say that, in contrast with the Levitical priesthood, in which those who were priests " were not suffered to continue by reason of death," "this Man, because He continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood" (chap. 7:23, 24); and does not this imply that only after He had passed through death could He become Priest ? No :this is but an inference, and a false one, derived no doubt from too close a reference to mere earthly priests. Death would remove one of these from his place of office :could it remove similarly a heavenly priest ? It would rather introduce him to it. And the "endless life" after the power of which Christ was made Priest could only be that "eternal life," though in man, over which death could have no power. But this will be supplemented by after-considerations.

4. We must now look at some other statements of the epistle to the Hebrews, which seem to affirm in the strongest way the fact of the Lord's priesthood upon earth. In chap. 8:4, we have already found the apostle saying, "For every high-priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices; wherefore it is of necessity that this man have somewhat also to offer." Again :"For such a high-priest becometh us … who needeth not daily, as those high-priests, to offer up sacrifices, . . . for this He did once, when he offered up Himself." (Chap. 7:27.) "Wherefore in all things it behoved Him to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High-Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation (R.V.) for the sins of the people." (Chap. 2:17.) " But Christ being come, a High-Priest of good things to come, . . . neither by the blood of bulls and calves, but by His own blood, He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption." (Chap. 9:ii, 12.)

Now what is the consistent testimony of these passages ? Is it possible to say, in view of them, that it was not high-priestly work to offer sacrifice ? Surely not:they were ordained to do it. But was this typical of what Christ did as priest, or was it something in which the types failed to represent the truth, as shadows, but not the very image ? Nay, He was a merciful and faithful High-Priest to make propitiation-for that purpose,-and as the high-priests offered daily, so He offered up Himself. And then, as High-Priest still, by His own blood He entered the heavens.

Surely the texts are plain, and must be forced, to make them speak otherwise than upon the face of them they seem to do. Where did the High-Priest offer Himself up? In heaven, or on earth? How did the High-Priest enter heaven by His own blood, if He were not High-Priest till He entered heaven? Will the perfection of Scripture allow me to say that the High-Priest did these things, but not as High-Priest? and even where it is asserted that He was High-Priest to make propitiation, still that He did not make it "as" High-Priest?

No ; as believing in the perfection of the Word of God, we dare not say these things. If we were at liberty to interpolate Scripture after this fashion, it would soon cease to have authority over us, because it would cease to have meaning for us. Any body, in this case, could see how simply such passages could be altered for the better ; and if it be the exigency of what has seemed to us the meaning of some particular verse or verses which requires this, have we not the very best reason to see if indeed we have interpreted such passages aright? The apparent contradiction is the result only of partial views of truth :with the whole, the perplexity clears. Scripture has not to be perfected by our thoughts, but cleared from the mists which our thoughts introduce into it.

5. But, it is said, the priests did not kill the sacrifices, except where for themselves, and that this shows that Christ's work on the cross was not a priestly work. But in this way evidence might be brought against evidence:for the burning on the altar or on the ground, the sprinkling and pouring out of the blood, were so strictly priestly functions that no private person dare ever assume them. Yet these are but different sides of one blessed work. It is not even strictly true that the priest never killed the victim except where for himself ; for he did kill the burnt-offering of birds. (Lev. 1:15.) But in any case the burning upon the altar or upon the ground was the most strictly sacrificial part, and it belonged to the priest expressly. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that in the death of Christ we have the victim side, as we have the atoning side, and that the death at the offerer's hands may represent the victim, as the priest's work the atoning side. This, I have no doubt, is the truth, the offerer for his part marking out thus the penalty of sin which he had brought upon an innocent sufferer, while the priest offers it to God as sacrifice, and so atoning. The slaying of the bird offered for the healed leper is not by the offerer, and that of the red heifer, between which and that of the leper there are strong points of resemblance, concurs with it, I believe, as showing Christ's death at the hands of the world ; and this is in connection with the truth in both cases of the crucifixion to the world implied in the cedar-wood, scarlet, and hyssop being in the one case cast into the fire, in the other stained with the blood of the victim. Both are lessons as to purification.

The offering, in any case, was exclusively priestly, and this was surely the representation of the death of Christ in its divine meaning.

6. One thing more in this connection. In Num. 17:, the true priest for God is known by the blossoming and fruit-bearing of Aaron's rod-a type unmistakably of resurrection. But this only marks out the priest, does not make him one, as in fact Aaron already was in office. Resurrection has the most important bearing upon priesthood, all the more on this account:for thus it is the acceptance of the work of Him who offered up Himself, and is by this shown to be the Author of salvation to those who obey Him.

7. If, then, the acknowledgment by God of His Son were the call to the priesthood, and if the anointing of the Spirit, and apart from the blood of sacrifice, marked out the great High-Priest,-if it was the High-Priest who offered up Himself, how clearly all this was fulfilled when at the baptism of John the Lord came forward to His public work among men. Then the Father's voice came forth in testimony, "This is My beloved Son," and the Spirit like a dove descended upon him. From that baptism to death which was the shadow of it, the Lord went on to another baptism, and a Jordan that filled all its banks for Him. Yet so was His priesthood perfected, and He entered heaven by His own blood. F.W.G.

All Christians recognize the great danger (to the unconverted) of coming short of salvation. "Almost persuaded " is sadder than altogether rejecting. Such passages as Heb. 6:and i Cor. 9:do not, as we well know, refer to children of God, but to those who, through outward privilege, have been " not far from the kingdom of God." of whom the apostle says, " It had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them." (2 Pet. 2:21.) The rich young ruler in Luke 18:, who seemed so near, was in reality as far as the proud Pharisee from that justification which, taking his place as distant, the publican found. Such cases as those of Ahab (i Kings 21:27-29), who walked softly after his fearful sin in the matter of Naboth ; of Shimei (i Kings 2:36-46), who lived at Jerusalem, the place of outward blessing and nearness, but on conditions, are alas! but too common in this day of outward reformation, and profession of being under grace, while really an unchanged enemy, under law. Is the reader of these lines, after all, only almost a Christian ? only apparently saved, not really so? Be sure (you cannot be too sure) that self, works, associations, professions, have no place in the foundation upon which you are resting. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." (i Cor. 3:2:)

But these lines are not written for such as know not our Lord Jesus, but for those who are really "children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3:26.) To such, the title at the head of this paper should be suggestive. It refers, not to questions relating to our standing as Christians, but to our walk and our communion.

Recovery presupposes declension. Were the believer always in a state of communion, there would, happily, be no need for recovery. But, alas ! God's Word, as well as our experience, assures us that " in many things we all offend." (Jas. 3:2.) There need not be some open lapse into flagrant sin, as in David's case, or that of the man in i Cor. 5:Declension is most insidious. It may be present when there is much labor, as in Ephesus (Rev. 2:); many gifts, as at Corinth (i Cor. 1:); much outward zeal, as among the Galatians. (Gal. 4:)

It is departing from the living God, in whatever degree, shown in the loss of that freshness of first love, that tenderness of conscience, that brokenness and holy fear, which are the sure effects of being consciously in the presence of a holy as well as gracious God. Ah ! beloved brethren, many of us who may not be chargeable with any thing immoral may at this moment be in a sad state of declension-saddest proof of this is the unconsciousness of its being the case. Like Samson, we may not know that we have lost the hidden source of strength, till the bonds of the Philistines awaken us to the real facts.

It is. however, only in passing that one would allude to declension-merely to ask each one who may read this, " How is it with thee to?" Our subject is recovery. Those who are conscious of having wandered-who desire to return – are the ones who need both the encouragement and the warning which are suggested here. For, oh ! what encouragement is held out to those who have lost the joy of salvation ! If God yearns over returning sinners, does He do less over returning saints ? Rom. 5:assures us that " much more" is true of the saint as compared with the sinner.

There is warning too, for, strange as it may seem, it is when a saint is awakened to a sense of failure that he is in greatest danger of self-righteousness. No hearts but ours could find in the realization or confession of sin material for pride. Saddest proof of corruption- to feed upon itself ! This is one of the clear marks of but partial recovery. Confession of sin is eminently fitting and necessary, both to God and often to our brethren ; but the moment that confession is enjoyed, or a certain satisfaction taken in it, we see the signs of but partial recovery-nay, of only a subtler form of sin. True confession comes from a horror and loathing of sin-farthest removed from that flippant or surface-acknowledgment of wrong, which is often but the prelude to still greater failure.

There are, in general, three marks of true recovery :I. God Himself becomes again the object of the soul. One may have grieved his brethren, and acted so as to lose his self-respect, but neither amends to them nor a restoration of self-complacency marks true recovery. "If ye will return, return unto Me." When Jacob had returned to the land, he had been but partially restored, and worldliness and defilement mark the state of himself and family. Bethel must be reached-the place where God is all and self nothing-before Jacob, or any one, is in his true place. How beautifully David exemplifies this in Ps. 51:" Against thee, thee only, have I sinned." Sin there had been against the individual, and against the nation, but David measures his guilt in the presence of God. So too, my brethren, will we find that whatever there has been in us,-whether worldliness in thought and ways, or deep moral evil, the conscience of one truly restored is alone with God. What deep work this means ! It is to be feared that many have had their understandings only convinced of failure, and not their consciences.

2. Growing out of a return to God will be manifested a submission to His government, in letting us reap the consequences of our wandering. How often do resentment, impatience, restlessness under the results of our own wrong, mark that recovery is but partial, and, so far, still worthless! Again, David shows that the deepest repentance, the fullest confession, does not avert the government of God-the child of his sin dies, and he bows to and owns the rod. The truly broken soul will not be contending for rights, seeking to accuse others, or pushing himself upon the notice of his brethren. He will, quietly wait, owning God's hand, even if the pride of man be the instrument used. "Let him curse, since God hath bidden him curse," says David of Shimei.

3. It will hardly be necessary to more than mention the third proof of true recovery-a ceasing to do evil. Without referring to those who turn the grace of our God into lasciviousness, we may warn one another to beware of a mere sentimental recovery,-tears even, and what not, but no practical, true change of life,-no breaking off sins by righteousness. True sorrow, true recovery, is thus known by the fruits of an upright walk-all else is worse than worthless, because deceptive. The deceit-fulness of sin is manifested in these careless, formal, surface-confessions. God keep his people from them ! Better not go through such a form, which only hardens the heart and makes sin easier. Do any, on approaching the Lord's table, or on other solemn occasions, thus salve their conscience? The Romanist does as well when he confesses to the priest.

Again, let it be pressed-true recovery is a deep work. On the other hand, a stiff rigidity-an unbending attitude toward the weak and erring not only may retard the work in their souls, but would indicate that our own state is not right with God. God sees when one honestly turns to Him, and owns all that He can, though Christ's work as priest on earth. He may have to say, " Howbeit the high places were not taken down." Let us, in conclusion, see a picture of true recovery. " For, behold, this self-same thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, what carefulness it wrought in you; yea, what clearing of yourselves ; yea, what indignation ; yea, what fear; yea, what vehement desire; yea, what zeal ; yea, what revenge! In all things ye have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter." (2 Cor. 7:2:) S.R.

Q. 14.-"Would you explain the meaning of the Savior's words in Luke 22:36-39, concerning the wallet and the swords ? Does ' It is enough' refer to the conversation, or the swords ?"

Ans.-The Lord is preparing His disciples for a different state of things, now that He is definitely rejected, from that which they had found when sent out by Him at the beginning (Matt. 10:9, 10). Then, they were on a mission to Israel only, seeking out the " worthy " ones; now, to go forth in the face of a hostile world. They were to be prepared, therefore, for rejection, carry their own provision, and arm themselves against opposition. But He speaks figuratively, and when Peter would use the sword rebukes it with the assurance that " all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword "-words which forbid the literal sense. Nor could " It is enough" apply to the swords, if each of the disciples was to be armed with one:rather, He means, "That is all I can say now; by and by you will understand." For "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." (2 Cor. 10:4).

Q. 15.-"Does Luke 16:9 apply to the Church?" Ans.-It is a general principle, and always applicable. " That they may receive you" is equivalent to "that ye may be received;" and verse 25 is the same carried out. The rich man had made his riches his enemy instead of his friend,-had taken his good things in the present life, and was not received, but shut out. Of course this might be taken in such a way as to deny the gospel, but the gospel does not set aside the truth that it is "they that have done good " who come forth " to the resurrection of life;" it explains how alone there can be any such.

Q. 16.-" What is the difference between giving money as they did in Israel for ' a ransom for the soul,' and similar things in Romanism ?"

Ans.-Romanism is essentially Judaism, but to go back to it when God has set it aside is, in principle, apostasy. It is one of the enemy's most successful devices to bring in that which was once of God to displace with it the present truth. And the thing thus brought back will always be found to be really different from what it was as given by God:it is now impregnated with falsehood, a fatal heresy. So it is in this case:the atonement-money in Israel was a figure of redemption, for us entirely done away; we "are not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ." (1 Pet. 1:18). But in Israel therefore (as the apostle says of the sprinkling of blood, etc.), it was never supposed to have virtue beyond death, or for the real cleansing of the soul before God, but only an external "purifying of the flesh" by which they held their place among the people of God, but the conscience was never set at rest. '(Heb. 9:10-14). And its being called "a ransom for the soul," must not make us think of " soul" in the ordinary sense now. The "soul," in the Old Testament, often stands for both the "life" and the "person." Balaam's "let my soul die the death of the righteous" (Num. 23:10) is only an emphatic " let me die."

Q. 17.-" Is there a difference between being ' reproached for the name of Christ,' and ' suffering as a Christian ? (1 Pet. 4:14-16.)"

Ans.-The latter is more comprehensive, I should say; but that is all.

" Q. 18.-At what time does judgment begin at the house of God (1 Pet. 4:17)? and is the house of God here what it is in 1 Tim. 3:15? "

Ans.-The house of God and the people of God were in Judaism quite distinct:only in Christianity are they identified. Here it is the people of God upon whom judgment comes as chastening in this present life, that they may not be condemned with the world (1 Cor. 11:32), for God must be holy as well as gracious. Judgment begins here with the saints of God:what will it be for the ungodly then, upon whom it rests in eternity ?

Q. 19.-"Are there any other than the three classes, 'the Jew, the Gentile, and the Church of God'? Is the house of God the same as the Church of God ? "

Ans.-The Church of God in its relation to God is His house, -to Christ, His body. The three classes spoken of by the apostle clearly embrace the whole world:he supposes none other to whom to give offense.

DR. WALDENSTROM AND NON-VICARIOUS ATONEMENT.

II.-Concluded.

No one of those whose doctrine Dr. Waldenstrom is opposing would think of denying that Christ's blood cleanses from all sin. If they were bold enough or ignorant enough to do so, it would certainly be easy work, with but a single text such as he quotes, to refute them. As it is, his first arguments, when he comes to the New Testament, are but another instance of the strange half-sightedness which so constantly afflicts him. Why should it result that because the blood of the Lamb cleanses, it cannot atone? or that cleansing and atoning should be but the same thing ? Surely it cleanses, purifies, sanctifies (we affirm it with all our hearts), and yet it atones ! And more:its power to atone is just what gives it power to cleanse, as we shall see.

Even as to cleansing, the washing of water and the sprinkling of blood have to be distinguished as he does not distinguish them; and likewise the sprinkling of blood upon the person from the sprinkling of blood upon the altar or upon the mercy-seat. All this he entirely confounds ; and to disentangle the confusion is enough completely to destroy his system.

He begins with what is indeed an important text- Heb. 2:17, 18, where the common version gives, "to make reconciliation for." The Revised has, rightly, " make propitiation." He says, Christ's "work as High-Priest was to make propitiation for the sins of the people." The apostle does not say, "to propitiate God," but "to make propitiation for the sins of the people.'' Dr. Waldenstrom turns back to the Old-Testament sacrifices to explain this in the manner already familiar to us, adding, "As John says, 'The blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin. (i Jno. 1:7.)' But to cleanse is to cleanse, or purify, and nothing else. . . . and when once all His work shall have been consummated, then there shall stand around His throne a great multitude which no man can number-a multitude of human beings, pure and holy like Himself. And were you to ask how they have become so pure, they would answer that they ' washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb! (Rev. 7:14.) Mark, mark, not that they by the blood of Jesus have appeased God; no, but that they, in the blood of Jesus, have washed their robes."

The style of argument I have already indicated:"The apostle does not say, 'to propitiate God' "! Not, it must be confessed, in so many words; but does he say, to make propitiation ? It is the only possible rendering of the text. whom, then, does He propitiate, if not God ? How did He make propitiation at all-that is, appeasal, -if there were no one to be appeased ? If there were, who was it but God ? Surely, if He is not named, the reference is, plainly enough, to Him.

Mr. Princell, as we have seen, is bolder than his leader. Hilaskomai here "plainly" means only "to show mercy with respect to"-that is, "to pardon '! But this is only assertion, against which we have the whole doctrine of the Old Testament, as we have seen, as well as the regular use of the word. In Luke 18:13 the correct force of the passive is also " be propitiated." The sacrificial system shows any thing rather than simple " forgiveness " without atonement made, and the sinner's repentance was not the atonement.

Then the quotation from John can scarcely, one would think, be meant for proof. Of course, to cleanse is to cleanse, but " to make propitiation " is not "to cleanse.' The latter is the effect of the former-not the same thing. And even to cleanse here is not to make inwardly pure, in the sense of regeneration, or communicating a new life, but answers to Heb. 10:22-the" heart sprinkled from an evil conscience." The meaning of purging by the blood Hebrews will presently show us.

As for the blood-washed throng in Revelation, they are witnesses against Dr. Waldenstrom, not for him. For the white robes are (διχαιώματα) " the righteous acts of the saints" (Rev. 19:8, R. V.), which cannot be meant, therefore, to have been internally purified, but freed from the imputation of the evil which had been in them after all; the washing here was from guilt, and it is by its atoning power that the blood of Christ avails for this.

But the doctrine of cleansing by the blood is in the ninth and tenth chapters of Hebrews, to which Dr. Waldenstrom now goes on, having quoted chap. 9:13, 14, he asks, " What, then, according to the idea of the apostle, were the sacrifices of goats and oxen meant to do ? Answer:To appease God ? No; but to sanctify the unclean unto an outward cleansing. To effect any spiritual cleansing, or to make the worshipers perfect as touching the conscience, that they could not do. (5:9.) ' For the law made nothing perfect.' (chap. 7:19.) But the sacrifices of the Old Testament were only types. In the New Testament, there is a better sacrificial blood-the blood of Jesus Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit has offered Himself unto God ; and what was its significance according to the idea of the apostle ? Did he say, " How much more, then, shall the blood of Christ appease God, so that, again, it may be possible for Him to be gracious unto us?' No; but he did say this:' How much more shall the blood of Christ cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.' . . . To cleanse, to cleanse from sin, that is the power of the sacrificial blood in the New Testament."

Now, what is the theme of the apostle in all this part of Hebrews ? It is the cleansing of the conscience, so that we can now do what under the law they could not-draw nigh to God. The vail before the holiest showed that under the law,-that is, by its works,-this was impossible. The vail is now rent, and Christ has, by His own blood, entered into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption. What does this mean, entering in as high-priest by His own blood ? Does it mean power in the blood Godward, or simply manward ? How has He obtained redemption ? Does the blood speak of death here, or of life ? Now, immediately following the verse which Dr. Waldenstrom has quoted we find this:"And for this cause He is the mediator of the new testament, that, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance."

Why has not Dr. Waldenstrom quoted this ? Would it have helped his argument, or spoiled it, to have done so ? And the apostle goes on to insist upon the necessity of death, and to connect with it what was, indeed, the testimony of it-the blood so necessary even under the law, and without shedding of which was no remission? We see that this shedding of blood does not stand alone in this chapter; but that it is connected with the doctrine clearly announced, of the necessity of the death of Christ for redemption, and that the shedding of blood must (of course) furnish the blood which now sprinkled upon the heart purges it from a bad conscience. The knowledge of redemption through Christ's death sets the soul at rest, and enables us to draw near to God.

But more :by the same precious blood the heavenly things themselves are cleansed for us,-"that is," says Dr. Waldenstrom himself, "the heavenly sanctuary." He catches at this to say that whatever may be meant by it, " yet surely we must see that [the apostle] sets forth the meaning of the sacrifices to be that of cleansing." If he had said 'a' meaning, who would have contested it ? But he thinks he has gained all when he states thus a half-truth for a whole. Nay, it is no matter to him what the heavenly sanctuary means; nor, therefore, what the cleansing itself is, for that must be affected by it. His view imperatively requires, as we have seen, that it should be internal cleansing,-the communication of life, for the blood is the life; but how can the heavenly sanctuary be cleansed thus? It cannot, and cleansing from defilement has no real place in Dr. Waldenstrom's thoughts.

Yet he can venture to tell us that the apostle " explains this cleansing as meaning that Christ once for all, now at the end of the ages, has been manifested ' to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (5:26);' " and that " in verse 28, he repeats the same thought, saying, ' Christ was once offered to bear [that is, for the purpose of bearing, or taking away] the sins of many.'Thus, what in other places is called atonement for sins through sacrifices, that is here called a putting away of sins, or a bearing them away"!

This is bold enough :the two words are quite different, the " putting away " of sins the effect of atonement, the bearing of sins, the essential element of atonement itself. The last is the same word that Peter uses when he says, in a text which seems, like some other important ones, to have escaped our author. " Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree … by whose stripes ye were healed." (i Pet. 2:24.) Is this the same as 'bare away our sins in His own body " and that " on the tree "? Even if it were, awkward as would be the conception, it could scarcely obscure the vicarious character of atonement here ; but it is not, as Dr. Waldenstrom must know it is not:it is "bare up," "sustained," bore the burden of. How nearly the repetition of Isaiah's words:" He shall bear their iniquities; . . . He hath poured out His soul unto death ; and He was numbered with the transgressors ; and He bare the sin of many " !

Thus alone could sin be taken away, " the chastisement of our peace " being " upon Him." How vain to deny it ! how terrible to slight or deny the need and value of a work so precious ! It is needless to follow Dr. Waldenstrom into the tenth chapter of Hebrews, where his argument is but a monotonous repetition of the same half-truths. The sacrifice cleanses, therefore it does not atone ! it sanctifies, therefore it does not atone ! What is supposed to be a part of our intuitive knowledge he does not seem to have apprehended, that a whole is greater than its parts. Let us repeat it for him, that it is just because the blood df Christ atones for us that it can cleanse,-that it is just because He bare our sins upon the tree that they can be taken away from us. The truth he refuses is the natural, necessary complement of the truth he sees.

Nor does it need to take up the passages cited from the first epistle of John, which even all his effort cannot make otherwise than clear. It is only when he introduces such thoughts as that of " propitiating sinners from their sins "-to which he rightly enough appends the doubt, " if we could use such an expression "-that there is any difficulty at all. He does not, as we have seen, even mention the passages in Peter. His arguments, with the most wearisome reiteration, do but affirm and reaffirm these two things, that because the blood is the life, blood poured out, or sprinkled is still life, not death ; and secondly, that once prove that the blood sanctifies or cleanses, you have disproved vicarious atonement. Meanwhile, he has scarcely attempted to meet the arguments on the other side, or looked even at the texts upon which they are founded ! And while he admits, in a general way, that Christ died for us-I suppose, for our sins,-yet why He should have died, we cannot, in the two books we have been examining at least, understand at all. It may be that it was for the moral effect of it:Scripture says it was " for redemption." That "the chastisement of our peace was upon Him;" that ''the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all;" that thus "He was made sin for us," "bare the sins of many," "bare our sins in His own body on the tree," "suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust," "redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us;" that He "tasted death for every man;" that "the Son of man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,"-all this, and much more, must be for him as inexplicable as, in fact, by him it is unexplained.

We do not propose to follow him into the last three chapters of this book, where, from the common confusion between reconciliation and atonement, he gains some points against those who make it. In this there is little interest for us, and in much that he says we should have to agree with him; but it is striking and characteristic that, when he has shown us how, in those who are ambassadors for Christ, God beseeches men, as it were, and they pray, in Christ's stead, Be ye reconciled to God,- there, as if a mountain lay across his path, he stops and goes no further. From his book you would never learn that the ground of the appeal for reconciliation lies in this, that "God has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him."

And this mountain, though with the eternal dawn bright upon its summit, lies still as an insurmountable barrier across the path of Dr. Waldenstrom and all those who plead the cause of non-vicarious atonement.

In pastures green ?Not always; sometimes He
Who knoweth best, in kindness leadeth me
In weary ways, where heavy shadows be-

Out of the sunshine, warm and soft and bright,-
Out of the sunshine, into darkest night;
I oft would faint with sorrow and affright-

Only for this :I know He holds my hand.
So, whether in a green or desert land,
I trust, although I may not understand.

And by still waters ?No, not always so ;
Ofttimes the heavy tempests round me blow,
And o'er my soul the waves and billows go.

But when the storms beat loudest, and I cry
Aloud for help, the Master standeth by.
And whispers to my soul, " Lo, it is I."

Above the tempest wild I hear Him say, "
Beyond this darkness lies the perfect day :
In every path of thine, I lead the way."

So whether on the hilltops high and fair
I dwell, or in the sunless valleys where
The shadows lie-what matter ? He is there.

And more than this ; where'er the pathway lead,
He gives to me no helpless, broken reed,
But His own hand, sufficient for my need.

So where He leads me I can safely go;
And in the blest hereafter I shall know
Why in His wisdom He hath led me so.

"And hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments."

"But whoso keepeth His word, in him verily is the love of God perfected; hereby know we that we are in Him."

" We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." (1 Jno. 2:3, 5; 3:14.)

It can never be held too simply that the foundation upon which our souls alone can rest is a work wrought for sinners, so that as sinners we may build on it. We have not to look in at ourselves for the evidences of being born again, in order to know we are. The moment we do so, we are off the ground of simple faith, and involved in a process of reasoning which naturally and necessarily produces doubt and anxiety of soul. Have we not deceitful hearts? Have we not a subtle adversary ever ready to take advantage of our readiness to flatter ourselves,-to hush our souls into a false peace ? Thus, while the careless may be readily persuaded that all is well, the more sincere and earnest we are, the more perplexed and anxious we must be. No word of God seems there to be to throw its light into the gloom and dispel it. Granted we are "justified by faith," who shall assure me that I have it? Granted, "he who believeth on Him hath everlasting life," what word of God settles for me that I believe in Him ?

True, there are marks-evidences:Scripture gives such. The application of them to myself is the difficulty. Scripture does not settle that I have the marks. That must be a reasoning of my own, prejudiced naturally in my own favor, blind as I often find myself, and with the solemn utterance of divine wisdom before me, " He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool." (Prov. 28:26.)

Thank God, to no such reasoning are we left. He who " justifieth the ungodly," because for ungodly ones Christ died, has assured me that, without need of further reasonings, all who trust in Him are blessed. (Ps. 2:12.) Without any trust in myself of any kind, I may trust One who died for the ungodly. My title to confide in Him, my Savior, is thus not my godliness but my ungodliness. And "to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly,, his faith is counted for righteousness." (Rom. 4:5.) Observe, it is not here, "that justifieth the believer"-true as that is,-but justifieth the ungodly; for what my faith sees if it look within is not itself or its virtues, but that ungodliness which is but the dark background on which shine forth, in all their glory, the virtues of Him who loved me and died for me when I was only that.

Sweet and precious faith, solid and unshaken, that trusts not itself but Christ ! My ungodliness is no delusion. No deceitful heart betrays me there ! No word of the old liar am I listening to in that, but the true and faithful word of the living God. So, too, that Jesus died for the ungodly, that same word is my warrant. Once again, then and there it bids me " trust in Him," and tells me it is no deception-can be none-to know my blessedness. Test every link there as you will, it is a threefold cord, not quickly broken.

Various are the objections, however, raised to this. The truths of Scripture themselves, torn from their proper connection and misapplied, become apparently the most formidable of all. Texts, too, no less than truths, used after (I must say) the most careless fashion, lend seeming authority to what is simply sad, injurious error. Who has not heard, for instance, the words, "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith ; prove your own selves," taken and dwelt upon as the plainest possible command to look into one's self for evidences of being born again ? And how many even now need to be told that the whole sentence, as the apostle wrote it, conveys exactly the opposite thought ? And yet that is the truth. We have only to remember that a certain part of this sentence is a parenthesis, and, for the moment laying it aside, we have, " Since ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me, . . . examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith, prove your own selves." They had got in themselves the proof of Christ speaking by the apostle, for themselves were the fruit of it. How could they doubt whether Christ had spoken by Paul, when through Paul He had spoken to them? If they questioned that, they might well question the reality of their own conversion. But that he was persuaded they could not do ; and so he goes on to ask, in the very next sentence, "Know ye not, your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you ?" As much as to say, Do you need to look?

This passage, then, so often quoted for it, certainly does not prove what it is quoted for-that it is right and needful to examine ourselves to see if we be Christians. To look in for peace is never right. It is the sure road to doubt, with the earnest, and to get off the ground of real confidence ; for it is always well to doubt self, and we are never called to have faith in ourselves. There is no word of God that I am born again; but if I know myself a sinner, there is abundant assurance that I may trust Jesus as one. If I cannot trust myself-even my faith,-I can trust Him.

But then, are there no evidences? I have already said, assuredly there are. The texts that stand at the head of this paper are the undeniable proof of it. The question is simply, When and how do I obtain them ? and what use do I put them to ?

It would be a poor thing to say that this faith we are speaking of wrought nothing one could be conscious of in the soul. It would be a poor account to give of faith, and no honor to it, and no comfort to the possessor of it to believe or find it so. Would it be comfort to say or think that I should never be conscious of true love to God, or true love to my brethren ? I think there would be as little of comfort as of truth. " We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." We know, then, we are conscious of, our love.

But how differs this from building upon evidences ?

In this way, that such evidences are only possible to one who is already building upon Christ.

Let me prove and illustrate this. The seventh of Luke may supply us both with proof and illustration from our Lord's own words.

" A certain creditor had two debtors:the one owed him five hundred pence, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both."

There is the divine picture of divine forgiveness. Two debtors, differing in the amount of their debt, differing not at all in this-they had nothing to pay. Beloved reader, have you ever stood before God so? If you have not, you shall. In the very truth of your condition as He knows, and as He has pronounced it. Solemn, most solemn anticipation, that! What must be the reality ? But it shall be; and your entire lot for eternity depends upon this, when and where you shall meet Him so-whether in the day of grace and salvation, or in the day of account and doom.
But, O beggared and bankrupt soul, thou hast not even a promise to make more, thou art so lost! not a right feeling, nor a sigh or tear that thou canst take comfort in any more ! bring that hard heart thou canst neither break nor soften, and set thee down in the presence of this Speaker, and see and own thy God in Him ! Listen now, and let thine ear drink in those precious words, "When they had NOTHING to pay,"-was ever a sad truth so sweetly uttered ?-" he,"-mark who this "he" is in our Lord's intent!-"HE frankly forgave them both."

How sweet and simple this utterance ! Does it need, think you, the ransacking of my thoughts and feelings with reference to it, to know it is for me ? Nay, the Lord cuts off the thought of that by the question that follows. "Tell me, therefore," says He to Simon, "which of them will love him most?" A question that even a Pharisee has to answer with " I suppose that he to whom he forgave most." Jesus said unto him, " Thou hast rightly judged."

Thus even human experience is competent to give the answer as to how love is to be produced in the soul. By the knowledge of love. "We love Him because He first loved us." And here in the seventh of Luke, how is this love shown ? By full and free forgiveness. The knowledge of forgiveness it was that caused in the heart of the debtor the love of him who forgave him to spring up.

Now, weaken the certainty of that knowledge, and you weaken the spring of all this feeling. If I am doubting the reality of the forgiveness which I have from God, will it have no effect in hindering the outflow of my love to Him? According to our Lord's words, it surely will. Or will my heart go forth in full, conscious delight in Him at the very moment I am doubting whether He may not banish me from His face forever ? And if I am not doubting, I have surely no need to examine my heart for evidences.

No, Scripture has, in perfect knowledge of what we are, and in perfect wisdom as to how we need to be dealt with, decided this. An apostle who came short of none in entireness of devotion to One blessed object, he who could say, " To me to live is Christ," gives us the very secret of that life given to Him, in the words, "And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."

Nay, it is "as the elect of God, holy and beloved," we are exhorted to " put on" the things which suit such. (Col. 3:) It is God's way, and good, to give all the blessing freely, which is ours in Christ, and then say, " Now walk worthy." How different from spelling out, or seeking to spell out, in the worthiness of my walk, whether I have the blessing !

It is as the love flows in, the love flows out. "If any man thirst," says our Lord again,-thirst, mark there is your title to Christ in all His fullness,-" If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink; and he that believeth in Me (so having drunk, remember), out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." (Jno. 7:)

Well then, we must drink,-drink,-DRINK ! Man can create nothing,-no, not love in his own heart! he must receive and enjoy, and the living waters shall flow forth. We shall be conscious of love as we are conscious of His love, and how it has been manifested in His giving Himself for us.

But how about, then, "We know we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren "?
Why, simply, so we do. But it is not the first way of knowing. It is the knowledge of a saint who has drunk in the love of Christ into his soul, and knows what he has got. But it is not the way a doubting soul acquires peace. Peace is got by believing, not our own feelings, which as a foundation are all untrustworthy, but the word of God about the blood of Jesus.

But still there is a solemn use and need-be for the apostle's statements here. Who can read his- words, " Hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments," without feeling he surely is thinking of some who say they know Him, and are not keeping His commandments. So indeed he is; and if there were need in the apostle's days of testing the tree by its fruit, how much more is there now? Thus, if I find still professors, orthodox enough in form of speech, but whose lives show nothing of the power of the gospel, I am entitled to take them up upon the ground of their professed confidence in Christ, and say, Are you keeping His commandments ? Do you love the brethren ? No other ground is it possible to take with such, for their profession is all right and orthodox. Now, if the soul is really firm in Christ, it can afford to look at itself, and stand a shake. If after all it is not building on Christ, the conscience may get alarmed, and the man find out his condition.

But it is quite another thing to say to one who does not take the ground of confidence, but of doubt, " Do you keep His commandments ? " There I should be doing positive mischief and wrong to speak so. Such a soul wants Christ to confirm, not self to shake, him. And I must deal with him accordingly. Only can he keep commandments when he keeps the first of all-the loving God. Only can he love God as he knows he is loved. Only can I exhort him to holiness when I can do it upon the ground of his being " elect of God, holy and beloved." Otherwise Christ is made to men a more vigorous law than the law of Moses ; but not so of God.

What we want is " rightly to divide the word of truth "- to apply it as itself teaches. The Lord Himself apply it, beloved reader, to every one who has need, and whose eye may rest upon this paper.

In the course of his wandering among the pyramids of Egypt, Lord Lindsay, the celebrated English traveler, accidentally came across a mummy, the inscription on which proved to be at least two thousand years old. In examining the mummy after it was carefully unwrapped, he found in one of its closed hands a small, round root. Wondering how long vegetable life could last, he took the little bulb from that closed hand, and planted it in a sunny soil, allowed the dew and rains of heaven to descend upon it, and in course of time, a few weeks, to his astonishment and joy, that root burst forth and bloomed into a beautiful flower. This interesting incident suggested to Mrs. S. H. Bradford the following thoughts upon the resurrection:-

Two thousand years ago, a flower
Bloomed lightly, in a far-off land;
Two thousand years ago, its seed
Was placed within a dead man's hand.

Before the Savior came on earth,
That man had lived, and loved, and died,
And even in that far-off time,
The flower had spread its perfume wide.

Suns rose and set, years came and went,
The dead hand kept its treasure well;
Nations were born and turned to dust,
While life was hidden in that shell.

The shriveled hand is robbed at last:
The seed is buried in the earth;
When, lo ! the life long hidden there,
Into a glorious flower burst forth.

Just such a plant as that which grew
From such a seed when buried low,
Just such a flower in Egypt bloomed
And died, two thousand years ago.

And will not He who watched the seed
And kept the life within the shell,
When those He loves are laid to rest,
Watch o'er their buried dust as well ?

And will not He from 'neath the sod
Cause something glorious to rise?
Ay ! though it sleep two thousand years,
Yet all that buried dust shall rise.

Just such a face as greets you now,
Just such a form as here you bear,
Only more glorious far will rise
To meet the Savior in the air.

Then will I lay me down in peace
When called to leave this vale of tears;
For " in my flesh shall I see God,"
E'en though I sleep two thousand years.

(From "Waymarks in the Wilderness")

There is a constant tendency to follow, in our reading of the Word of God, certain lines of teaching:those most easily discerned by us, or that have most impressed themselves upon our minds and hearts perhaps ; and these, engrossing the attention at the expense of others, become the limit of our spiritual horizon. How many Christians of years standing are still where they where when perhaps they began to live to God- only that where this is the case, the old truths will have lost their freshness and real interest for the soul. Theology comes in to develop this tendency, and to limit the pasture of the flock of God often in such a way as to keep believers always babes in the faith, instead of proper growth being attained to full manhood. But the loss and damage to the soul is immense; and for the lack of knowing the distinct and definite teaching of the Word, souls are exposed to the blighting effect of the " winds of doctrine," which are so many and so various. How well does Rome know the advantage to her that is gained by keeping souls in ignorance of the Word of God, of which she proposes to be the sole interpreter! but may we not with an open Bible, and perhaps keeping up the daily reading of it, yet be much in the dark as to the teaching of the Spirit of God concerning the greater part of what its blessed pages contain ? How many souls would have to acknowledge this to be their state, and that they have little intelligence of the scope of the Word, or of the plan so perfect and harmonious which it contains, which God in His infinite wisdom is working out in this world of sin, and which He is pleased to communicate to His beloved people by the Spirit and through the Word !

All truth is so linked together that you cannot leave out-one part without marring or losing something else ; whilst here, surely, it must be ever true that "we know in part, and prophesy in part," awaiting the time of full and perfect knowledge when we shall see face to face the One who died for us, and of whose glory all truth is but a ray.

The key to the dispensational lines of truth is, of course, prophecy :a subject many consider too deep for them, and from which others are frightened by the rash speculations of those who, not content with humbly and reverently searching the Word, proving all things, and holding fast that which is good, have set out to be prophets themselves, or who, for lack of light on certain points of importance, have perhaps overlooked dispensational distinctions, and so gone quite astray. It may be the fruit of traditional teaching with many an upright soul, which perhaps has missed the mind of God through receiving from man, and not having learned to cease from the creature, and trust only in the living God. How few have really been brought to that, and have to do with God directly about what they hold, so that even if it is truth they have on any point, it is held but weakly, so that they are not able " to give an answer to every man that asketh a reason of the hope that is in them!

There is no portion of truth which is so neglected by the mass of believers as prophecy. Yet we are told it is "a light that shineth in a dark place," and that we do well to take heed to it. Do we not, then, do ill to neglect it? Would God advise the study of that which was hurtful or dangerous ? In a dark place is it not dangerous to go without the light ? So God has told us that it is a light shining in a dark place. But so many are taken up with human advancement and progress that they do not any more consider the world a dark place ; it is regarded as growing more and more enlightened. For such, I need not say the light shines in vain ; they are in spirit identified with the progress of the age; they have not yet learned the lesson of the cross, nor can they say with Paul, " God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." Yes, perhaps many would answer, I can glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; it is that by which pardon and justification are procured me. Well, so be it; this is surely matter for thankfulness truthfully to own that. But it is not this that Paul says here; he adds, " By which the world is crucified to me and I to the world." This is another story, surely,-a step beyond the other, and an important one indeed-important in the practical side of Christianity. It puts the cross between us and the world which has rejected and still rejects the Son of God. It puts us on God's side of it, as sharing in the rejection of His Son, and as sharing too, through grace, in the love which prompted Him to give that Son, and that still is holding back the wrath so long and well deserved, that the message of grace may be preached, and God's servants may still, in Christ's stead, be beseeching man to be reconciled to God. But it shows the world as lying in the wicked one, as enslaved by sin and Satan, though passing on insensibly to its doom, asleep in false security. The Christian's path is through the world to the glory of Christ as a stranger and a pilgrim. How many, alas ! are deceived by morality and religious profession, all which Nicodemus had when the Lord Jesus said to him that night, "You must be born again."

But if my reader is a believer, and it is for such this is written, I entreat him or her to consider if the greater part of the Word is not really locked up from sight, and beyond its history, perhaps, and the truths of the gospel necessary to be known for salvation, hardly any thing of its wonderful and blessed contents is understood. Beyond the Sunday-school lesson, perhaps, the interest in it is small, just because the soul has not been laid hold of by the precious things which need to be searched for as for hidden treasure,-treasure compared with which all that the world has is not worth considering, because it is "the unsearchable riches of Christ,"-an expression often quoted, but little understood.

For the present, then, I press upon my reader the great fact that the subject of the Bible is Christ, the Son of God; that the burden of the prophets is "the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow." The first is past, and the last, it may be, near at hand ; but the One who has been crucified will surely come to reign. Let him remember, in view of the prevailing opposition or indifference to the coming of Christ again, that at His first coming such blindness had fallen upon the professed people of God-the Jews-that they rejected and crucified Him, thus fulfilling the very scriptures they were ignorant of; so too to-day, how many are sharing in the unbelief which has substituted something else for the coming of the Lord! How many are saying, "My Lord delayeth His coming"-the mark of an evil servant; and besides all this, how scoffers abound, saying, "Where is the promise of His coming?" Men will be saying, " Peace, peace, when sudden destruction cometh upon them . . . and they shall not escape."

Do the armed hosts of Europe look like progress? does the present strife between labor and capital augur well for the future ? do the corrupt practices in trade; the increasing crime; the ascendency of the Jesuits, which is increasing rapidly; and the blindness of politicians to the growing menace to their boasted liberties, assure us of peace ? Assuredly not! And if it be said that the world is now open to missionary effort as never before, yet this, too, does not promise the world's conversion, but exactly fulfills the word of Christ, who said, " This gospel of the kingdom must first be preached among all nations for a witness, and then shall the end come." All this fulfills His word as every thing must, for He knows the end from the beginning. In succeeding papers, God willing, some points will be looked at with a view to present this truth for the consideration of the Lord's people, with the assurance that it is a subject full of blessing for those who are simple and upright in heart, and who, casting aside human sophistry and reasonings, have learned in faith to take God at His word, and if blessing for them of glory to Him who always links together His own glory and His beloved people's welfare. R.T.G.

AN EXPOSITION OF REVELATION IV.-XXII.

PART II.-Continued.

The First Woe. (Chap. 9:1-12.)

At the sound of the fifth trumpet a star is seen, not to fall, as the common version put sit, but already fallen from heaven to earth. This seems naturally to connect thus with the apostasy under the third trumpet, nor is it likely that the apostasy of any other should be as noteworthy as his whose course is recorded here. At all events, it is an apostate, surely, that is before us, and to him is committed "the key of the abyss."

The force of the words have first of all to be considered. A " pit" is in the Old Testament often a synonym for a dungeon, and every thing unites to show this to be the meaning here ; while the "abyss " is not other than the pit itself, but only a further definition of it* -the dungeon which is the abyss. *The genitive of apposition, as Jno. 2:21, " the temple of His body."* So the demons pray that they may not be sent into the deep, or " abyss " (Luke 8:31), and Satan is, in the twentieth chapter, shut up there. In the Old-Testament parallel to the same in Revelation, it is said, " They shall be gathered together as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in prison." (Isa. 24:22.) Here the abyss is the " pit," or prison, clearly. The key is used in this place as in the later one-here, the " key of the pit of the abyss;" there, simply "the key of the abyss."

The abyss is not, however, "hell"-the "lake of fire," -as we may see by the fact that it is, in one passage (Rom. 10:7), used in connection with the Lord:"Who shall descend into the deep (the abyss)?-that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead." Here, as the heavens are inaccessible to man for height, so is the abyss for depth. The literal meaning (" bottomless ") must not be pressed, as our own use of the word shows, and the Greek was similar ; the Septuagint use it for the " deep " upon which darkness rested on the first day.

The connection of the " pit" with the state of the dead in the Old Testament is similar to that of the "abyss" here in the New. We have this again in Revelation, where the " beast," in its last phase, is said to come up out of the abyss. This seems naturally to refer to the wounding to death, and revival (chap. 13:3, 12, 14). Some have even contended, seeing the identification of the beast (the empire) with its last head (chap. 7:ii), for the literal resurrection of a person in this case; but this is only a wild extravagance:for resurrection literally could only be from God, and the beast in its last form is wholly under the power of Satan, (13:i, 2). The rising up out of the abyss is figurative, therefore, as the beast itself is; and indeed the use of the word seems figurative throughout.

Now Christ has "the keys of hades and of death" (chap. 1:18); and it is not to be imagined that He should give up into the hand of an apostate, whether man or spirit, any portion of His own authority. We must not think, therefore, (as has been done,) of a literal opening of hades, and an irruption of the spirits of the lost upon the earth. Fancies like these easily gain ascendency over a certain class of minds; and yet who could seriously maintain such an outbreak of wickedness on the part of those shut up, like the rich man in hades, to await judgment? Were it so, there would be "deeds done" out of the body, as well as " in the body," to give account of in the day of judgment. But, in fact, the locusts are not said even to come out of the pit. Nothing is said to come out of it but the smoke which darkens the sun and air; and out of the smoke the locusts come. It may be natural to think that, after all, they cannot be bred of the smoke, and that they must come with the smoke out of the pit; but naturalistic interpretations may easily deceive us, where the spiritual sense is the whole matter, and for the spiritual meaning there is no difficulty. The smoke is not, as in other places, the smoke of torment, but the fumes of malign spiritual influences which darken the air and the supreme source of light itself. Out of this darkness we can easily understand the locusts to be bred.

It is quite in accordance with their origin that their power should be represented as that of the scorpions of the earth-that is, in their poisonous sting-and their distinction from natural locusts is seen in this, that they do not touch the locusts' food, but are a plague only upon men, and these the unsealed. Remembering that it is in Israel that the sealing is found, the inference seems just that these unsealed ones are Israelites, and the sphere of this plague is in the east. They do not kill-as, in general, the scorpion does not,-but inflict torment to which death is preferable ; and their power lasts five months.

We next find them pictured as warriors-a military power subordinated to what is their grand interest and aim, the propagation of poisonous falsehood. Thus "the shapes of the locusts were like horses prepared unto battle;" and, as in the certainty of triumph beforehand, "upon their heads were as it were crowns like gold." Little matter of real triumph had they, as the limiting words here show. "Their faces were as faces of men" also,-they had the dignity and apparent independence of such; while yet "they had hair as the hair of women," being in the fullest subjection to the dark and dreadful power that ruled over them. " Their teeth as the teeth of lions " show the savage, tenacious grip with which they can hold their prey; their breast-plates of iron, perhaps, the fence of a hardened conscience; the sound of their wings, like that of the locust-hosts they resemble, conveys the hopeless terror which they inspire. Finally, we are again told of their scorpion-stings, and their power to hurt men five months.

They have a king over them-the angel of the abyss, whose name is given, almost exactly the same in meaning, in Hebrew and in Greek. The use of the Hebrew unites, with other indications we have had, to assure us that it is upon Israel that this woe comes, while the Greek no less plainly indicates that the angel here has also to do with the Gentiles:according to both, he is the " destroyer;" and it is natural to think of Satan in such connections, while it seems not probable that the angel of the abyss is the same person with the fallen star.

The historical application in this case is one in which there is great unanimity among interpreters. They apply it to Mohammed, and the Saracens, whose astonishing successes were manifestly gained under the inspiration of a false religion. They came in swarms from the very country of the locusts, and their turbaned heads with men's beards and women's hair, their cuirasses, the sparing of the trees and corn, and even «f life where there was submission, with their time of prevalence, according to the year-day reckoning, one hundred and fifty years,- all these things have been pointed out as fulfillment of the vision. It has been objected, on the other hand, that such points as these are below the dignity of Scripture, and that the terms are moral. While this is surely true if we think of the full intention, it is to be considered, on the other hand, whether God does not allow and intend oftentimes a correspondence between such outward things and what is deeper, just as the face of a man may be a real index to his spirit. Just because they are external, they are well fitted to strike the imagination; and the parable is, as we know, a very common method of instruction every wherein Scripture. Thus God would open our eyes to see what is indeed all around us; and to stop at what is external, or to ignore it, is alike an error. In any case, and for reasons which we have already considered, we cannot take this Saracenic scourge as any complete fulfillment of the locust-vision. Nor can we, on the other hand, connect it as fully and certainly with other prophecy as would be necessary for very clear interpretation. What seems indicated, however, with regard to its final fulfillment in a time yet to come, is the rise and propagation of that delusion to which we know both the mass of mere Christian profession and of the unbelieving Jews will in the end surrender themselves. (2 Thess. 2:)The antichrist Of that time will be, there is little doubt, both an apostate from Christianity and from the faith of his Jewish fathers (Dan. 11:37); and his apostasy will remove (under divine permission) the present restraint upon the power of evil. It will be as if the abyss had opened its mouth to darken the light of heaven; a mist of confusion will roll in upon men's minds, which will under Satanic influence soon find definite expression in forms of blasphemy and a host of armed adherents ready to force upon others the doctrines of the pit. As has been said, it is apparently with Israel that this trumpet has to do, but yet the Greek name of the leader seems to speak also of the connection with the Gentiles. If the application here made be the true one, then we know that the "wicked one" will not be a Jewish false Christ merely, but will also head the apostasy of Christendom. In this sense also it may be that the " beast " under its last head-the revived Roman empire -is said to come up out of the abyss, its actual revival being due to the dark and dreadful power which is presented to us here,-so exceeding in malignity all that has preceded it, that its advent is called, in the language of inspiration, "the first woe."

Q. 8.-" Were the fowl as well as fish in Gen. 1:20 out of the waters ?"

Ans.-The generality of modern commentators prefer the marginal rendering, "Let fowl fly." But Tayler Lewis, in a note to Lange's " Genesis," says that the words " cannot, we think, be rendered in any other way than as we find it in our English version, ' and fowl that fly ;' and in all the ancient versions, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate. The Syriac is exactly like the Hebrew in its construction, and can have but one possible sense, birds that fly. . . . The idiom of the Hebrew seems fixed, requiring us in such a case 'to regard the future as descriptive-like a participle or an adjective. In the Arabic, the corresponding usage is so established as to put any other translation out of the question. It occurs frequently in the Koran with the same subject, and in just such a connection as we have it here. The other rendering, 'and let birds fly,' would require a different order of the words. The more modern rendering has come from the fear -of what would seem gross naturalism, namely, the education of the birds from the water; but we know-nothing here except as we are taught."

Q. 9.-" How is ' eating the herb ' part of man's punishment (Gen. 3:18), when it had already been named as his food (1:29)?"

Ans.-It is ' the herb of the field' instead of the garden- paradise.

Q. 10.-"The 'sanctifying' of the Sabbath, was it not for man? And, while not mentioned in Genesis again, was it not owned as already given in Ex. 16:23 ?"

Ans.-The first question can only be answered in the affirmative. God could not 'sanctify ' a Sabbath for Himself, and we have no reason or authority for saying it was for the angels. But we must remember that this was while every thing was good. The fall came, and after that we have no history of the Sabbath till Ex. 16:, except it may be a hint of the weekly division of time in connection with the flood. (Gen. 7:4; 8:10, 12.) People may have kept it-or the godly ones, but "from Adam to Moses" there was no law.

Ex. 16:.23 is not conclusive; for the same or a similar formula is found elsewhere in connection with what is newly instituted (10:16,32). And in the law, " Remember the Sabbath-day" may only point back to chap. 16:This is a doubtful basis for any clear faith, but it seems all that in the wisdom of God, we are permitted.

Q. 11.-" What is ' perfect in his generations ' (Gen. 6:9.) ?" Ans.-Blameless among the people of his day.

Q. 12.-"Why in Num. 3:39 are the Levites 22,000? The total is 22,300,-more, not less, than the first-born ?"

Ans.-The total of 22,000 is right, evidently, and it would seem there must be a copyist's error in the text as to one of the tribes. Keil suggests that in ver. 28 the 600 should be 300. It would easily result from the dropping out of one letter (1).

Q. 13.-"Explain Acts 7:.16, ' sons of Emmor,' etc."
Ans.-There is again some mistake, apparently the word "Abraham" should be omitted ; but the MSS. give but little help. It is an old and well-known difficulty.

DR. WALDENSTROM AND NON-VICARIOUS ATONEMENT.

II. – Continued from p. 139.

The first point that he insists on with reference to the meaning of the Old-Testament sacrifices is just that which we have already considered, and without which he could not get on for a moment, – that' it is never said in the Old Testament that atonement, or reconciliation, was effected by the death of the sacrificed animal. No ; atonement was effected by the blood:" that is, for him, as we have seen, by life, not death. To which he adds here that " not by the shedding of the blood was atonement made, but by the sprinkling of the blood." " But what did this sprinkling signify ? It signified cleansing, or purging, from sin, as the apostle says, ' Almost all things are by the law purged with blood.'" For some reason Dr. Waldenstrom does not complete the quotation here, " and without shedding of blood is no remission." I may not assume to know his reason for the omission, but it certainly would seem to need accounting for. The passage thus completed lies, in fact, in the very teeth of his argument ; and it is safe to say that it is a complete refutation of it.

Why without shedding of blood was there no remission ? Probably Dr. Waldenstrom might suggest (for, as he has said nothing, we can only suggest for him) that the blood could not be sprinkled if it were not shed ; but this answer is not as satisfactory as it seems it ought to be. For, in the first place, the apostle should have said, and it cannot be conceived why in that case he did not say, " without sprinkling of blood," instead of " without shedding." We would insist as much as Dr. Waldenstrom on the exact force of Scripture words, and here plainly (for him), the apostle has put the emphasis upon the wrong point, and is in that measure accountable for the doctrine we have been getting from it.

But again. Suppose an Israelite who had sinned under the old economy. Should we say to him, The shedding of blood is not what makes atonement:it is sprinkling of blood ; and, acting upon our suggestion, he was to go to the priest and say, " Here is the fresh blood of a newly killed animal; put it, I pray thee, upon the horns of the altar for me." Would that avail ?

He might add, "And here is the beast itself for the fat to be offered, and for the priest." Still the priest would have to say, "Sir, is this beast your own sin-offering? Did you designate it as your own by laying your hand upon it, and then kill it in the place where they kill the burnt-offering before the Lord ?"

All this is nothing for Dr. Waldenstrom. The shedding of blood is not the point, but the sprinkling of blood. One cannot see why the animal should even die at all:for the type would be much more perfect, according to his view, if it were some of the blood of a living animal than as the blood of a dead one ; it would surely better signify life!

And why need every one that sinned have his own sin-offering? Why must there be this solemn shedding of blood for each one, and the whole of the blood poured out in each case-save what anointed the horns of it-at the bottom of the altar!

The sprinkling, however, says Dr. Waldenstrom, is the important thing. It is this that cleanses from sin, and atonement is just cleansing from sin ! Think of the Israelite again, as instructed in this new theology. He brings his beast according to the manner :it is slain, and the priest takes the blood. To do what with it? To anoint the horns of the altar, and to pour out all the rest of it at the bottom of it? The man looks anxiously. "But, sir, have you left none to sprinkle upon me? That is what atonement means ; it is to be sprinkled upon me, to cleanse me." " I have none left," says the priest; " I have acted strictly according to the ritual. The animal was killed before the Lord ; its blood is poured upon the ground, except what you can see upon the horns of the altar. I have no word to sprinkle any upon you ; but atonement is made nevertheless, and your sin is forgiven!"

Dr. Waldenstrom's doctrine does not consist with the facts. The blood of the trespass-offering is sprinkled upon the leper, as also the blood of the bird killed at the beginning of his cleansing ; the blood of the covenant is sprinkled on the people in Ex. 24:, but it is the blood of burnt-offerings and peace-offerings only ; the ashes of the heifer are sprinkled upon the defiled person in Num. 19:; and to these last two the apostle refers in Heb. 9:; we shall see the significance of this shortly :but the blood of the sin-offering, or of the ordinary trespass-offerings, was never sprinkled upon the person, while it was, nevertheless, again and again declared that atonement was made by it, and that the person was forgiven.

We see, then, that the apostle knew what he was saying when he declared that "without shedding of blood is no remission." He knew all about sprinkling, and insists upon it in the very same chapter; but had he said " without sprinkling of blood is no remission," the whole Jewish ritual would have borne witness against him, as now it does against Dr. Waldenstrom. He has made the exception the rule, and misinterpreted both alike; and Scripture, which is no " nose of wax," and will not speak as we please, but only according to the truth of God which it declares, witnesses decisively against him. The whole Levitical ritual, while it does say that atonement is by blood, unites to show that the blood is the testimony of death, not life, only of a death substitutionally offered to God, and so making atonement as lifted up to God upon the altar's horns. The blood is given upon the altar to atone. Thus is the sinner forgiven ; and " without shedding of blood"-death-"there is no remission."

In what follows, Dr. Waldenstrom repeats what is well known, that the Hebrew word "to make atonement" is literally " to cover," and that is in the sense of annulling,

-if you please, blotting out. But he is wholly wrong in interpreting this of a work done in the sinner :it is a thing wholly distinct. The blood of the sacrifice covers

-atones for-sins, puts them away from before God, because it is the blood of a legal substitute, the type of One precious, perfect Lamb of sacrifice, upon whom was " the chastisement of our peace."

But, asks Dr. Waldenstrom further, " Who is set forth in the first and foremost place as one that atones for sins ? Answer:It is God. But if God is the one who makes atonement for sins, then it cannot mean that He makes atonement for or appeases Himself in regard to sins"! A clever, bold, and absolute deception; though no doubt he is first self-deceived. If I were to ask, seeking answer from Scripture, " Who is set forth in the first and foremost place as the one who atones for sins?" I should have to answer, The priest, assuredly ; and that is not God. So says the Old Testament ; so says the New. " The priest shall make atonement for him, and it shall be forgiven him." God it is who forgives, and forgives on the ground of atonement, and the atonement is thus made to God, and to none but God. " A merciful and faithful High-Priest," says the New Testament, " to make propitiation for the sins of the people" (Heb. 2:17). So the Revised Version ; and it is undoubtedly right. The thought of propitiation cannot be taken away from hilaskomai here,-the very word used by the heathen every where for it. But " propitiation, "-if there be such a thing at all-is Godward. The doctrine of the Old Testament and that of the New is one.

"Go quickly unto the congregation," says Moses to Aaron, " and make atonement for them ; for there is wrath gone out from the Lord." (Num. 16:46.) " Every day shall thou offer the "bullock of the sin-offering for atonement." (Ex. 29:36) " It is the blood that maketh atonement." "When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you." "He that offereth the blood of the peace-offerings." "Thou shall not offer the blood of any sacrifice with leavened bread."

In all this work of atonement, then, is il "set forth in the first and foremost place'" that it is God who makes the atonement, and therefore that the atonement cannot be offered to God, because God could not offer or atonement to Himself ? No :assuredly il is not who offers to God, and yet the atonement is offered to God, or words are altogether deceptive, and there is no use in discussing this or any other matter.

But what about the passages quoted by Dr. Waldenstrom as Ps. 65:3, for instance, "As for our transgression, Thou wilt purge them away," where, he says, "it is liter-ally, 'Thou will atone for them,' or 'cover them'"? Let us consider this, and we shall find assuredly that there is in it neither the difficulty which he sees for us, nor the doctrine he advances for himself.

Now it must be owned that there is a difference in some respects between the way in which atonement is presented in the Old Testament and our common way of putting it. When, for instance, on the day of atonement, Aaron goes in with the blood to make atonement in the holiest of all, and then coming out to the altar, sprinkles upon it and makes atonement for it,-though we are accustomed, no doubt, to the words, it can hardly be said that we are accustomed really to the manner of speech here. In our way of putting it these would not be separate atonements, but applications of atonement. The literal meaning of the Hebrew word (kaphar, "to cover,") perfectly accords with and accounts for this use, as our word "to atone" does not. In reality, for us, atonement is that satisfaction made to the holy and righteous nature of God which enables Him to manifest His grace ; and that work was not done in heaven-which the holiest typifies-but on earth, upon the cross. So God says of the blood, " I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls." That does not hinder, as we have seen, the making atonement with it elsewhere. This difference, it is plain, there is between the Scripture use and our own ; and it accounts for the expressions which Dr. Waldenstrom brings forward.

When God applies to this purpose or that, to this person or that, the value of the atoning blood, He would, as we see in Old-Testament language, be making atonement thus. With us it would be misleading to speak so. The corresponding expression with us would be that He " purges." And this is no more difficult to understand than that any other word should have different meanings or shades of meaning. Such almost every word has, and to confound them would produce just the confusion which has resulted here in Dr. Waldenstrom's mind. Every translation of the Bible, I suppose, makes the difference here which he would obliterate. And yet even he, if we translated Prov. 16:14, that "a wise man will atone the wrath of a king," would rightly admonish us that kaphar has other meanings. So be it, then, and the difficulty is ended, this special meaning being also fully accounted for in accordance with the general doctrine, as we have seen.

We need not, then, examine at length the passages brought forward to show that atonement is simply cleansing. It is never significant of an internal work. It is by blood shed, poured out; death, not life, offered up to God as on the horns of the altar, or the mercy-seat, turning aside the wrath of God from him on whose behalf it is accepted. All this is the teaching of facts that cannot be denied, and ought not to be misinterpreted.

But we must look more closely at what is said of the day of atonement, though I cannot agree with the statement that the sacrifice on that day was " the sum of all the sacrifices that were offered for sin." The atonement for the holy place, for the tabernacle, and for the altar, Dr. Waldenstrom urges, is not that " God should thereby become gracious toward " these, (who ever thought so ?) but "to cleanse and hallow from the uncleanness of the children of Israel."

He anticipates, however, an objection :-

" Some one objecting may say :' But the holy place could not really have any sins from which it needed to be cleansed. Answer :The cleansing of the tabernacle was a type of the cleansing of the people. Therefore, also, it is said that the holy place, the tabernacle, and the altar should be cleansed 'from' [thus, literally; the versions have it "because of"] the transgressions of the children of Israel." (5:16.)

This is surely arbitrary enough ; for the verse quoted can scarcely be contended for as proving that the tabernacle represents the people of Israel! It should, on the other hand, (if only he had quoted it entire,) have taught him better :"and so shall he do for the tabernacle of the congregation which remaineth amongst them in the midst of their uncleannesses." The tabernacle that is specially marked as remaining amongst them cannot rightly be confounded with the people amongst whom it remains. And it should be plain that no typical significance of the tabernacle is at all in question, but the simple fact of God dwelling thus in connection with sinners.

But we have come to what is indeed utterly opposed to Dr. Waldenstrom's system, and which he seems to have no capacity to see. " The holy place could not really have any sins from which it needed to be cleansed." True, but could not the sins of the people defile the holy place so as to make it no fit dwelling-place for a holy God? Surely, it is plainly asserted here; but then the difficulty for Dr. Waldenstrom results :how could atonement meet such a case as this ?

For him it could not; for atonement with him is the cleansing of people, and this is expressly stated to be for the tabernacle itself. Look at the full specification in the thirty-third verse :"And he shall make atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tabernacle of the congregation and the altar ; and he shall make atonement for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation." The mention of all these distinctly in this way precludes the thought of the one being but the type of the other.

But here, then, as there are confessedly no sins belonging to the sanctuary itself, atonement for it is not the cleansing of sins, but of defilement from the sins of the people ; and this is accomplished by the bringing before God the precious blood which vindicates His righteousness so entirely that no patient going on with sinners in grace can raise a question of it.

But for Dr. Waldenstrom no atonement of this kind could be needed. God is always righteous, he would say, in going on thus with men ; just as it is also righteous of Him to show grace when they turn to Him apart from atonement altogether. How, then, can His tabernacle among men be defiled? The author's incompetence to explain such a thing is shown by his having to make the tabernacle only the type of the people themselves. The apostle's interpretation is, " It was necessary, therefore, that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these ;" although the blood could scarcely be the figure of life communicated in the case of "things in the heavens"!

The scape-goat, however, is to make all plain, it seems. There is confessedly a difficult phrase in connection with the scape-goat, that he is to be "set alive before the Lord, to make atonement with him, to send him away for a scape-goat into the wilderness." So the common version ; but the revised gives, "to make atonement for him," and this is allowed to be the regular use of the Hebrew words. This appears to suit Dr Waldenstrom, who claims that " atone for " means here the same thing as at other places,-to wit, make holy, sanctify, or cleanse. " That atonement should be made for the goat meant, therefore," he adds, "that in a typical or symbolical way he should be sanctified [separated or dedicated] for the purpose of carrying away the sins of the people."

But surely this is a strange reading of atonement. First, it means "to cleanse;" but where in Scripture do we hear of a sacrificial animal-and the two goats are one sin-offering (5:5), – needing to be cleansed for such a purpose? This "cleansing," therefore, has to be attenuated into a " dedication " with no thought of cleansing in it! But certainly kaphar never means this. Indeed the only "cleansing" by it is, not inward cleansing, but the removal of guilt-a very different thing. Moreover, this removal was by blood ; but no blood was shed for or sprinkled upon the scape-goat, and it would have been an extraordinary thing indeed in such a case.

But what are we to make, then, of an atonement for the scape-goat ? We must leave the phrase as it stands in the Revised Version, I believe. It is the regular force of the words :" atonement with " is not correct; "atonement upon"-the resort of many translators,-has no clear meaning, and what it might have scarcely seems consistent with the facts.

But what, then, does "to atone for it" mean? The facts will, I doubt not, themselves explain, if we will follow them only with attention.

The two goats are, as already said, but one sin-offering ; and the object of the sin-offering is to atone:the two goats illustrate atonement; they are a double type, like the two birds in the cleansing of the leper. One bird only dies, as one goat only dies :in each case the second one of the two is needed for a purpose for which its death, without a miracle of resurrection, would have incapacitated it; and this is the only reason why there are two at all.

Thus if atonement be by blood, only one furnishes the blood, only one properly atones. The atonement, illustrated by the two, is yet but actually made by the one, who in this sense atones for the other. And thus the words following in this case are explained,-" to make atonement for him, to let him go for a scape-goat into the wilderness." This is why the other must die, in a sense, for him, that he may be sent away alive, as, in fact, he is.

This, which is plain, is a complete answer to Dr. Waldenstrom's real perversion.

The Old-Testament doctrine of sacrifice is clear. It is the shedding of blood by which comes remission, and the blood shed is all poured out at the bottom of the altar, save what is put upon the horns in testimony of death, not life,-a death offered to God, as the blood upon the altar shows, for it is upon the altar, the place of offering, that it atones for the soul. It is not ordinarily sprinkled upon the person at all, but upon the altar; and thus the wrath of God is removed from the sinner that turns to Him. He sees the blood, and passes over. He says as to Noah, that He will not curse ; or as to Abel, gives testimony that he is righteous, testifying of his gifts.

The sacrifice is substitutional. The hands of the offerer mark it out as this. It is henceforth his sin, or sin-offering, for the words are the same. Death is entered into the world through sin, and "the soul that sinneth, it shall die,"-so the victim dies. The sword of judgment is sheathed, for the ransom has been found. The Old-Testament doctrine of sacrifice is the doctrine of vicarious atonement.

But we have still to inquire as to the New Testament:will it reverse or confirm what we have gathered from the Old ?

(To be continued.)

There is no service to Christ which is without a cross. As it is written, " He that taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me." (Matt. 10:38.)

The disciple is called to be as the Master (10:24, 25); and he will find faithful discipleship leads to much suffering ; and the worst of all is that which comes from what bears God's name upon earth, without the power of it.

Cruelty, shame, and disgrace are the three things which service to Christ will gain for you from earth. For the cross of Christ is not a thing that can be used merely to moralize, or to obtain a good or a healthful influence over men's minds. It is either eternal life, delivering a man into the liberty of a son of God, or it is the manifestation that Satan is blinding his eyes. G. V. W.

Many souls have been led into spiritual darkness by giving heed to the monstrous delusion of so-called "Christian science"-which, in fact, is neither Christian nor scientific. Christians have allowed it to pass unchallenged because its egregious folly appeared to them unworthy of notice. Intelligent people having been ensnared by it, warns us that when professed followers of Christ lend an ear to teaching which is so dishonoring to Him and God's Word, they are punished by being given over to "strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."

Its dogmas are generally vague and confusing, but where doctrines are clearly stated, they are utterly antagonistic to the gospel. They deny the existence of matter, the atonement of Jesus Christ, and other distinctive doctrines of Christianity; declaring that the material world is not real, and what seem to be facts are only ideas. " God is all-there is no room for evil, hence any thing other than good is a belief, an unreality, that has no substance. You are well, for God made all things, and all that He has made is good. You are spirit, hence true and perfect." Of course this teaching dispenses entirely with the atonement; for if there is no sin, there is no need of redemption.

These false teachers assert that there is neither personal Deity, personal devil, nor personal man-a revival of old and oft-refuted heresies under a new name ; the errors of the Docetae, who taught that matter was unreal, and our Lord was born, died, and rose only in appearance ; and the Gnostics, who held that the body of our Lord was a myth ; also that spiritual beings could not be defiled by contact with matter, any more than a diamond by lying in the mire. St. John wrote a portion of his first epistle in refutation of the Gnostic heresy, wherein he sets forth, by divine authority, that Jesus was a veritable person. (i John 4:2, 3.)

It is a reproduction of the old idealism of Hume and Berkley ignoring the existence of matter or disease as a fact. It is related of Berkley that having fallen into a ditch a friend in passing said, " So you have really got into a ditch." " Not exactly that," replied the bishop, as he shook the mud from his clothes, "but you see I have an idea that I am in a ditch."

If as these teachers maintain, " disease is not a reality, but only a delusion of the mind-the effect of fear," how can they account for the physical sufferings of infants ? Our Savior treated sickness and disease as real and actual for we are told that He healed all who were sick, in fulfillment of prophecies concerning Him.

It has been urged in favor of some who set forth these doctrines that they cannot be anti-christian, because they quote Scripture in support of their tenets. When Satan made his most desperate effort to accomplish the everlasting ruin of mankind, he used the Word of God as a means of attaining his end.

Some of the expounders of this belief have been received with favor on account of their mental and moral graces-the loveliness of their daily lives. Satan is too clever to select ignorant disreputable agents for his most powerful assaults on Christianity. He craftily uses persons of scholarship, deep thought, refinement, benevolence, and amiability, as decoys to lure unwary souls to destruction. Some one has truly said that "one of the many hindrances to the cause of true Christianity is, that a counterfeit of the Spirit's work is often presented in the lives of refined moralists, devout religionists, benevolent philanthropists, who are yet as much disowned of God as the most notorious sinners." Never having been born from above, they do not belong to His kingdom, but are aliens and strangers to the covenants of promise, and without Christ.

Let Christians beware of any entanglement with this anti-Christian medley of oriental mysticism, German pantheism, and English deism, which is now presented to them under the misnomer of " Christian science."

Lecture III.-I. Kings 17:17-24.

In this last scene in the verses I have read to you we find the third thing in the discipline of the man of God,-and a thing that is above all needed to be known in order that he should really fulfill this character. As I have said, it is what we all are by position, it is therefore what we all must be practically, or else our very profession of Christianity condemns us. Being a man of God is not being something very exalted, and which God would leave, so to speak, to our choice, whether we would be so or not. As we have seen already, all Scripture is given to furnish the man of God thoroughly unto all good works. Mark well, it does not speak of furnishing any body else, and we are necessarily God's by the fact that we are purchased by the blood of Christ. Beloved friends, to be according to his mind, therefore, is what we are called to, and throughout history,-especially, I may say, that of the Church of God,-the very failure of His professing people has only forced those true to Him the more to take that character.

You have here, in the very last verse, something which especially makes known the man of God. The woman says to Elijah, " Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth." What is it that makes the man of God specially known to her, and gives specially to his testimony the character of truth ? It is this :not merely that he knows the living God, but that he knows and has had to do with the God of resurrection. Death visits the house of the widow of Zarephath. God has taken away her son. Not the widow alone, but Elijah himself is brought face to face with this fact of death ; a death which the woman's conscience realizes, as ours do if in activity at all, to be the fruit of sin.

Death is the stamp upon a fallen creation-the solemn witness upon God's part of the ruin which has come in. Every where, in every language, whatever the darkness of man's mind, whatever the religious corruption of those not wishing to retain God in their knowledge, it has testified plainly to men's souls of wrath against the creature He has made. Why else undo what he has clone ? Why take again the life that He has given ? He is not a child, to break and cast away His plaything of an hour.

Death is what we all have to do with,-the liability to which God has not delivered any one of us from here. If the Lord Jesus comes, of course we shall not die; but in the meanwhile, each of us is personally liable and exposed to it. And what we need is, surely, to know the. God of resurrection. We need a God of that character in two ways:for ourselves, of course, as a matter of simple power for our own life. We need to know this also as a power for testimony, as Paul the apostle,-" We also believe, and therefore speak:knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus;" or, as you see it here in the widow of Sarepta, " Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth."

Resurrection, God's power over death,-power available and displayed in our behalf, is thus God's testimony to Himself among men. But I may say, in these times it is particularly the testimony He is giving. You know, if you take the Lord Jesus through His life even down here, as you have Him in the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans, "He was marked out the Son of God." How? He was, on the one hand, Son of David after the flesh ; but He was " marked out the Son of God, according to the spirit of holiness, by resurrection of the dead." By the fact that He could meet death, and manifest divine power over it,-by that fact He showed Himself as evidently the Son of God; for He met it, not as Elijah meets it here,-by prayer and supplication, looking up to another for help about it, but in His own power and name alone. By His simple word He met it and dispelled it; a condition hopeless for man to deal with. Man says, " While there is life there is hope." When death comes there is no hope :he can only bury his dead out of his sight. That gives God the opportunity to come in. It is just there He testifies to Himself as One who has available for man the power of resurrection. The Lord thus manifested His power on earth before His own death and in His own name. He showed that He was the Son of God there with practical help for man,-a power that could deal with sin itself, or it could not deal so with its fruit and penalty.

When the Lord met death, He met it fully ;-Jordan filled all its banks for Him. He knew it in its full character as penalty, bearing in His own body what had brought it in. Three days and three nights He lay under it, and when He arose from the dead, there took place what had had its type long before, when for Israel the ark stood in the bed of Jordan ; when those who bore it stood on the brink of the waters, and they rolled away right and left till there was a road no woman's heart need fear to travel from shore to shore. Then His own words received their full interpretation which He had spoken to the sorrowing heart of Martha before that- " I am the resurrection and the life :he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."(10:25, 26.)

In the past, there had been death ; in the past, people had to go through it. No doubt He was with them :and so the Psalmist says, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me." (Ps. 23:) Still it had to be gone through, though resurrection eventually for them also should banish it, whereas now the Lord having been in it, and come through, there is no real death impending for us, but a clear path made right through it. " I am the resurrection and the life ; and he that liveth and believeth in Me "- has no death to go through at all,-"shall never die." Now are we not called as Christians to realize the truth of that? It is truth, of course, for faith ; it is not truth evident to sense and sight. Yet by and by, when the Lord Jesus comes, it will be manifested as to those that are in the body at that time ;-it will be manifested as to us then, if we should be, as we easily may be, here, that death has no title over us at all. He will take His own to Himself without dying. Until that time, it is a fact that faith has to realize. For faith it is simple, that Christ having passed through death and come up out of it, His resurrection no less than His death is ours. Divine power has shown its exceeding greatness toward us, "according to its working when God raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places." (Eph. 1:19, 20.) In Him, quickened and raised up with Him, we too " are seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Therefore in God's mind we have no death to pass through, for we have passed through it in Him who is as much our representative in the heavens as He was upon the cross. We are rightly expected, therefore, to know resurrection in a way in which even Elijah could not know it-in a way in which no saints of the Old Testament could possibly know it. We are called to know it as those who in themselves, in their own persons, are living examples of it.

True, we did not know what death was in passing through it :there was no water in Jordan for us. The waves and billows, so terrible as God's waves and billows, spent their force on Him alone. We have come through the dry bed only. But we have come through. This is the simple fact in God's account; and God's is ever the truest-the only true one. Being dead with Christ, we are also quickened with Him out of death, and raised up and seated together in Christ in the heavenly places.

It is one thing to have this, of course, in Scripture,-nay, -to recognize this truth in Scripture; but another thing for ourselves to have known what it is practically-to have got hold of it experimentally, to have apprehended in this respect that for which we are apprehended of Christ Jesus. It is this latter alone that makes us men of God, and gives us to be real witnesses for God, accredited witnesses of heavenly things. This makes us lights indeed in the world :for earth's ordained lights are heavenly ; sun and moon and stars light her up, otherwise dark. So, if the Church is the responsible witness for God on earth-the candlestick,-the true light, the "angel" is the heavenly "star." (Rev. 1:20.) Nature is one with God's Word in affirming thus the character of all true witnessing ; because it comes from God, it must be of necessity heavenly, for He is. Resurrection puts us there. Resurrection carries us outside of the world through death, its boundary-line. Left in it for a while, no doubt, in another sense, but even so pilgrims and strangers, merely passing through it. We belong to it no more than Christ belonged to it.

And is there not such a thing as getting hold of this in reality? It is a different thing to say, " I know it is there in Scripture," from saying, "I know it for a truth in my very soul." Such recognition will make us of necessity something of-in one sense much more than-what Elijah was. It will carry us into a new sphere of relationship, of thought, of interests; and where all is deathless and eternal. We shall appreciate the Lord's words to the lingering disciple, to " let the dead bury their dead." That will be no unintelligible mysticism, as to many a believer we fear still it is.

The simple recognition of the fact requires faith. All spiritual realization is by faith,-a faith to which the sure-est evidence and the highest reason are that God has spoken. And although the Spirit of truth must make it good to us, and to grieve the Spirit is necessarily to deaden spiritual sense and dim perception, yet it is as the Spirit of truth He acts-by truth, and our faith in it. Thus alone can we pass through death and beyond, to where Christ is before God, and there for us.

If you look at the eleventh chapter of John's gospel, you will find there the great chapter which speaks of resurrection as God's witness. All the way through, you find how even Christ's disciples are under the power of death. The sisters of Bethany send to Him to say that His friend Lazarus is sick. The thought is (one so natural), if Christ were there, he could not die. They want His presence in order to put off death, which yet could be merely a reprieve, staving it off for a little while. That is all they think of. He has other thoughts. He stays away, in his love to them (for it comes in here so beautifully, " Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus), and lets him die.

When the Lord proposes to go to Judea again the disciples say, "Master, the Jews of late sought to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again ?" Thomas says, " Let us go also, that we may die with Him." Death is upon all their souls,-nothing but death. When He comes, He finds them overwhelmed at the thought that death had come and touched one of the Lord's own. Instead of Lazarus being this making it better, it made it worse in one sense. Was He indifferent ? or was death master even over His ? What does He do ? He has said from the beginning " This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." Facts might seem to be against Him, for Lazarus does die. But even so is it seen, as else it could not, that He, not death, is Master. Lazarus is raised. And what is the consequence ? Such a testimony to Himself they never had before :crowds come out from Jerusalem to learn about this wonderful thing; and the very presence of Lazarus there, the man who had actually come through death, is the thing that draws them. They come, " not merely that they may see Jesus, but to see Lazarus also, whom He has raised from the dead." Think of a man who had actually come through death and come out of it! If we apprehended that we are just such a people,-if we did apprehend, in any proper sense, that we really belonged to another sphere, what a testimony for Christ it would be ! It would indeed bring persecution. It brought it in that case. It was then that the Pharisees consulted about putting Christ, and Lazarus also, to death, because by reason of him all men, as they thought, would believe on Him. They would like to put out the lamp which God had lighted ; but it just shows what the power of such a testimony is. And let me say again, there is no real and sufficient testimony-there is no proper Christian testimony now-but that.

Some may call it high truth; and some, again, to whom it is outwardly familiar, may think it truth that needs very little insisting upon. I wish it did. What is the fact, when practice comes to test the actuality and power of the belief we have? What, for men who really knew the power of resurrection, would be the serious business of their lives? Would it be their aim to make money, beloved brethren ? Trying to get things comfortable around them ? To keep up their station in the world, and live as well as their neighbors ? Of course we have got to get through it, and have to do with it in the way of business. He who was "the carpenter" has sanctified honest labor, and there is nothing at all derogatory or unspiritual in it. But I need scarcely remind you what He was down here, all the way constantly and absolutely a heavenly man. Let me ask you, beloved friends, do you think that Christ could have set his heart on making money? Do you think He could have come into the world in order to seek a comfortable place in it, or anything of that sort ? You know it was the very opposite of that. And what are we ? We are distinctly His representatives in the world, as He was Himself His Father's representative. " As My Father hath sent Me into the world," He says to us, "so have I sent you into the world." What is the consequence? Why, we must not talk about this being " high truth," and we must not think that after all the humble part is not to pretend to so much. We are Christ's representatives down here in the world. True or false, no doubt:that is what it comes to; true or false witnesses for Christ down here. The responsibility of the place is ours, and if we are Christians, we must frankly accept it.

It will not do to value ourselves upon our morality, honesty, benevolence, and that sort of thing. The world knows perfectly well there is no testimony merely in that, because it will find you honest men, benevolent men, and moral men, without the least pretense to religion. The world is keen-eyed, and knows that is no sufficient testimony. "If that is all you have to show," they will tell you, " we can do without your Christianity. We have just such people who have none." But if we appear as people of another sphere, people who have their backs upon the world, as having beyond it a sufficient and satisfying portion, such as in it they have not,-that is another matter. " There be many that say, Who will show us any good ? Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us. Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased."

Elijah of course could not know, as we now may, the power of resurrection. We have in this case the exhibition of it in a very different way, because we have Old-Testament truth, and not New Testament. Still it was resurrection that made Elijah known as a man of God, and the word of God in his mouth as the truth. So nothing else will make the word of God in our mouth known as truth in any sufficient sense, or approve us as men of God.

You will find, if you turn to the fourth chapter of the second of Corinthians, the apostle speaking very plainly about this. What opened his lips to speak? He was continually exposed to death, given up to it, not merely of his own accord, but by God's will too, God everywhere exposing him to that which he had given himself up to. " We are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh." (5:2:) He was "always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus," (5:10.) and God gave him up to death, to meet it practically,- " in deaths oft."

That was the very thing which made life work in those around about. This death which was working in him (5:12) was the power of his testimony to them. Death, so to speak, had a fair opportunity to show its power over him ; but it only showed that it had none at all; all it could do was to make life shine out brighter. " Death worketh in us but life in you."

The power of resurrection opened his mouth :" I believed, and therefore have I spoken," (5:13), "knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us with you. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen." (5:17, 18.)

That is where his eyes were ; that is what his heart was occupied with ; and you find at the opening of the next chapter how fully for him Christ had met death and judgment. To die was to "depart and be with Christ." The thought of the judgment-seat moved him for others :"Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men."

Listen to him again:"We have this treasure (the treasure of divine grace,) in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." (5:7.)

What is the practical value of the "earthen vessel"? The bird of heaven, the leper's offering in Lev. 14:, needed an earthen vessel too !-to die in !

It was one thing impossible for God-to die. He who had that in His heart of love for us, if He remained that simply, could not die. He took an earthen vessel-a human body-to die in. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, and death works in us. God has taken us up as earthen vessels, in which He can accomplish something for Himself. He takes up what is just proper material to be broken into potsherds,-poor, weak creatures, who can stand nothing, we may say ; and then, like Gideon's men, having hid his lamps there, He breaks the vessel to make the light shine out. Death may have power over Paul's body, but the very fact manifests that there was that in Paul over which it had not power. His true life is beyond it, untouched by it. The life of Jesus-the risen heavenly life of Jesus-shines manifestly out in him.

" Death worketh in us, but life in you."

The life of Jesus belongs not to the world. It is eternal life, with the Father before the world was, and manifested to us in Him in whom the world found nothing kindred to itself, therefore no beauty. His home was elsewhere. His delights with the sons of men did not alter that. In us, too, it will manifest itself as that which has its source and attachment elsewhere, and there where alone no want, no unrest, no instability, is found. We manifest it when Christ is our realized sufficiency and strength, and our circumstances alter nothing, as with regard to this they can alter nothing. When we pass through the world debtors to it for nothing it can give. This is not misanthropy, not asceticism, not giving up this world in order to get another,-that is only living to ourselves in another form, and from that we are delivered. It is the very opposite,-giving up the world because we have what is beyond. God is our portion, and to the fullness which is ours in Christ the world can add absolutely nothing; nor, blessed be His name! can it take any thing away.

This is real testimony to Christ. It is when we can say, " He is enough for us ; and know how to be abased, and how to abound, for He strengthens us. Why, oftentimes God has to put us on a sick-bed, in order to show us practically what He can do. Blessed it is, surely, to see how He works thus,-to see how He proves His sufficiency to those whom He lays low. But the blessing of a sick-bed is often just that God takes away all other things to show us that in reality we have lost nothing, whereas before we did not quite believe this. And what Christ shows us there, He is ready to show us without the need of a sickbed at all. I do not say that all there need it in this way. I am not reflecting upon these at all:God has His own mysterious working, and there are many and diverse purposes worthy of Himself He can accomplish thus. Still this is often what we learn and have to learn there, to be weaned from nature's breasts, and find what is our sufficiency elsewhere.

The power of resurrection is divine power, and He who is in us, come down from His own abode to link our souls with the place to which they belong, is not limited in His power to do this for us. No doubt we, by our unbelief, may practically limit Him, and as with Elijah on the mount, the storm and earthquake and fire maybe needed to prepare the way for what after all must do His work with us-the " still, small voice."

Let us remember, too, one thing as to resurrection which connects itself with our first gospel-lessons. I have already spoken of it, but not as fully as it needs. Until Christ died,-until the work was done by which righteously He could do it,-God could not show Himself upon our side, or His heart out as He would. There was a time when the blessed Sufferer had to say, " I cry in the day-time, and Thou hearest not." He had to be delivered out of death, not from it,*-out of it as the One gone into it for others. *So the passage in Heb. 5:7 should be read.*

As soon as His work was accomplished, then God stepped forth and showed Himself at once on the same side as the One who took that place for us,-by raising up His Son from the dead. It was the acceptance of Christ's work. He showed Himself there upon our side. Therefore the apostle says, at the end of the fourth of Romans, " If we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification," (10:24, 25.) That is, believe on the God who is for us righteously by the death of Christ. Who is for us, and showed Himself for us the very moment He could ; and He could be for us now, with all His attributes displayed and glorified. He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father ; righteousness required it, while love shone out in it.

That is what resurrection makes us know. It is the full and bright display of divine glory now shining in the face of a man in the nearest place that can be to God in heaven; yea, and that man is God,-His image. To attempt to know Christ after the flesh, as the apostle says for himself he did not, is to lose all the blessedness of this. Nor is there any Christ to be known but up there in heaven. If our souls are occupied with Him up there, in the light over which never more comes a cloud,-there where all the glory of God is displayed, shining with perpetual sunshine down into our souls,-what will the world be to us ?

With our eyes and hearts up there, where Christ in the glory is the revelation of a divine object for a heart brought back to God, they will necessarily be off the whole scene from which temptation comes to us. He is for us there in the glory. We are before God in Him, those upon whom God's eye rests with fullness of satisfaction, His own beloved. And so, practically, outside all that now tempts and defiles and weighs down here ; that is what God has provided for us, and our first duty as Christians-taking the epistle to the Philippians-is to " rejoice in the Lord." To be happy where happiness is full and uninterrupted. The only possible power we can find for going through the world aright is the power of the enjoyment of Christ. If Christ is known in this way,-if Christ satisfies, in that is strength to do all things-to be abased and to abound-as the apostle ; to go down into the scene of death, and, while it works upon us, to give forth the testimony which God seeks from us. The Lord give us grace to realize what I have so feebly shown you here. Thus only can we be practically men of God.

The Lord enable us to realize what we are, as those who have learned the power of resurrection-the power which has raised up Christ from the dead, and which works toward His people in the same energy, raising us up with Him and putting us in Him in the heavenly places before God.

Q. 1.-" Had the Lord Jesus a soul ? and will the saved have souls in resurrection ?"

Ans.-Man is body, soul, and spirit; and the Lord was in every particular true man. "Thou wilt not leave My soul in hades, as "applied to Him by the apostle (Acts 2:27, 31), shows that He had a soul, and that He took it with Him beyond death. So does the human soul survive death (Matt. 10:28), certainly not to pass away afterward. Little as is made known to us of the resurrection-state, there need be no doubt whatever as to the eternal existence of the soul, as of the spirit.

Q. 2.-"To what time do the words, ' He was made a quickening spirit' apply ? "

Ans.-"The last Adam was made" this. In resurrection, after His work accomplished, He became last Adam, and as such breathes upon His disciples (Jno. 20:22) as God breathed upon the first Adam. There is connection, and as plain contrast also. As last Adam, He is the new-creation Head and Lord, as the first was of the old.

Q- 3.-"Was Adam perfect as he came fresh from God's hand?" Ans.-Surely, perfect in the sphere for which God made him,-"upright," innocent:holiness could not be when as yet there was not the knowledge of evil.

Q.4.-" Was it possible for the Lord Jesus to have departed from the path of obedience had He so chosen ? "

Ans.-It was not possible for Him to have chosen to do so. There is often a great mistake in our conceptions of freedom. God cannot lie, cannot repent :is He not free ? And so with the Lord Jesus:absolutely perfect and perfectly free.

Q. 5.-" It is said that Pentecost was the only baptism of the Spirit, docs not Acts 10:44, 45; 11:15, 16, show otherwise?-the expressions, 'fell on,' 'poured out,' 'baptized with,' 'as on us,' being used?"

Ans.-The brother who, I think, first advocated the view of baptism of the Spirit having taken place once for all at Pentecost says,-

"As to a person subsequent to Pentecost being baptized with the Holy Ghost, I should say he was introduced into an already baptized body but by receiving the Holy Ghost, by which he is united to the Head-Christ. I am not anxious as to the word ' baptism,' but it is not generally employed as to the individual reception. Acts 11:17 and 1 Cor. 12:are the nearest to applying it to an individual or individuals, but it is not actually used. But the receiving of the Holy Ghost is equivalent, they having what was originally treated as baptism of the Holy Ghost, and are looked at, as they are, as partakers of the same thing."

It seems to me to be in this way a distinction of very little moment, even if real:of which I have never been convinced. For 1 Cor. 12:13 positively says, "For by one Spirit have we all been baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks;" and there were no Greeks baptized on the day of Pentecost. Acts 11:17 certainly looks in the same direction.

Q. 6.-"Is the distinction 'came upon' and 'dwell in' sufficient to mark the contrast between Old-Testament and New-Testament times ? Is it not rather the fact of (1) the Spirit's abiding, instead of transient visits:and (2) forming the one body, instead of using individuals for special occasions ? In, the case of the prophets (1 Pet. 1:11), and of John the Baptist (Luke 1:15), 'in them' and 'filled with' are used, as they would be now."

Ans.-In the case of John the Baptist, we find, not even transient visits, but one filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb. We read this of no other, and yet one such case is sufficient to show that the first distinction is not exact. Of even John, however, it could not be said, as to the Corinthians, "Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost ? " Plainly, the Spirit had not yet come; and though controlled fully by Him, he was yet not indwelt. Then again, the Spirit of Christ was "in" the prophets, but only as prophets,-that is, in their prophecies. I still think, therefore, that the indwelling of the Spirit is truly distinctive of the present time.

Q. 7.-" What is the force of ' The supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ' (Phil. 1:19.) ?"

Ans.-The ministry of grace by that Spirit by whom Christ had been anointed for His work on earth.

AND NON-VICARIOUS ATONEMENT.

II.

We now pass on to consider Dr. Waldenstrom's larger work – " The Reconciliation." " The term, reconciliation,' " he tells us at the beginning, "sets forth the real essence of salvation, for salvation consists just in the reconciliation of man to God." He confounds this with propitiation ; or rather, expunges the latter thought from Scripture to make way for the former, as we shall see :Mr. Princell, his translator and editor, assuring us in a preliminary note to explain the author's view, that " hilaskomai" (to propitiate) means, "in the two New-Testament passages in which it occurs, plainly this and nothing more :I show grace, mercy, or kindness with respect to, – that is, I pardon; Luke 18:13, rendered 'be merciful,' and Heb. 2:17, the A. V. rendering, 'to make reconciliation] the R. V. rendering, 'to make propitiation,' plainly meaning, to show mercy with respect to, – that is, to pardon." As we are to have the passages before us, I will not anticipate what will come before us then; but it is strange if it be really so, that the " aim " of the heathen "to appease God, "of which Dr. Waldenstrom speaks a few pages further on, should have found expression in this very word ! Any Greek dictionary will satisfy us that it did so.

" All their worship of God proceeds," says the author, " from the principle that God is angry with them," and this is so deep-rooted in human nature, somehow, "that men often consider Christ, whom God has sent in His grace to reconcile us to Himself, as One on whom God has poured out His wrath, in order that He might be gracious to us." "Contrary to all such perverse imaginations," he goes on, "the Scriptures teach that no change took place in God's disposition toward man in consequence of his sin; that therefore it was not God who needed to be reconciled to man, but that it was man who needed to be reconciled to God; and that consequently reconciliation is a work which proceeds from God, and is directed toward man, and aims, not to appease God, but to cleanse man from sin, and to restore him to a right relation with God."

Now that " God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son," is the text of many a sermon and the joy of many a heart, thank God, among those who yet believe that Christ's voice it is which in the hundred and second psalm speaks of having endured God's indignation and wrath (5:10; comp. 5:25 with Heb. 1:10-12); and it only deepens inexpressibly in their hearts the wonder of God's love. God's wrath upon sinners, Dr. Waldenstrom will presently himself assure us, is not enmity against them; and it is true that He does not need to be reconciled-His heart toward them needs not to be changed. There is no need for confuting what in fact is not held. Even those who do use the language rightly reprobated, as to reconciling God, do not mean by it in the least that Christ's work is the procuring cause of God's love to us, but rather the expression of that love, and that which enables it righteously to manifest itself toward us. But righteous wrath against sin there was and is, which when the soul is turned to God, needs to find holy expression also, in order that the sinner may be received. And thus Christ, "made sin for us, who knew no sin," proclaimed the righteousness of the penalty upon it, when bearing our sins in His own body on the tree (i Pet. 2:24), He was " made a curse for us." (Gal. 3:13.)

"There is not to be found" says Dr. Waldenstrom, "a single passage in the Bible setting forth the atonement as having its cause in this, that the justice of God needed satisfaction.'' Boldly, as always, he emphasizes this. Has he forgotten that Christ " was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him"? God's righteousness is expressed in giving us our place of acceptance as the result of His taking the place of sin. Substitution is here the very thing that proclaims God's righteousness :was it yet unrequired by it ? or when it said that " God hath set forth [Christ] to be a propitiation [or mercy-seat] through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins," (Rom. 3:25) was it still not righteousness that required this blood-shedding? If the passage required is not to be found, it is by blind men that it is not to be found. The whole warp and woof of Scripture declares the same.

"But," he says, again, "love and justice are never, in the Bible, set forth as being in conflict with each other, so that one can bind the other. On the contrary, it is right and just, both for God and men, to love-to have compassion on and to save sinners. It was right and just that God so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son for its salvation." Of course, but why give His Son ?-what need of that? Again and ever this utter blindness as to the meaning of the cross! Righteous to give His Son to "suffer, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God"! Righteous to "lay on Him the iniquity of us all"! (i Pet. 3:18; Isa. 53:6.) Was it all meaningless, this? Nay:it was " the chastisement of our peace," and by His stripes we are healed, (5:5.)

Yet Dr. Waldenstrom can quietly reply to the suggestion that God's punitive righteousness demanded satisfaction,-" It is nowhere thus written; and, as something outside of the Word of God, it is not well to assert any such thing "! And he can actually assert, " To punish in order to inflict evil on the one punished is unjust and unrighteous, and only he that is evil can do evil; but God is not evil, for He is love :but to punish in order to produce repentance is righteous, just, and good" !! What, then, was the chastisement [or "punishment"] of our peace which Christ endured ? And how can God punish the finally impenitent? Alas! Dr. Waldenstrom knows not the glory of the cross.

I may pass briefly over the whole of the next chapter, inasmuch as there is no question either of changing God's hatred of sin, or of changing God at all, or of averting His wrath from those that go on in sin. Many of the arguments here are very much like beating the air. Late in the chapter, however, is one that cannot but create astonishment. "For the unrighteous man (as such) there is no salvation, however gracious and merciful God may be; and for the righteous man (as such) there is no condemnation, however righteous God may be." And then, after his manner, he emphasizes the words, " Yea, it is the very righteousness of God which makes it impossible for the righteous to be condemned." No doubt; but who can claim for his own righteousness such recognition by the righteousness of God ? The apostle says of some who imagined the possibility, that "they, being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God." And the "righteousness of faith," which he goes on to contrast with "our own," is Christ as "the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth." (Rom. 10:3, 4.)

It will be said that Dr. Waldenstrom believes in justification by faith. Nominally, he does; in reality, rather by the change which faith produces. And this leaves Job's question (who was certainly a believer,) still unanswered:" But how shall man be just with God ? "Our author would make it a very easy matter.

In the third chapter, he turns to the consideration of the Old-Testament sacrifices; and here we must follow him more closely.
In the first place, he catches at the words of the apostle in Heb, 9:22, that "almost all things are by the law purged with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission," to point attention to the " almost," upon which he argues, "the apostle has laid special emphasis."But it is hard to realize this, as the apostle never refers to it again, and as his object is to insist on the rule and not the exception! Moreover, the position of the word at the beginning of the sentence merely extends the application of it, as he rightly says, to the whole verse. It is true that there were exceptions under the law to the general rule that all things were purged by blood, and without shedding of blood was no remission; but the apostle immediately goes on in a way entirely contrary to what might be gathered from the "almost,"-"It was necessary, therefore, that the patterns of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these."What becomes, then, of the great importance of the "almost" to the apostle's argument?

To his own also it is as difficult to see it. According to Dr. Waldenstrom himself, apart from the communication of the life which is in the blood, forgiveness there cannot be ! Why, then, insist on the "almost "? It looks as if he had begun to realize that the "shedding of blood" must mean death, and not life, and would as much as possible diminish the importance of a witness which is against him. Our wills often act in a way of which we are little conscious. But how much is gained by it ? The law puts forward a broad principle with a few exceptions:if the law be not the very image of the things (chap. 10:i), where is the wonder?

He goes on to the question of the vicarious character of the sacrifices. First, he asserts, in his usual manner, that God never puts forth such a principle anywhere in Scripture as that God's righteousness demanded That the "punishment must be endured by some one if sin should be forgiven." Now, if he mean's in the way of" abstract statement, it is very little in the manner of Scripture to put things in that way. God speaks of how He acted or will act, and that is enough; although really the passage in Hebrews comes very near to such a proposition. If the shedding of blood be necessary for remission of sins, then it is certainly the blood of another, not of the sinner, that is shed, and what is that but the principle of substitution? And what are we to learn from "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all " ?

He then, as in his smaller treatise, denies the Lord's work to be the payment of debt. I do not contend for it, and need not repeat what has been already said.

He goes on to what is more at the root of the matter, that "the Scriptures never represent, in any way, that it is just or righteous to punish the innocent instead of the guilty." He is here on common ground with Unitarians and others every where; but an essential element of this case he has omitted. It is the One who has imposed the penalty who stoops to suffer it:it is His own as well as the Father's glory that is to be shown forth; the Father and He are one. Who shall forbid Him, not to execute the law upon other sinless ones, but to bear its penalty Himself? Who shall bind the hands of the Holy One, that He should not be able to sacrifice Himself? and who shall be bold enough to stigmatize it as unrighteous?

Yet Dr. Waldenstrom affirms, " Neither is it ever said in the Bible that God has inflicted punishment upon Christ instead upon us. Yea, the prophet Isaiah represents it as a delusion that the Jews believed that Christ was punished by God. The prophet says, " We did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted; but He was pierced through by our sins, He was crushed for our misdeeds.'

On the other hand, Delitzsch, than whom there is no better Hebraist, and with whom few critics can compare on such a question, says of the text quoted, " Here again it is Israel, which, having been at length better instructed, and now bearing witness against itself, laments its former blindness to the mediatorially vicarious character of the deep agonies, both of soul and body, that were endured by the great Sufferer. They looked upon them as the punishment of His own sins, and indeed-inasmuch as, like the friends of Job, they measured the sin of the Sufferer by the sufferings that He endured-of peculiarly great sins. They saw in Him nagua, 'one stricken,'-1:e., afflicted with a hateful, shocking disease (Gen. 12:17; i Sam. 6:9),-such, for example, as leprosy, which was called nega especially; also mukkeh Elohim, 'one smitten of God' . . . The construction "mukkeh Elohim" signifies one who has been defeated in conflict by God his Lord."

He adds, "In ver. 5, 'but He,' as contrasted with, 'but we,' continues the true state of the case as contrasted with their false judgment-'Whereas He was pierced for our sins, bruised for our iniquities:the punishment was laid upon Him for our peace ; and through His stripes we were healed. … As min with the passive does not answer to the Greek ύπό, but to άπό, the meaning is, not that our sins and iniquities had pierced Him through like swords, and crushed Him like heavy burdens, but that He was pierced and crushed on account of our sins and iniquities."

Further, he says, " We have rendered the word musar punishment,'and there was no other word in the language for this idea."

Dr. Waldenstrom now comes to the Old-Testament sacrifices themselves, which, he contends, "could not express a penal suffering instead of the sinner." Here, first from the peace- or thank-offerings, he finds "something which is of the greatest importance as to the question of the meaning of the sacrifices:to wit, that we must never draw the conclusion that a sacrifice expressed penal suffering just because it was bloody. When, therefore, it is concluded as to the sin- and trespass-offerings, that because they were bloody they expressed penal suffering, then is drawn an entirely too hasty conclusion."

The "hasty conclusion" is Dr. Waldenstrom's alone. He should have proved that the peace-offerings could not express penal suffering. In fact, it is Christ's work which, as bringing to God, is the foundation of peace, as our apprehension of it. is communion with God. Why could not a thank-offering, because such, speak of that blessed work, which is the ground of all our good,-for which the heart that knows it praises and blesses God forever ?

The author thinks, however, there is no need to tarry upon this, and goes on to the expressly atoning offerings. And here, his first objection is, that "sacrifices were never allowed to be made for other sins than such as were not to be visited with death or capital punishment. . . . how, then, could any one think that the animal which was offered suffered the punishment of death instead of the offender ? Why, his sin was not at all liable to be visited with the death penalty."

This is singularly inconclusive, however, and only reveals the objector's low thought of sin and its desert with God. Rome may distinguish between her venial and her mortal sins, but the Word of God proclaims, " The soul that sinneth, it shall die." Reason enough there was for not allowing a great offender to escape with the easy offering of a sacrifice ; but God would have all men know that death has entered upon the heels of sin, and that it has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Dr. Waldenstrom's argument is worse than poor :it is a revelation of the one who makes it.
The second argument is derived from the provision of an offering of fine flour as a sin-offering in a case of poverty. It was one of the few exceptions to the general rule, for it was emphatically proclaimed that it was the blood that made atonement for the soul. In case of deep poverty, God's mercy abated the demand; and so where a soul might be spiritually so poor as not to know what work was needed for his sins, yet clung to Christ as meeting them, such an one could be accepted of God ; not because sin needed not a true atonement, but because Christ's work has met the full need as God knows it.

The third argument is again weakness itself. Where a man-slayer was not discovered, the law decreed "that the people-mark, the people-should be forgiven [literally, atoned for or reconciled, 5:8] by the sacrifice of a young heifer." This could not mean, he urges, that it died instead of the people, for the people were not guilty of the sin, and had not deserved to die ; nor for the man-slayer, for it was forbidden to take ransom (or atonement) for him !

Did atonement mean nothing, then ? Suppose we were to argue that if atoning means reconciling or being gracious to the people or the man-slayer, should we not still have to say, the people did not need it, and the man-slayer could not have it? It is evident that if sin were not in some way imputed, it could not be atoned for, whatever the meaning of atonement; and that if it were imputed, God's one way of atonement was by blood ?

His fourth argument is, that the laying on of hands on the victim did not signify that the penalty was transferred to the animal; first, because this took place in the case of the peace-offering, where there was no question of penalty.-This has been already shown to be a mistake. Secondly, because in Lev. 16:21 it is "clearly represented to be an expression of the confession of sin " ! As if the confession of sin were not the suited accompaniment of the action which transferred it to a victim ! Thirdly, that "on the day of atonement, the hands were not laid on the animal which was killed, but on the one that was kept alive:-another of the exceptions to the ordinary mode; and for a plain reason, that God would show to the people the complete removal of sin, which could only be clone by the living animal. Yet it was identified with the other goat that had died as one sin-offering. (See 5:5.)

These are all the reasons given against the true expiatory character of the Old-Testament sacrifices ; but before we are entitled to come to the conclusion, we have yet to see what Dr. Waldenstrom believes to be their actual meaning.

(To be continued.)

By Aaron's work within the holiest propitiation was effected, for the blood was sprinkled on the mercy-seat. Thus the claims of God's holiness were met. The action of the throne in judgment, with which the cherubim were associated, was stayed; and their faces being toward the mercy-seat, they gazed, as it were, on the blood, which never, that we read of, was wiped off or washed away. Provision, as we see, was duly made for the blood to be sprinkled thereon, but nothing was said or provided for obliterating all trace of it afterward. There it remained; and because it had been put there, propitiation was made, and God was seen to be righteous in dealing in grace with sinners :for the action of propitiation is Godward,-the making good the ground on which God can righteously deal in mercy and favor with those who have sinned against Him; but that being made, it is evident that, as far as God's character and nature are concerned, He can righteously deal in grace with all sinners if He can righteously deal in grace with one. Whether all will submit now to God's righteousness is another matter. Propitiation, however, having been once truly made by the blood of Christ, it can avail for the whole world, as John the apostle teaches us."-(From "Atonement as set forth in the Old Testament".)

In the first epistle, oversight is committed to Timothy, that purity and order might be kept in God's house; but in the second epistle, when confusion and evil have prevailed, the faithful servant is addressed, and aroused to overcome and persevere.

The outline is this :the servant is strengthened in the first part, then prepared unto every good work, then furnished by the Word, and, in chap, 4:, solemnly charged before God, and sent into the field, encouraged by the crown held forth.

The gift is to be rekindled; for God never gave a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind ; and afflictions are to be faced, that the gospel brings, in the power of God, who hath saved and called us; and in the summing up we have (chap. 2:i), " Thou, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus."

This is the first thing. If we are overcome with fear, we have no ear to hear any further exhortation. What effect have orders upon panic-stricken troops ? The fearful heart, then, must be strengthened-by faith in the power of God that nothing can overcome. The power of God ! let this take hold upon us. This is the first part of the outline,- a rocklike basis for further instruction and exhortation for effectual service.

It was Saul and his men who trembled before the enemy, and not David, or any of the cloud of witnesses. David encouraged himself in the Lord his God. Let us not yield, but maintain the conflict.

Note some of the exhortations in this part:"Stir up," or "rekindle the gift"!-"Hold fast"!-"Be strong"!- " Endure"!

Such an one is a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

Paul took a long look ahead as to consequences. " Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sakes, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory."

Secondly, a man must purge himself from vessels to dishonor to be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the Master's use, and prepared unto every good work.

"Evil communications corrupt good manners." (i Cor. 15:) Corrupt doctrine or corruption in life the Christian is to have no fellowship with. " Awake to righteousness, and sin not"! Grace teaches us to be firm and uncompromising in rejecting evil in ourselves and in others, that we may not be overcome by the devil. Hymeneus . and Philetus said the resurrection was past:this was overthrowing the faith of some.

As sanctified ones, we are priests, and so prepared for every good work in service as Levites. As holy priests, we draw near to God, and maintain diligently and reverently in our souls the doctrine of Christ, as the priests alone could view and handle the altars and the vessels of the sanctuary; then the Levites, who were joined to the priests (Num. 4:and 18:), came and carried the burdens along the way ; so Christians, as Levites, bear witness in ministry of the truth received in communion with God as priests. When holiness is absent, there is no priestly discernment of the truth, and no preparedness to serve.

Paul said, "I have kept the faith " (2 Tim. 4:7); and to Timothy he says, " That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us." (2 Tim. 1:14.) So in Ezra 8:28, in carrying the vessels of the house of God, not now from Egypt (or the mount) to Canaan, but from Babylon to Jerusalem,-a similar lesson,-the word to the priests is, "Ye are holy unto the Lord; the vessels are holy also. . . . Watch ye, and keep them; until ye weigh them … at Jerusalem."

"If the faith is not kept, there cannot be true service for God, nor is there the sweet sense of His approval amid the stern realities of warfare.

But how well balanced the Christian character ! With holy firmness in departing from iniquity must go gentleness and meekness in maintaining the truth to instruct opposers, counting upon God to bless and give effect to His Word. The energy to refuse the evil must be tempered by meekness, lowly confidence in God, who is above all the wiles of Satan, and able to deliver.

This gives repose to the character amid all distress, and gives glory to God, and effectual ministry.

Thirdly, the man of God, to be perfect, must be furnished for work by the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; without that, he is not complete. Whatever else he may have, he cannot use the Word without what has already been spoken of. But without the Word diligently searched and learned, he has no weapon to use, however full of courage and zeal. Like a storekeeper without goods to supply his customers, or so little acquainted with his stock that he is unable to lay his hand upon the goods before his customer has gone.

But if I am unable to use the Word for others (according to my measure) it is because I am not using it for myself. Therefore the exhortation here is, first, "But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned, . . . knowing . . . that the Holy Scriptures are able to make thee wise unto salvation." Then follows the word that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness; that the man of God maybe perfect, furnished unto every good work. For it is only as I am myself living by the Word that I can use it for others. But diligence is needed, or, with all advantages and sincerity at the start, the soul becomes famished, and the Christian life a failure, and Laodicean lukewarm-ness destroys all freshness,-the condition of many Christians, though they have known both peace and liberty before.

We may feel we have excuses, of course,-sorrows, trials, vexations, fears, burdens; but they were not overcome, and the fact remains, vigor has departed, and appetite for the Word and reading with the household has ceased, because it has become a form only ; and lack of gift is pleaded, or timidity. Such is the common condition in souls and in households. " Yet a little sleep, a little slumber (Prov. 6:10, ii); . . . so shall thy poverty come as one that traveleth, and thy want as an armed man."

" Through wisdom is a house builded, and by understanding it is established ; and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches." (Prov. 24:3, 4.)

We might say that in the first chapter of our epistle we have wisdom enjoined, the house is builded, and the soul encouraged; in the second chapter, by understanding it is established, for "to depart from evil is understanding; " (Job 28:28) and in the third chapter, the chambers are filled with precious things, by knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, Compared with a neglected, tenant-less house, a house-a home well filled and adorned is a picture the Spirit of God presents to us of a soul that is diligent and instructed in the Word. The mind is not habitually dwelling upon trouble or vanity, but upon God and the word of His grace, and the profiting appears unto all.

Chap. 4:we leave for another article. E.S.L.

Dear, __

The questions you put make me feel the walk of deeply all that there is sorrowful in one whom nevertheless I love sincerely, our friend M. G. To enter upon subtle questions as to the person of Jesus tends to wither and trouble the soul, to destroy the spirit of worship and affection, and to substitute thorny inquiries, as if the spirit of man could solve the manner in which the humanity and the divinity of Jesus were united to each other. In this sense it is said, "No one knoweth the Son but the Father." It is needless to say that I have no such pretension. The humanity of Jesus cannot be compared. It was true and real humanity, -body, soul, flesh, and blood such as mine, as far as human nature is concerned. But Jesus appeared in circumstances quite different from those in which Adam was found. He came expressly to bear our griefs and infirmities. Adam had none of them to bear ; not that his nature was incapable of them in itself, but he was not in the circumstances which brought them in. God had set him in a position inaccessible to physical evil, until he fell under moral evil.

On the other hand, God was not in Adam. God was in Christ in the midst of all sorts of miseries and afflictions, fatigues and sufferings, across which Christ passed according to the power of God, and with thoughts of which the Spirit of God was always the source, though they were really human in their sympathies. Adam before his fall had no sorrows :God was not in him, neither was the Holy Ghost the source of his thoughts; after his fall, sin was the source of his thoughts. It was never so in Jesus.

On the other side, Jesus is the Son. of man, Adam was not. But at the same time, Jesus was born by divine power, so that holy thing which was born of Mary was called the Son of God; which is not true of any other. He is Christ born of man, but as Man even born of God ; so that the state of humanity in Him is neither what Adam was before his fall nor what he became after his fall.

But what was changed in Adam by the fall was not humanity, but the state of humanity. Adam was as much a man before as after, and after as before. Sin entered humanity, which became estranged from God:it is without God in the world. Now Christ is not that. He was always perfectly with God, save that He suffered on the cross the forsaking of God in His soul. Also the Word was made flesh. God was manifest in flesh. Thus acting in this true humanity, His presence was incompatible with sin in the unity of the same person.

It is a mistake to suppose that Adam had immortality in himself. No creature possesses it. They are all sustained of God, who "alone has immortality" essentially. When God was no longer pleased to sustain in this world, man becomes mortal, and his strength is exhausted :in fact, according to the ways and will of God, he attains to the age of near one thousand years when God so wills, seventy when He finds it good. Only God would have this terminate, that one should die sooner or later when sin enters, save changing those who survive to the coming of Jesus, because He has overcome death.

Now, God was in Christ, which changed all in this respect (not as to the reality of His humanity, with all its affections, its feelings, its natural wants of soul and body; all which were in Jesus, and were consequently affected by all that surrounded Him, only according to the Spirit and without sin). No one takes His life from Him ; He gives it up, but at the moment willed of God. He is abandoned, in fact, to the effect of man's iniquity, because He came to accomplish the will of God ; He suffers Himself to be crucified and slain. Only the moment in which He yields up, His spirit is in His hands. He works no miracle to hinder the effect of the cruel means of death which man employed, in order to guard His humanity from their effect; He leaves it to their effect. His divinity is not employed to secure Himself from it, to secure Himself from death; but it is employed to add to it all His moral value, all His perfection to His obedience. He works no miracle not to die, but He works a miracle in dying. He acts according to His divine rights in dying, but not in guarding Himself from death; for He surrenders His soul to His Father as soon as all is finished.

The difference, then, of His humanity is not in that it was not really and fully that of Mary, but in that it was so by an act of divine power, so as to be such without sin; and, moreover, that in place of being separated from God in His soul, like every sinful man, God was in Him who was of God. He could say, "I thirst," "My soul is troubled," " it is melted like wax in the midst of My bowels ;" but He could also say, "The Son of Man who is in heaven," and, " Before Abraham was, I am." The innocence of Adam was not God manifest in flesh ; it was not man subjected, as to the circumstances in which His humanity was found, to all the consequences of sin.

On the other hand, the humanity of man fallen was under the power of sin, of a will opposed to God, of lusts which are at enmity with Him. Christ came to do God's will:in Him was no sin. It was human it yin Christ where God was, and not humanity separate from God in itself. It was not humanity in the circumstances where God had set man when he was created, the circumstances where sin had set him, and in these circumstances without sin ; not such as sin rendered man in their midst, but such as the divine power rendered Him in all His ways in the midst of those circumstances, such as the Holy Ghost translated Himself in humanity. It was not man where no evil was, like Adam innocent, but man in the midst of evil; it was not man bad in the midst of evil, like Adam fallen; but man perfect, perfect according to God, in the midst of evil, God manifest in flesh; real, proper humanity, but His soul always having the thoughts that God produces in man, and in absolute communion with God, save when He suffered on the cross, where He must, as to the suffering of His soul, be forsaken of God; more perfect then, as to the extent of the perfection and the degree of obedience, than any where else, because He accomplished the will of God in the face of His wrath, instead of doing it in the joy of His communion ; and therefore He asked that this cup should pass, which He never did elsewhere. He could not find His meat in the wrath of God.

Our precious Savior was quite as really man as I, as regards the simple and abstract idea of humanity, but without sin, born miraculously by divine power; and, moreover, He was God manifest in flesh.

Now, dear–, having said thus much, I recommend you with all my heart to avoid discussing and defining the person of our blessed Savior. You will lose the savor of Christ in your thoughts, and you will only find in their room the barrenness of man's spirit in the things of God and in the affections which pertain to them. It is a labyrinth for man, because he labors there at his own charge. It is as if one dissected the body of his friend, instead of nourishing himself with his affections and character. It is one of the worst signs of all those I have met with for the church (as they call it) to which Mr. G. belongs, that he has entered thus, and that it presents itself after such a sort before the Church of God and before the world. I I may add that I am so profoundly convinced of man's incapacity in this respect that it is outside the teaching of the Spirit to wish to define how the divinity and the humanity are united in Jesus, that I am quite ready to suppose that, with every desire to avoid, I may have fallen into it, and in falling into it, said something false in what I have written to you. That He is really man, Son of man, dependent on God as such, and without sin in this state of dependence, really God in His unspeakable perfection-to this I hold, I hope, more than to my life. To define is what I do not pretend. If I find something which enfeebles one or other of these truths, or which dishonors what they have for object, I should oppose it, God calling me to it, with all my might.

May God give you to believe all that the Word teaches with regard to Jesus ! It is our peace and our nourish merit to understand all that the Spirit gives us to understand, and not seek to define what God does not call us to define; but to worship on the one hand, to feed on the other, and to live in every way, according to the grace of the Holy Ghost. Yours affectionately. J.N.D.

Lecture II.-i Kings 17:2-9.

Now we have, from the second verse of the chapter, the Lord's discipline of His servant. We have his character in the first verse,-what he was, how he stood before the living God, the God of Israel. We see him in the presence of God's enemies with His word; one of those who had learned His mind, and therefore who could be used as Jehovah's mouth. He is now called away into the wilderness, himself to be disciplined; to learn some needed lessons under God's hand.

Discipline is needed by us from the first moment of our lives until the last. The discipline of the Father is ours because we are children. And the discipline of the Lord is ours too in the character of servants; for He has as much to do in shaping the instruments He uses as He has by them when they are shaped.

That discipline of the Lord never ceases; but still there are special seasons of it, and a special season we have here in Elijah's life. He has scarcely stood forth publicly before the world before the Lord takes him away again, apart by himself. No doubt it was not a new thing for Elijah to be alone with God ; but there are yet some new features in his present isolation. He is bidden to turn eastward and hide himself by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan. You know what "Jordan" means,- the great typical river of death. And " Cherith " means "cutting off." The Lord brings him to that significant place, and there makes him drink of the brook, sustained by the ravens, which feed him there.

We have to take these illustrative names to help our understanding of the Lord's dealings here. They show us Cherith as the prophet's Mara, where he had to drink in, as it were, the death from which as judgment he escapes. Miraculously sustained himself, he learns for himself "the terrors of the Lord," and how sin has wrecked the first creation. And it is a lesson we have to learn. We have to pass through the world, knowing, as far as outward circumstances go, no exemption from the common lot of men. God would not sever us from it. His own Son has come down into the world, as we know, in order to go through it Himself; the One who was ever pleasing to the Father, and had no need of discipline, and could not possibly have to say to judgment except as bearing it vicariously on the cross. Yet, in His grace, He came in the likeness of sinful flesh, and passed through all the trials and troubles proper to man. Free from the callousness which sin engenders in us, He entered into them in a way we can little realize. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses." His mere presence in the world was enough to make Him a " Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." It did not need that He should personally be subject to it:it was enough for Him to be in the world to realize what the world was. He had come from God and went to God, and He was with God all the way through. That was sufficient to make Him pre-eminently a Man of sorrows, just because He was not a man like us. How little of the misery around have our hearts room for ! How even familiarity with it deadens our sense of it! And how our own personal sorrows absorb and abstract us from those around ! Think of One all eye, all ear, all heart, for all of this. The Lord knew it divinely, and felt every thing.

Personally, however, He gave Himself up to that which sin has made our condition. His probation was not. in Eden, but a wilderness; nor did He use His miraculous power to relieve His hunger there. He had come into the world only to do God's will in it, and His hunger was no motive to act, when that will was not expressed. In His answer to Satan, He just takes the ground of man, but perfect man:-" Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

And the word of God, whatever trial were involved, whatever suffering it called for, that word was to Him meat and drink. He lived by it. It ought to be that to us. The bare fact of having the word of God to fulfill, whatever it call for ought to be enough, surely, to sustain us. The bare fact of being in His path ought to be enough, as we realize it, to furnish us with the endurance and faith needed for it.

Thus, then, the Lord passes Elijah through the suffering and sorrows coming on the land. He brings him to Cherith, and Cherith yields him water for his thirst. Just as, in the beautiful language of the eighty-fourth psalm, it is said, as to the blessing of those "in whose heart are the ways "-the ways that lead to the presence of God, " Who passing through the valley of Baca," (of tears) " make it a well". Cherith becomes this to the prophet.

Thus God makes things most contrary to work together for good to them that love Him. It is not loss to learn what that world is through which Christ has passed before ; nor to be proved by it as He was proved; nor to have had in it the discipline He could not need ; nor the opportunity of doing in it, as He did, the Father's will, in the face of suffering and of sorrow.

By and by, it will certainly be no sorrow to have known, in whatever measure, the circumstances of his path down here, in which God was glorified as nowhere else. How could we be so prepared to see, as now we may see, but soon shall fully, what His perfection was, or what the grace that brought Him into the world for us ? And then to have shared, in whatever smaller measure, with Him the trial, and with Him the victory ! Manna is no mere wilderness food, though it is that. In our Canaan home at last, and forever, it is written that he that overcometh shall eat of the hidden manna.

This is another thing from discipline, of course; but we do need discipline at God's hand continually too ; and that discipline is really what God uses to strengthen and bless. You have it in a beautiful way in Balaam's unwilling blessing of the people. "Who can count the dust of Jacob ?" Jacob is looked at in the figure of dust. What does that mean? It means that they had been as dust trodden under the foot of the Egyptians. And yet Egypt was the place in which suddenly Jacob had grown into a nation. " The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew." It is the rule in all dispensations that have been, for all God's people. Thus Balaam says, "Who can count the dust of Jacob?" "Jacob" is designedly said. It was his natural, not spiritual, name,- Jacob, the " supplanter." And Jacob needed humiliation, but grew by it.

That is what we find in the first place as to the prophet in this chapter. In the second place, God takes him away from the brook, when it fails and dries up, to Zarephath, outside of Israel altogether. Israel had rejected the Lord, and were feeling His hand in consequence. He takes him outside of Israel to be witness that the grace of the Lord will not be dammed back by human barriers, or restricted to the narrow limits to which man would confine it. That is the way the Lord uses that story of the widow of Zarephath. And the gospel in Luke commences with His testimony at Nazareth, that if in Israel the outflow of His goodness is restrained, God will have His witnesses in spite of that. Grace will only show itself the more gracious. Outside of the whole field of privilege, He takes Himself a witness among the Gentiles.
For the Lord's words recorded in the fourth chapter of Luke are not a mere arbitrary expression of God's sovereignty;_they have been so taken, but they are not. " Of a truth," He says, " many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land ; but unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow." (10:25, 26.) Now you must remember that what they had been just saying, after they had borne witness too of His gracious words, and wondered at them, was, " Is not this Joseph's son ?" Before this, He had been declaring to them the acceptable year of the Lord, and the power of the Spirit there in Him for their healing. It is when they were saying, "Is not this Joseph's son?" in spite of the gracious words they were conscious and witness of,-it is then that He warns them that God cannot be shut up by their unbelief:if they reject Him, He will go outside to the Gentiles.

That is what Elijah has to learn in the case of the widow of Sarepta. He has to learn to go out with God outside the" limits to which natural ties, and even religious associations, would confine him, and recognize in a woman of Sidon the work of God's sovereign grace,- there in its fullest and most wonderful display. I do not believe we have bottomed the need of man (or, therefore, our own,) until we have learnt the absolute sovereignty of divine grace,-shown, however, let us remember, in a scene where man's rejection of it compels Him to be sovereign, if He show grace at all. Man's will, alas ! is in opposition to that will of God to which, if all yielded, all could and would be saved. But if some,-if we have yielded, is it because of betterness in us?-were our hearts naturally more docile or obedient ? Scripture shall answer for us:"As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man." Therefore, beloved brethren, was it needful that we should be born again, "not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God " alone. The very figure speaks of this ; for in our natural birth, was there aught of our own will ?-were we consulted ? Or in creation, has the thing called into being its choice? And we are not only born of God, but His creation, " His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works."

But then this sovereign grace is grace in its fullest display. It is divine love overtopping barriers that might well be thought, even by it, unsurmountable. It is the heart of God manifested,-His will shown indeed to be but the energy of His nature who is love.

I know what rises in the mind of some :" Why not, then, save all ? Could He not as well save all ?" But I can only answer, The necessary limit even to divine goodness is its own perfection. God has solemnly assured us He would not have men perish. What infinite wisdom can do, I must be infinitely wise myself to know.

Elijah's second lesson is one that it indeed imports the man of God to have learnt well.

All the way through, Elijah has to learn the lesson of dependence. Dependence, of course, is nothing else than faith ; and the Lord puts His servant where faith shall be a continual necessity. Thus, what He seeks from us, He gives us practical help toward producing for Him. Faith grows by exercise. God ordains for it, in Elijah's case, continual exercise. He has no stock of his own, we may say, ever to subsist upon. The ravens bring him bread and flesh in the morning and bread and flesh in the evening ; and the next day, and still the next, it is the same thing again. And then when he comes to Zarephath, there you find, in the same way, the widow is called upon to sustain him, and there is a little oil in a cruse and a handful of meal in a barrel. The meal does not fail in the barrel, and the oil does not fail in the cruse. It does not increase, however,-it continues a handful of meal and a little oil ; and he is kept, in that way, in constant dependence upon God.

And that is the way the Lord would have us spiritually. He never gives a stock of any thing-of grace or of gift- so that we can say, " I have got enough to last me so long, at least." That would be taking us out of the place of faith, and depriving us of the blessing God has for us. He covets to show us what He is,-His power, His love, His unforgetfulness of us. As it is said of the people whom in His love and His pity He redeemed, " He bare them and carried them all the days of old." It is a great thing to get this in a real and practical way for ourselves with God. If He keeps us low down here,-and you know it is His way, in more senses than one, to call and choose the poor,-it is not because His hand is niggard, (God forbid !) but that we may not miss realizing this great blessing of His care. Often all we think of is, having our need met; but how little a thing is that with God ! It would cost Him nothing, we may say, to meet the need of a lifetime in a moment; and a lesser love than His would supply it at once, and get rid of a constant burden. But that is not His way. To supply the need is a small thing ; but to supply it in such a way as to make us feel in each seasonable supply the Father's eye never withdrawn from us, the Father's heart ever employed about us,-that is what He means. "Give us day by day our daily bread " is the prayer the Lord taught His disciples; and thus we ask Him continually to be waiting on us. Is it not much more than to ask, Give us now, that we may not have to come again ?

What a place the wilderness was to Israel, where the constant manna was a daily miracle, and the cloud of Jehovah's presence led them in the way ! It was the place, alas! of constant murmurings ; but in God's design, and to faith wherever in exercise, how wonderful a manifestation of the living God ! Yet that wilderness journey is but for us a type,-only a shadow, therefore short of the reality of what faith in us should realize to be ours. What a spectacle to the heavenly beings, to whom is " known, by the Church, the manifold wisdom of God "! what daily miracles of grace for eyes that are open to it!

And of course these were types (as the manna and the water from the rock,) of spiritual blessings ministered to us. And here, the same rule applies. No stock given into our hand; all funds in God's treasure-house, but therefore unfailing; and a daily, hourly, ministry of strength according to the need, which not only meets it, but tells of the tenderness of a Father's care, and of the faithfulness of our High-Priest gone in to God.

Precious lessons for more than Elijah the Tishbite !- fresh for our hearts to-day.

(To be continued.)

Dr. Waldenstrom and non-vicarious atonement.

I.-Continued.

Dr. Waldenstrom's additions to Lutheranism necessitate an important modification of it. The Lutheran creed is, that "the unworthy and unbelievers receive the true body and blood of Christ, so that, however, they shall not thence derive either consolation or life." Dr. Waldenstrom, believing that the blood is the life, cannot, of course, hold that unbelievers receive it. "This participation in the life of Jesus " is " by the believers in Him " only. Faith he presses as a necessity, yet it is in the sacrament that "through the bread and wine we really become partakers of Christ's body and blood,-that is, we become one body with Him, and are made partakers of His life." Whether this is possible apart from the sacrament I cannot find that he has said. Our Lord's words are absolute, " Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you ; whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life." (Jno. 6:53, 54.) Dr. Waldenstrom may not take these words as referring to the Supper, and he would be surely right in this; but then it is possible to eat and drink thus by faith alone, and there is no ground for maintaining any other presence of Christ in the sacrament. As for membership in the body of Christ, that is by the baptism of the Spirit (i Cor. 12:13; comp. Acts 1:5), and not by any sacrament at all. Thus all is confusion in these views from first to last.

Dr. Waldenstrom lays stress in this connection upon i Cor. 10:16, 17, the last verse of which he translates " more literally :It is one bread ; we, the many, are one body, for we all have part in that one bread." "Paul," he adds, "says, in effect, 'Here is a communion, a partaking of Christ's own life, given for us in death ; here is a uniting of believers into one body, by their partaking of Christ's body, thus making common cause with Him.' "

But it is unfortunate for the argument that the apostle as much speaks of being χoιvωvo, or communicants, of the devils(5:20, Gk.), and of Israel being (χoιvωvo) "partakers of the altar," as he speaks of the (χoιvωvία) communion of the body or of the blood of Christ. In either case, he is thinking evidently of association, and so identification, whether with the altar or worship of Jehovah, or with the devils to which under their idols the Gentiles sacrificed. And just so at the Lord's table, they were associated and identified with the wondrous revelation of God whose central part is the cross of Christ. Dr. Waldenstrom's views really displace the cross, turn the supper of the Lord from a memorial of the past into what is wholly inconsistent with it. True, he speaks, forced by what is so evidently there, of a " life given up in death," but it is not for him the giving up of life, the death itself, for participation in death (in his sense of participation) could have no meaning. For him, it is participation in life,-not death, but its opposite. For the apostle, in this same epistle, it is a remembrance, and a showing forth the Lord's death.

I have before said, believers are not united into one body by partaking of Christ's body, but by the baptism of the Spirit; and the apostle's language, which our author builds upon, suits better the thought of partaking of the one bread being the expression of the one body than it does the idea of the body being formed by this. For it is' of outward association he is speaking, and not of something entirely hidden save to faith. The doctrine of the body is further on in the epistle (chap, 12:), and there quite different, as we have seen.
"The life that the Son of God gave in death " becomes thus for Dr. Waldenstrom the truth intended in every passage where the blood or the death of Christ is spoken of in connection with justification, remission, redemption, or whatever else has been procured for us by it. An un-scriptural expression is introduced every where for the purpose of making death mean the opposite of death. True, it is admitted, He gave His life in death, but the necessity of that death, the meaning of it, we are never given to know. It reminds us of those who tell us, as to the old sacrifices, that the death of the animal was only needed because the blood could not be otherwise procured! Thus that which cannot be altogether ignored is annulled in its deep reality. The awful cry, "Why hast Thou forsaken Me? "finds no answer. God's making His Son to be sin for us is explained to be only this, that God " allowed Him to be treated by men as a sinner." In this light loose fashion, Dr. Waldenstrom might easily, as he promises to do, "consider briefly all the passages in the New Testament which speak of the blood of Jesus as a means of salvation," secure that if death can be only made to mean life, all is simple. The very texts which most plainly say the opposite become at once the strongest in his favor.

Thus, if the apostle says that " God set forth Christ to be a mercy-seat through faith in His blood," this is by such a process easily made to mean that " by faith sinners are made partakers of the blood of Jesus, or of His life, which He gave in death for them." He does not argue about this, nor need to show it from the context. We have only to bring in the new vocabulary, and read " blood " as " life," and we see it at once. It is not pretended that the passage in Romans proves that the blood means life, or that it says any thing about life. Plainly it does not, but that is no matter.

But why give any consideration to texts that can teach us nothing, and when we have the means of so reducing the most refractory into subjection ? In this all too easy work we need not follow Dr. Waldenstrom. It will be only needful to look at any new argument that may present itself. And here we have what perhaps he would call that:-

" Paul says that' God set forth Christ to be a mercy-seat through faith in His blood,-that is, God has made Him to be a mercy-seat by His giving His life in death. … So far from the case being such that Christ through His blood should be a shield for sinners against God and His righteousness, on the contrary, God Himself has set Him forth to be a mercy-seat for sinners, in order that He might save and bless them through Him.'"

Does Dr. Waldenstrom really believe that Christ's death is maintained by any of those he opposes to be a "shield against God and His righteousness"? Is He not uniformly presented by them as "the Lord our righteousness"? (Jer. 23:16.) Can righteousness be a shelter against righteousness ? At any rate, we need not, and dare not, undertake the defense of any one who does not believe that God "gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

But there is a deeper question. God gave His Son, assuredly; but why to death? why to the cross ? why to be made a curse for us ! Why must the Son of Man be lifted up? Why is it that " except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit"? It is this need which Dr. Waldenstrom seems never to have realized.

That blood-sprinkled mercy-seat of which the apostle speaks here,-for " mercy-seat," I believe, with the Swedish translators, to the proper rendering of the word,-should surely be the very thing to show Dr. Waldenstrom his error. For here, if the blood sprinkled speaks of life, it is life taken, not communicated. It is sprinkled before God, not upon men. It is sprinkled to make the throne of God a " mercy-seat; " to cleanse, not sinners, by any impartation to them, but their sins, so that God may be able to abide among them. (Lev. 16:14-17.) I am aware of Dr. Waldenstrom's comments upon this elsewhere (The Reconciliation, p. 55), but it is not true that the tabernacle, ark, or altar represent or typify the people, as he says. No instance can be shown, and any one who reads the chapter can see the case to be as I have represented it.

Dr. Waldenstrom next takes up Rom. 5:9, 10.; and here he makes (rightly enough) "by His death" to be essentially the equivalent of "by His blood; "and then the usual transformation is effected. But thus he makes justification to be also grounded upon a work in ourselves, instead of the work of the cross:" In the blood of Jesus by faith they had become righteous. By faith they had become partakers of the life of Jesus, which He gave in death for them, and thus had their justification happened." And he is bold enough to add, "Here again, therefore, the same doctrine. There is never in Scripture any thing about the obtainment by faith of any reconciliation or grace or righteousness acquired or purchased by the blood for the world,-no, not one single passage with any such idea can be shown to exist in the Bible"(!)

Yet even Dr. Waldenstrom must admit that the Lord Himself said that " God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish," and that this refers to the cross on which "the Son of Man was lifted up, that whosoever believeth on Him might not perish," as also that He says that for this the " Son of Man must be lifted up." Why "must"? and was nothing in the way of grace even procured by this? It was for the world surely, for it was the fruit of God's love to the world ; and many similar passages might be quoted. Here, the blood indeed is not spoken of directly, but the cross is, and is illustrated as to its meaning by the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness :why a serpent lifted up ? It is a type, and we may differ about the significance, but it must mean something ; and if you say, " It just means the 'old serpent' overcome," how does the "lifting up" do this? That is not a picture of life, is it ? it is of death, certainly. Why must the death take place that the life might be received ? Even the author is compelled by Scripture to repeat, though it seems to have no meaning for him, " life given up in death:" well, why " given up in death " ? Could we, then, receive it in no other way than by His dying that we might receive it? Must He lose it that we might obtain it? Nay, He laid down His life that He might take it again ? Why was it, then, that He must lay it down ?

Dr. Waldenstrom cannot answer this:he has no answer. He catches at what is in itself true, that we are recipients of life in Him; but if you ask, Why through death ? why " made a curse for us " ? how did He " bear our sins in His own body on the tree " ? how is it " through His stripes we are healed? he does not know-has nothing that will stand a moment's question. The value of Christ's death seems for him only to win the hearts of men, if at least I read aright all that I can find upon it in this tractate:'"By the death,' 'in His blood,'" he says. That Christ by the grace of God had given His life in death for them, that was what had broken their enmity, and reconciled them to God." All well; but is there no more?

To this we shall return, if the Lord will. The strength of Dr. Waldenstrom's position, it will be seen, is just the utterance of half-truths for whole ones, and the reiteration of a bald sophistry, that blood shed in death stands for life. This he repeats and re-repeats, and it would be idle to repeat the exposure of it. What makes against him, he omits to speak of:as where, in Heb. 13:12, the apostle dwells upon the truth that "Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered without the gate," Dr. Waldenstrom insists upon what every one knows, that to be sanctified is to be "cleansed from sin." It is more, but it is that; and so when he says that "the work of Christ was to remedy just the injury which sin had occasioned," that is a truth, though a partial one. We may agree too that " neither is it said that the blood by its merit should move God to consider us holy, although we were not holy." Few, it is to be hoped, believe any such thing ; and there is confusion apparently between holiness and righteousness. That God "justifieth the ungodly" Scripture does say plainly, righteousness being "imputed without works" (Rom. 4:5, 6); but that is the very way in which God produces holiness,-not acts as if it were no matter.

But the gist of the passage in Hebrews Dr. Waldenstrom never notices at all, though it is plain enough in the verse as he quotes it. Why must Jesus, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffer without the gate ? It is this evidently that gives the very blood of Christ power to sanctify, as in the type he tells us that the "bodies of those beasts whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high-priest for sin are burned without the camp." (5:2:) Why that? If the blood be the life, in the way the author puts it, and the impartation of life be the whole thing, how does the burning without the camp help the blood to sanctify ? Dr. Waldenstrom has not a word-does not entertain the question. Though with the apostle of all importance, with him it seems to have none:why but that he and the apostle are not in agreement ?That is the simple reality.

The apostle is speaking of death, and not of life; and even here, he tells us, death alone would not be enough. " Outside the camp " expresses what " outside the gate " of the city of God does afterward-distance from God, because of sin ! Nay, one expression of it in the cross is not enough, but the darkness which throws its pall over the scene must also testify with the agonizing words of the Sufferer which break out from it, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " " Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law," says the apostle, "being made a curse for us, as it is written, ' Cursed is every one that hangeth upon a tree.' " (Gal. 3:13.) The due of sin is not death alone. The bearing of our sins requires more:and to the real subject of the experience of the twenty-second psalm, the agony of agonies is that which again and again He deprecates-" But be not Thou far from Me, O Lord ! "

Dr. Waldenstrom's system has no place for this :vicarious atonement he refuses. But why this, then?-" Our fathers trusted in Thee; they trusted in Thee, and were not forsaken." Why this exception in the case of the One only absolutely righteous ?

Here, then, we may leave the consideration of Dr. Waldenstrom's first pamphlet on the blood of Jesus. There is nothing more in it that presents any difficulty, if we have clearly mastered what has been before us.

(To be continued.)

Lecture I.-I Kings 16:29-17:1:

I have just read these closing verses in the sixteenth chapter, beloved friends, in order that we may have before us in some measure the times in which Elijah stood forth. My desire is, if the Lord will, in this, or a lecture or so, to look at what, in the most striking features, the man of God is. We find, in the times of Israel, that word "man of God" coming up repeatedly in connection with Elijah and Elisha. The title, while actually found, as the character itself is prominently brought out, in times of failure, is still really applicable to all the Lord's people, as what they are all, I may say, positionally, and as purchased by the blood of Christ. They are surely God's men ; but the "man of God " is the title here of one who is practically that,-one whose practical character answers to his position.

We have, in a very striking way, in the second epistle to Timothy, the man of God spoken of as the one for whom, in a sense, all Scripture was written, and whom alone it would profit as it ought; and so it becomes a very serious thing with us whether we have that character. "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." (2 Tim. 2:16, 17.)

There you find that Scripture only has its proper effect on the man of God; and though, of course, no child of God is shut out, and it is written for all in this sense, that all may be and should be such, yet of necessity the profit of it is limited to those who have, in a measure at least, the character of the man of God,-God's man; of those who stand out for Him-those who are manifestly and practically His.

The character naturally becomes only the more distinct as the times are trying. Even in the apostle's time it could be said, "All seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's." (Phil. 2:21.) Just in proportion as that is so, of course it makes more striking the reality of one who is a man of God ; it makes him shine out in the darkness ; as it is said of John the Baptist, who in his day took up Elijah's mission :' He was a burning and a shining light,"-not merely a shining light, mark, as the dead and decaying wood may shine, but a burning light as well. And it is a great point to understand, that while, of course, the darkness is not of God,-surely it is not!-yet, at the same time, it is used of God to make His light more apparent. We should accustom ourselves to think of it in that way; not excusing the evil, or thinking lightly of it, but as certainly not sinking down under it, or being controlled by it. For God's lights, as such, are made for the darkness, which does not hide or put them out, but manifests them. Such a light, in the very darkest days in Israel, was Elijah the Tishbite.

In the chapters before this, how little one seems to find one's way amid the discordant shapes of evil that fill the page, where the son is but spiritually the "brother of his father," as Ahab's name imports, and that which is born of the flesh is only flesh again. It is so beautiful that you get God at once brought into the scene when Elijah steps into it. Then, while there is still darkness all around, it is not unrelieved darkness any more. If you consider, you will see how largely God's people have lived in such times as these; how from the very beginning of all dispensations that which was intrusted to man's care he failed in, and the ruin of what was set up became a settled thing. If you take Israel, God says of their course in the wilderness, "Ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them; and I will carry you away beyond Babylon." (Acts 7:43.) The failure in the wilderness is there connected with the Babylonish captivity, though a great number of years intervened. The whole thing failed there, and Babylon was the necessary result of the failure in the wilderness.

Take, again, the Church, before the apostles had passed off the scene. It was the mercy of God that they had not passed away before we get His judgment through them of the condition of things. One of them can tell us, "It is the last time ; and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time." (i Jno. 2:18.) Another, "The mystery of iniquity doth already work" (2 Thess. 2:7); and a certain hindrance has only to be removed for the man of sin to be fully manifested. Look into the writings of those called " fathers," but a generation or so after the apostles. There was a sudden dropping down into the very depths of darkness, we may say, at once. From that time to this, nearly eighteen hundred years, has been a time in which God's people have had to walk with God alone. It is what we ought always to do, of course, but still more does a time of general departure call on those who would be overcomers to walk alone with Him. If the stream be adverse, we need more spiritual energy, that is all.

If you compare the second epistle of Peter, the first chapter, with the first chapter of the first epistle, you will find such a difference. There is a call in the second for greater energy; because God does not leave us to the influences of every kind about us. He does not fail, if man does. Yet it is so astonishing that we should be ready almost to credit Him with failure, because we fail. And at a time of general failure, as if delivered up to it, we claim it as even a sort of humility, not only not to pretend to be Pauls, but even to take his path at all.

Yet such as he were men of like passions with ourselves; and we, as they, are redeemed with the precious blood of Christ. The Spirit of God was no more in them than in us; because if the Spirit of God is in us, it has no measure from God. You find everybody almost imagining that there is a "measure of the Spirit," whereas there is not, in that sense, a measure of it at all. That word which the apostle gives in the epistle to the Ephesians, "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit" (5:18.), is to all Christians. If we were filled with the Spirit, should we be any thing less than men of God ? Elijah had a special mission, of course, and so had Paul ; but still, as to spiritual character, should we be any other than even these ? If the night is dark, will not even the faintest light be brighter ?

The times in Israel were not times in which we, should look for such a light as Elijah the Tishbite; it was, exactly, God's time. God delights in showing, in the very midst of it all, that He is quite as sufficient for the darkest times as for the brightest. Elijah's name shows where his strength was. "My mighty One is Jehovah "is its full significance. "Eli" means "my God,"but yet also "my strength," or "my mighty One." It is the word used by the Lord upon the cross,-" Eli, Eli,"-" My God, My God ;" but the very force of it there is, that He is appealing to One who has got abundant power (if it were only a question of power,) to bring Him out of all the difficulty in a moment; instead of which, the mighty One, His strength, forsakes Him. So here, it is "Jehovah is My mighty One," and it is the power of God we see in Elijah,-a power as available for you and me as for him. " Tishbite " is said by some to mean " the converter,"-

the one in whom there was power to turn men from the way in which they were unto Himself, and who sought to bring a nation back to God. In his own lifetime there might seem to be little apparent success in that; even so there is the lesson for us. For while God never allows His Word to fall fruitless to the ground, and we may surely trust Him for that, on this very account we may leave success to Him,-not indifferent, but still not daunted, if it do not much appear; and anxious, first of all, that the seed and sowing should be to His mind, rather than to see results which perhaps the day of manifestation will alone disclose.

That is what God would have before us:success is in His own hands, and God is content sometimes to work in a way to us inscrutable. Look at the Lord's life :how many apparently were converted?-a few disciples gather in an upper room after His resurrection. There was quite a number at Pentecost, and a mightier work ; but as you go on, you find no such large success, even in apostolic hands, as you would expect perhaps from the gospel. Very various indeed it is :in many places to which the apostle Paul went, instead of having, what people expect now from a few weeks' revival-meetings, converts by the score, very often but a few, so far as we can see. And only in a few places at first was there large response. In an exceptional one, you find the Lord saying, " I have much people in this city;" but in no wise was that the rule. And the Lord, in His own parable of the mustard-seed, indicates that the growth of the little gospel-seed into the "tree" was as little likely a result as it argued little for Christianity. Alas ! the great spread of this took place in proportion to its adulteration; and as it became popular, so it became corrupt.

Why do I speak of this? Because if we make success our object, it will become a snare to us. We shall get our eyes upon the results, and by this, test our work untruly. For if that were the test, what about His who said, " I have labored in vain :I have spent My strength for naught!" "Yet surely," was His confidence, "My judgment is with the Lord, and My work with My God." God, on the other hand, would have us look, in the most careful way possible, at walk and work and life, and as to what comes of it,-the issue of it all,-leave that to be made manifest in the day fast approaching, which shall make every thing manifest. Are you content to leave it to that ? Care for souls and love to them is of course another thing. God forbid that I should say one word which should make that a matter of little moment! but beware of what on every side people are doing ; and beware of thinking that quantity, with God, will atone for quality.

Now with Elijah, while God honored the man in the most remarkable way, as you know,-put Himself along with him, authenticated his word, and gave the fire from heaven which consumed the sacrifice,-yet there ..seemed no adequate result. Did the nation turn to God ? " Hear me," Elijah prays,-" Hear me, O Lord ! hear me ! that this people may know that Thou art the Lord God, and that Thou hast turned their hearts back again." (i Kings 18:37.) In the very next chapter, he is fleeing from the face of Jezebel, because she had said, " So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to-morrow about this time." (Chap. 19:2.) There you find, perhaps, how the ill-success of his mission affected one like Elijah. When he looked at that, he was asking, "Would God I might die!" and sank down in discouragement. There he was, just the man that was not going to die,-just the man who, as you know, was taken straight into heaven without seeing death at all, vanquished by the apparent want of success, after all this wonderful display of power. Is this not to us a most wholesome warning not to look at the success so much as at the being with God which will insure success? If we are to wait for the success-for the end-in order to see what the thing is we do, is it not manifest that we must do it in the dark in the meantime, as to whether it be of God or not ? Yet only as knowing this can we do it in communion with Him. What comes of it is God's account, not ours. We need not be afraid that His purpose will not be fulfilled, or that which is of Him not prosper.
Now let us look at Elijah in the attitude expressed here in a few words. " Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, 'As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years but according to my word.'" (Chap, 17:) He stood before the living God :God was for him that-the living God. That is the first thing. "As the Lord God of Israel liveth," be says. He can find no way of expressing assurance equal to that. It was the surest thing he knew, the most vividly realized, that the God of Israel lived. And that is just the thing that we want to realize on the way down here. The living God is what we want in the midst of scenes like this; in the midst of all so full of life and activity, the life around and about, brushing us on every side, how we do want to realize the living God !

I know, when you look at Elijah's life, you may say, " Certainly God did manifest Himself to Elijah in a marvelous, miraculous way, which we do not see at all now. To only some is it given to work in that way with God. We cannot see these things now." Yet God is the same living God ; and we may be sure of this, that while it is true we do not realize what Elijah did, the failure is clearly our failure, and not God's. I do not mean to say there are what people call miracles in the self-same way now ; that is not exactly what I am speaking of. We do not expect fire to fall from heaven, or any thing of that sort, very likely ; but while all this is true, as we see how the drought of fishes could bring the living God home to a soul ready for the announcement, so we may see, and should be prepared to see, Him acting in every little event of our lives. We only need to look:just as with those people who are not prepared to find great things in the Word, so are never able to find great things in it. The open eye is faith. It is the new sense of the child of God, and more certain than any other. In proportion as this is in exercise will the Word be permeated by. a living Presence. "Quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword," it will bring us under the eyes of "Him with whom we have to do."

So with God's presence about us. The earth is still full of Him. What has drawn a vail over His presence ? Really, it is unbelief,-that is all. Unbelief! I grant you that vail is perfectly impenetrable unless the Word has approved itself to us as His revelation in the way we have spoken of. But then creation becomes, from mere materialism, spiritualized and transfigured. Our own history becomes the story of an omnipotent love, under which " all things work together for good to them that love God." He counts the very hairs of our head, goes beyond all our thought and care for ourselves, and fills our loneliest moments with His presence.

It is only that which will make our lives at all what they ought to be; it is only that which will redeem them, so to speak, from the littleness and meanness and unimportance otherwise attaching to them. The meanest life in His presence ceases to be drudgery, and becomes ennobled ; the noblest without it, what is it but utter vanity ?

You must not imagine that Elijah's life was made up of miracles. How small a part of it these miracles were!

And when he stands forth here to answer for the living God, we do not find that the faith he manifested had been nurtured upon miracles. It is not God's way. Those who believed in Christ's name when they saw the miracles He did were not those in whom He confided. It is when we have faith in His presence and nearness that He will respond to the faith we have. It would be merely tempting God to want Him to show Himself in this wonderful way just to prove He was with us. To question is to tempt Him. He is near us, and we ought to know it; and when we realize that, then we may see, perhaps, what to unaccustomed eyes may look not unlike miracle even in the present matter-of-fact day.

But again, to Elijah, the living God was not merely his God:He was the God of Israel. That is a beautiful thing, quite characteristic of the man of God. Israel were God's people. He was not standing before Israel, remember; he stood before the Lord God of Israel, not before Israel. But Israel was something to him, because his God was Israel's God; and because the Lord God was the Lord God of Israel, therefore Israel was in his thought connected with the Lord God for whom he spoke.

Now, that is of immense moment to us, to whom God has revealed the mystery of His Church. We may easily have the Church before us, and be monopolized with the thought of the Church in such a way as really to take us out of the presence of God. What is the Church without the God of the Church? We may easily be making much of the Christian and leaving out the God of the Christian, and leaving out all that gives Christianity or Christians the least importance.

On the other hand, let us understand that to stand before the God of Israel implies this, that we are linked in heart with what is God's cause in the world. " Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it,"-not for a fraction of it, even the most intelligent,-aye, or the most devoted. Every one of the tribes had its name upon the high-priest's breast-plate ; and even so all His saints are upon Christ's heart now. Can we be God's men and yet not in active earnest sympathy with that with which His heart so intimately concerns itself ? Surely it is impossible. " I fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ," says the apostle,"for His body's sake, which is the Church."

Thus, while God, who forgets not the smallest in His care for the greatest, nor one of His people in His concern for the rest, is to be for us personally and intimately ours, at the same time, He is to be the Lord God of Israel to us, and we are to stand before Him as such. Now, this standing before Him, what does it mean ? It is not an expression of confidence-there is abundant confidence you see at once-or of rest, or of peace. Too often we make that the whole thing. He stands before the Lord God of Israel. This is the attitude of service. He is waiting, ready at His bidding. Not merely walking before Him; not running about, surely, with the restless hurry of many, too busy with His service to listen to His word. "Standing" is waiting to have His will expressed. We stand before the Lord God when we are waiting for Him to direct us, and do not move without His guidance. There may be much more standing than moving even, no doubt. If you take Elijah's life, how much more of standing, or waiting, or being alone with God, than there was of acting for Him ; but the acting for Him, in consequence, came just at the right time. So should we be ready to serve, not merely occupied with the service, much less hurrying about, as if to be doing was the whole matter, but to be in His path, to be doing His will, conscious that all else is worse than idleness.

Now notice how God identifies Himself with the men who stand before Him in this way. "As the Lord God of Israel liveth before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years but according to my word." What a bold thing to say ! Of course, Elijah did not mean to assert that because of his word the Lord would do these things. It was not that the Lord was going to accomplish Elijah's will, but that Elijah was accomplishing the Lord's. " The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." "Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets. . . . The Lord God hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" (Amos 3:7, 8.) The prophet and the man of God are nearly identical. Would He keep back any thing from those who stood before Him, seeking to be servants of His will and toward the people of His choice? What a wonderful place that is to be in ! For God to identify Himself so with one, not to be ashamed of him, as it is said in the eleventh of Hebrews of those old worthies; not ashamed to identify Himself with, and uphold before the face of the world, the word of a poor, un-titled man, but to whom His word and will were all. Thus was it with Elijah, and so he became linked with the fulfillment of the purposes of One to whom the universe is but the scene of the display of a glory which transcends it still.

Now, that is the character of the man of God. Do we know what it is to have the living God before our eyes in this kind of way ? Do we know what it is to be able to see, not only His actings in our lives, but what He is doing in the world, and toward His people, because we are with Him and therefore have His mind ? Do we know what it is, as sons of God, to be His servants, working with the zeal and intelligence of those who both know the Father's will and know the Father ?

Of course, we must be sons before we are servants; but, being sons, do not let us imagine that this is every thing ! People put service in the wrong place often. They are serving before they are sons, or before they are conscious of being sons ; and slipping, therefore, into that hired service for which God has no place. On the other hand, it is surely the right thing when sonship ripens into service, and the full reality of sonship can hardly be enjoyed when this is not so.

Even so, rest from labor develops into rest in labor, or it is not the full rest Christ gives. Rest for the conscience is attained when we have known that the work of Christ is what God alone accepts, and has accepted, as justifying us before Him. Therefore He gives rest."Come unto Me all ye that labor; and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." (Matt. 11:28.)Does He stop there? Is that all? No; "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls." (5:29.) That is the only way in which rest in the full sense is attainable. It is rest, not apprehended by the conscience merely, but laid hold of by the heart; rest from all restlessness,-perfect and complete repose. But notice, it is His yoke and His burden. It is not a yoke of our own making or imposing. It is not setting ourselves to so much work for Him. It is another thing to take Christ's yoke and His burden, and learn of Him, the Doer of the Father's will, and whose meat and drink it was to do it. In Him, the true Son was the perfect servant. Have we apprehended that because we are sons, from the very nature of the child's relation to the father, we are necessarily and always servants? The child is never released from it, as a mere ordinary servant may be. His very relationship makes him a servant to his father. A servant of love, no doubt, and thus completely one.

Our service, from first to last, is to have His Word to justify it. Our own wills religiously are no more really right than irreligiously. God has one path for us to walk in, one work at any moment for us to be about. While the Word guides, it must be a living guidance-guided by His eye.

The Lord grant it to us, for His name's sake.

(To be continued.)

AN EXPOSITION OF REVELATION IV.-XXII.

PART II.-THE TRUMPETS. (Chap. 8:2-11:18.)

The First Four Trumpets.(Chap. 8:2-13.) (Continued.)

The third trumpet sounds, and a star falls from heaven, burning like a torch."And it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood:and the third part of the waters became wormwood ; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter."

The heavens are the sphere of government, whether civil or spiritual; a ruler of either kind might be here indicated therefore, and the historical application is in general to Attila, king of the Huns; yet the fall from heaven, the poisoning of the sources of refreshment, as well as the parallel, if not the deeper, connection with the sixth trumpet, seem to point much more strongly to an apostate teacher, by whose fall the springs of spiritual truth should be embittered, causing men to perish. With all the misery that has hitherto been depicted as coming upon men under these apocalyptic symbols, we have not before had any clear intimation of this, which we know, however, to be a principal ingredient in the full cup of bitterness which will then be meted out to men. Because they have not received the love of the truth, that they might be saved, God will send them strong delusion, that they may believe a lie; and here would seem to be the beginning of this.

In the French revolution at the end of the last century, the revolt against the existing governments linked itself with an uprise against Christianity ; and the socialistic and anarchical movements which have followed, with however little present success, are uniformly allied with infidel and atheistic avowals as extreme as any of that time. Russian "nihilism" fulfills its name in demanding "No law, no religion-nihil!" and as the first thing, "Tear out of your hearts the belief in the existence of God." Here is forestalled the one "who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshiped ;" nor is it a contradiction to this that one with such nihilism on his standard should exalt himself into the place of God :the atheist Comte devised for his followers a new worship, with forms borrowed from Rome, and a peremptory spirit, which have gained for it from a noted infidel of the day the title of " Catholicism minus Christianity." This was his proposition, as stated by himself:" The re-organization of human society, without God or king, through the systematic worship of humanity."

This was a delirium ! True, but such dreams will come again, as the Word of God declares, in that fever of the world to which, with its quick pulse now, it is fast approaching. Apostasy is written already upon what men would fain have the dawn of a new day, and the being who has raised himself from the chattering ape to link the lightning to his chariot of progress, what shall stay him now? These are the words from the lips of Truth itself:"I am come in My Father's name, and ye receive Me not; if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive."

We have already considered in a measure the doctrine of a personal antichrist yet to come, and we shall be repeatedly recalled to the consideration of it as we go on with Revelation. Here it is only the place to say that his birthplace in the book seems to be under this third seal, though his descent more strictly than his rise. He is born of apostasy, as the second epistle to the Thessalonians (chap. 2:3) would lead us to anticipate.

And now, under the fourth trumpet, a scene occurs which may be compared with that under the sixth seal, but which in the comparison reveals important differences. Then, a convulsion affected (as would appear) the whole earth:now, it is only the governing powers that are affected by it; and that, not every where, but a third part of the sun and of the moon and of the stars, so that the day shines not for a third part of it, and the night likewise. These last words in connection with the similar limitation to a third part in the preceding seals, seem plain enough. The day does not shine in a third part of the sphere of its dominion, nor the night (in its moon and stars) either. Certainly this would not be the natural result of the darkening of a third part of sun and moon, and intimates to us that we have not here a literal phenomenon such as is represented, but figures of other things. Royal or imperial authority has collapsed, with its train of satellites, within such limits as a " third part" may designate; and with this, the first series of the trumpets ends. As ordinarily in these septenary series, the last three are. cut off from these first four, which have a certain oneness of application, as the use of this " third part" employed in them throughout also would imply; for the next trumpet has no intimation of this kind. The sixth has it again, but the seventh refuses all such limitation.

The meaning of this trumpet, then, is simple; but its proper significance must be gained from its connection with the series of which it forms a part, and indeed with any prophecies elsewhere which by comparison may throw light upon it.

In general, also, the historical application attains here a consistency which claims attention ; and that there is some substantial truth in it (though not the full truth) there is no need to doubt. The minds of so many of the Lord's people as have explored the book of Revelation by this light have not been left so utterly dark and untaught of the Spirit as to have allowed them to wander utterly astray. Scripture is larger in compass than we think, and this is by no means the only part of prophecy in which a certain fulfillment has anticipated and, as it were, typified the final and exhaustive one. In this very book, those who receive the addresses to the seven churches as prophetic of the history of the professing church at large can surely not deny, or seek to deny, a primary application to churches actually existing in the apostle's day. And here the foundation of the historical interpretation is already laid. The stream of prophecy in the seals and trumpets in this case naturally has its germinant fulfillment from that very time; and if we refuse it, we refuse not only the comfort we should gain from seeing the Lord's control of the whole course of man's spiritual history for so many centuries, but also lose for the final application a guiding clue with which the grace of God has furnished us. That it is not a full, exhaustive fulfillment will not in this case either affect its being a fulfillment. It will be in perfect keeping with its place that it shall not be a complete one ; for were it this, no room for the final one would be left.

Now the general interpretation of the first four trumpets applies them to the breaking up of the Roman empire by the barbarian inroads of Goths, Vandals, and Huns, until its final extinction in the west by the hands of Odoacer. The eastern half survived to a latter day, but it was henceforth Grecian rather than Roman, Rome itself, with all that constituted its greatness,-nay, its being, in the days of its ancient glory, having departed from it.

This application agrees with the unity of these trumpets, while it gives a sufficient reason for the series coming to an end, and the fifth and sixth trumpets turning now to judgments upon the eastern half, by the hands of Saracen and Turk, the seventh being in its character universal. The Roman empire, let us remember, as the last empire of Daniel's visions, and that which existed in the Lord's lifetime upon earth, and by the authority of which He was crucified, stands as the representative of the world-power in its rebellion against God. (Comp. Ps. 2:with Acts 4:25-28.) No wonder, therefore, if its history should be given under these war-trumpets, the last of which gives the full victory of Christ over all the opposition.

It is consistent with this that Satan in the twelfth chapter of this book should as the dragon be pictured with the seven heads and ten horns of the Roman beast. He is the spiritual prince of this world, and in this way is clothed with the power of the world, which we see here again is Roman.

So again, the "earth," which both in Greek and Hebrew may mean " land," and is often by no means the equivalent of the world, seems almost constantly in these prophecies, till the final one, to be the Roman earth, the territory of the Roman empire in its widest, and of which the western part seems to be the "third part" mentioned in the trumpets. As to this third part, Mr. Elliott urges, that during the period of these early trumpets, "the Roman world was, in fact, divided into three parts,* viz., the Eastern (Asia Minor, Syria, Arabia, Egypt); the Central (Moesia, Greece, Illyricum, Rhoetia); the Western (Italy, Gaul, Britain, Spain, north-western Africa); and that the third, or western, part was destroyed." *I quote from the American edition of Lange on Revelation, p. 201.*

Others would make the "third part " equivalent to the territory peculiar to the third beast of Daniel, or the Greek empire; but this seems certainly not the truth:for in this case, according to the historical interpretation, the end of the eastern empire must be found under the fourth trumpet, whereas the fifth trumpet goes back before this, to introduce the Saracens !

Of all interpretations, that only seems consistent which applies the "third part" to the western part of the Roman earth, and in this way the term may have a further significance, as that part in which the Roman empire is yet to revive again, as it will revive for judgment in the latter days,-the "third " being very often connected in Scripture, as is well known, with the thought of resurrection.

The Roman empire has indeed long been extinct, both in the west and in the east, and it is of this very extinction that the historical interpretation of the trumpets speaks, yet the voice of prophecy clearly assures us that it must be existing at the time of the end, when, because" of the words of the little horn, judgment comes down upon it. (Dan. 7:.2:) The nineteenth chapter of this book unites with the book of Daniel in this testimony:for it is when the Lord appears that the beast is seen, along with the kings of the earth, arrayed in opposition against Him. Thus it is plain that the Roman empire must be existent at the end. It has yet, therefore, to rise again, and in the thirteenth chapter we see it, in fact, rising out of the sea:while in the seventeenth, where the woman Babylon has her seat upon it, it is said, " The beast that thou sawest was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition." (5:8.) So it is called, " The beast that was, and is not, and shall come." (5:8.,R. V.)

Nothing can be much plainer than the fact that the Roman empire will revive again.

But not only so; it is also declared by the same sure Word that it will revive to be smitten again in one of its heads,-and apparently to death, yet its wound is healed and it lives, (chap. 12:3, 12, 14.) It is after this that it becomes idolatrous, as Daniel has intimated to us it will, and all the world wonders after it. (10:3, 8, 12.)

It is not yet the place to go fully into this, but so much is clear as enables us to see how the historical interpretation of these trumpets points, or may point, to a future fulfillment of them. One other thing which the book of Revelation notes will make more complete our means of interpretation.

The beast, as seen in Revelation, has seven heads, or kings; and these are successive rulers-or forms of rule -over the empire :for " five," says the angel, " are fallen, and one is, and another is yet to come ; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space." The heads, then, in this primary view, are seven, but five had passed away -commentators quote them from Livy-the sixth, the imperial power, existed at that time:the seventh was wholly future, and, in contrast with the long continuance of the sixth, would continue only a short space.

But there is an eighth head, and the beast himself is this. The last statement has been supposed to mean that the head exercised the whole authority of the empire ; but it would seem nothing strange for the head of empire to exercise imperial authority. Does it not rather mean that the beast that is seen all through these chapters is the beast of this eighth head ?

But the seventh head, where does it come in ? There are some things that would seem to give us help with regard to this. For the empire plainly collapsed under its sixth head, and the seventh could not be until the empire again existed. There are. questions here that have to be settled with the historical interpretation; but in the meantime the course of the trumpets as we have already followed it, confirmed by their historical interpretation also, would suggest that we have in them, and indeed from the commencement of the seals, the history of the seventh head. The rider upon the white horse, to whom a crown is given, may well be the person under whom the empire is at first re-established. And of such an one Napoleon, though not (as some have thought) the seventh head himself, may be well the foreshadow. The sixth seal does not point to his overthrow:it is a wider, temporary convulsion which affects all classes-high and low together; and in the pause that follows, they would seem to recover themselves. The trumpets begin, however, at once to threaten overthrow. The very escape of the governing classes under the first trumpet seems to prepare the way for the outburst under the second, which is an eruption from beneath,-fierce with passionate revolt; to which is added, under the third, apostasy, the giving up of the restraint of divine government, soon to grow into the last, worst form of Christianity according to Satan- Antichrist:the opposition to incarnate Deity of deified humanity.

The result is, under the fourth trumpet, as it would appear, the imperial power smitten, the seventh head wounded to death, and with it the recently established empire overthrown beyond mere human power to revive again. But this brings in the help of one mightier than man-the awful power of Satan, working with an energy proportionate to the shortness of the time which is now his. The beast arises out of the abyss, its deadly wound is healed ; the dragon gives him his power and throne and great authority; and all the world wonders and worships, (chap. 13:2-4.)

Then indeed it is " Woe ! woe ! woe ! to the inhabiters of the earth."

(To be continued.)

DR. WALDENSTROM AND NON-VICARIOUS ATONEMENT.

I.

The work of Dr. Waldenstrom may well take its place among the Current Events which deserve special notice at our hands. It is one of the signs of the times-sad signs of the departure from the faith which is going on every where, and will go on to the apostasy predicted as that in which the dispensation ends. (2 Thess. 2:) I do not take it up, however, merely to notice it as that, but to give full examination to the views themselves, which, having been widely accepted already among Scandinavians generally, are now being brought before the English-speaking public for an acceptance which they are but too sure to find with many. Dr. Waldenstrom's writings have in them a tone of piety which will attract, while they assume to deal exhaustively with Scripture on their several topics. It is something which assuredly they are very far from doing, a partial truth being very commonly mistaken for the whole, so that we have but to fill in the gaps to find the antidote. But the appearance of doing so will be enough with many to carry their convictions, at least for a time. Among his own countrymen, we are told,-

"The promulgation of the author's views on the atonement occasioned a very general and earnest searching of the Word of God by all classes of Christians, and as these so-called 'new views' were plainly found just in that Word, they were accepted by the majority of Swedes, in their own and in this country [America] ; also by many among Norwegians and Danes, by preachers and people in and outside the state church. Notwithstanding the cry of heresy raised in some quarters at the time against Dr. W–, he passed triumphantly (in 1873), by a discussion before the bishop and consistory of the diocese, his examination for admission into the higher orders of the clergy. In 1874, he was appointed professor of theology (including Biblical Hebrew and Greek) in the state college at Gene, one of the largest cities in Sweden. This position he still holds, while at the same time he is serving his second term in the Swedish parliament."

It is with the treatise on the "Blood of Jesus," the key-note to his views as to atonement, that we naturally begin. It leads us at once into the heart of our subject.

He tells us, first of all, that if, according to the law of Moses, "almost all things are purged with blood " (Heb, 9:22), "the purging itself was accomplished, not by the slaying of the victim, but by the sprinkling with the blood. This has a profound typical significance. In the New Testament also it is said that cleansing from sin is effected by the blood of Jesus-notice :not by the death of Jesus, but by the blood of Jesus."

This is true, and the reason is plain also:by the blood of Jesus our "hearts are sprinkled from an evil conscience." (Heb. 10:22.) And this sprinkling is just the application to the person of Christ's blessed work Useless would His death be to us if it were not to be applied-that is, appropriated to us ; and the blood speaks of death, but of a violent death, not of a natural one; of a life taken, not merely ended. A natural death the Lord could not have died, and such a death could not have availed us, because it implies sin in the one who dies.

But, says Dr. Waldenstrom further, by the blood of Christ we cannot mean His bodily or physical blood ; but the blood must be a type of something:we have to ask ourselves, therefore, what the blood typifies.

This is a very serious mistake. The blood of Christ is not a type of something else. It is used metonymically, as the rhetoricians say,-that is, to express such a death as has been pointed out; but that is a very different thing from its being a type. This would deny the blood of the cross to have any real place in our cleansing from sin at all. It would be simply in such relation to it as was Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness, and nothing more. Dr. Waldenstrom seems to have borrowed from Swedenborgianism here.

But he asks what is meant by the saints having "washed, their robes in the blood of the Lamb," or our eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood. " Every one understands," he says, "that the blood here is a type of something." I can only answer that, for my own part at least, I have never thought so. Figurative, of course, the expressions are; but it does not follow that every expression in a sentence is figurative even because some are. The washing and the garments, the eating and the drinking, may be figurative ; and are, surely :but it does not make the blood simply a "type." When the Lord says, "He that eateth me shall live by Me," is Christ Himself only a type ? It is strange that a professor of theology should make so rash a statement.

He bids us, again, observe that it is not "faith in the blood" which cleanses from sin, but the blood itself. And that it is not the " value of the blood in the sight of God," but only the blood. And again, that the blood of Christ is never represented as a payment to God for our sins; nor in the Old Testament is the blood of the sacrifices ever represented as such a payment.

What all this is to prepare the way for is pretty clear. But is it true? and is it the whole truth ?

For it is plain that if our hearts are sprinkled from an evil conscience – and sprinkling is to cleanse, as Dr. Waldenstrom insists,-we read, on the other hand, of God "purifying hearts through faith" (Acts 15:9), and of " peace "-that is, a purged conscience-" in believing' (Rom. 15:13); just as we read of justification by faith, sanctification by the truth,-that is, of course, by faith in it,-and so on. Surely it is true that faith has for its object, not faith, but Christ, and His work, and that its power for blessing is in this very thing. Thus this is just how faith necessarily must say, "Not faith, nor any thing in myself, but the blood of Christ cleanseth." And that is true ; and yet without faith there would be no cleansing.

Now, when he says, It is not the value of the blood in the sight of God that cleanses, he makes another mistake . of the same kind. Whatever the value of a remedy, of course, it is not its value that acts in the cure. It is the remedy itself that acts. It is indeed the blood that cleanses, and by its being sprinkled ; but if we ask, how is it the sprinkled blood can cleanse? we shall then find that its cleansing power depends upon its atoning power,- that is, upon its value in the sight of God. Dr. Waldenstrom confounds here cleansing with atonement, while in general we shall find he makes atonement to depend upon cleansing, instead of making, as he should make, cleansing depend upon atonement. These two things are widely different. Cleansing is for man, (it is man who is cleansed), while atonement is for God. Once let us make this easy distinction, Dr. Waldenstrom's doctrine will appear the mere confusion that it really is.

As to the blood of Christ being payment for our sins, the expression, it is true, is indefensible, although those who use it have, after all, a truer thought than Dr. Waldenstrom. It is true that the sacrifices of old were not represented as payment for sin, and that this would be a gross, low thought, unworthy of God ; yet our author seems to have forgotten that there was such a thing as atonement-money (Ex. 30:12), and that this was said to be a ransom for their souls. It is to this also that the apostle refers when he says that we " were not redeemed with corruptible things, as with silver and gold,'. . . . but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and, without spot." (i Pet. 1:18, 19.) Here, undoubtedly, the blood of Christ is regarded as the true atonement-money.

The thought, then, is, of a price by which we are redeemed; and with this, all are purchased. (2 Pet. 2:1:) Christ's sufferings are thus a price He paid for all, though only a ransom-price, for His people. Purchase must be distinguished from redemption, although every one that will may find in the first general truth what enables him to realize the special and distinctive one. Christ tasted " death for every man." (Heb. 2:9.) Here is the price paid, and for all:it is for faith to lay hold of this, and say, as it has title to say, "Then I am His." To him who receives this precious grace, the purchase is found to be redemption.

What, then, is the mistake in saying that Christ has made " payment for our sins"? This, that in Scripture the price is for us, not for our sins. He has bought us as that which had value in His eyes. True that the price He had to pay was really that of making atonement for our sins :here is the way open for the confusion, if we are not as careful as, in matters such as these, we should be; and yet we ought to be able easily to distinguish what is very different. Price paid for us speaks of where His heart is:price paid for sin conveys the thought of God being able to tolerate it if His demands are met. Yet no renewed soul could mean such a thing or think of it. The expression to him is only intended to convey that there was an absolute necessity for satisfaction to God's righteousness in order to our salvation, and Christ has given this. Blessed be God, He has! but price for sin is a different thought, and one to be rejected utterly- which every true soul brought face to face with it will assuredly reject.

But Dr. Waldenstrom sees no need of satisfaction to divine justice, as Mr. Princell on his part explicitly assures us ("The Reconciliation," p. 5, n.). Thus-with him there is not merely confusion of thought, but fundamental error, as will be clearly seen in the issue.

For him, the blood of Christ is a type, as we have seen; and he thinks that very commonly " Christians hear and speak and sing about the ' blood of Jesus ' without making it clear to themselves what this expression means," and so it is not "of any use to true edification" ! If this be so, it is surely sad enough. Think of it, that very commonly to true Christians (we must suppose) all their hearing and talking and singing about the blood of Jesus is really a vain and idle thing ! They do not even know what the blood of Jesus means ! What then ? do they not know that it is that which was shed for them upon the cross for their sins? And is the belief of that wondrous fact unedifying to the one who bows prostrate in adoration before God because it is so ?

What is, then, for Dr. Waldenstrom the meaning of the blood of Jesus ? He goes on to tell us,–

"In Lev. 17:11 (according to the original), we read, 'The life [or soul] of the body is in the blood, and I have given it you to sprinkle [or pour] upon the altar, that thereby atonement may be made for your lives [or souls]; for the blood maketh atonement by reason of the life [or soul] which is therein.' And again in ver. 14, ' The life [or soul] of all flesh is in its blood, and it [the blood] constitutes its life [or soul]. For that reason the Israelites were forbidden to eat blood. From these words we understand that the blood is a term for or expressing life ; and this immediately sheds a beautiful, heavenly light upon the language of the Bible concerning the blood of Jesus,"

The blood means, then, the life, for Dr. Waldenstrom:that is evidently not death, but its opposite. And the blood of Jesus of course means, not the death, but the life of Jesus !

Let us first of all examine Dr. Waldenstrom's translation of the passages to which he refers us. Would it be imagined that, he has more than once inserted words which are not there, but which are his commentary merely, and even emphasized what he has inserted, as if part of the text? Yet it is so:the words, "to sprinkle [or pour]," and "which is therein," the last of which is emphasized for us in his book, have absolutely nothing corresponding to them in the Hebrew; and the last of these additions is one of special importance for his argument. "For the blood maketh atonement by reason of the life which is therein." Therein, when? Remember that it is the blood sprinkled or poured upon the altar to make atonement of which this is said. Is the life in it then 1 That would seem perhaps too foolish a question to be asked. Yet the nature of Dr. Waldenstrom's argument requires one to say, Yes ; and he actually makes Scripture say so too ! The blood sprinkled makes atonement by the reason of the life which is in it!

Strike out the interpolated words, and we have Scripture, and what is consistent with the fact. The blood does make atonement by reason of the life, but not of a life which is still in it, but of a life rendered up. That is, it speaks of death, as every Christian perhaps before Dr. Waldenstrom has understood it. If "the blood constituted its life"-the life of the body,-it is surely in the body that it does so, and not out of it. "The life"-not soul-"is in the blood;" or, as this means, and is said further on, it is the blood that is the life. What, then, does the blood shed mean but life poured out? and what is life poured out but death!

But our author would put it rather thus, that the blood being the life of the body, when shed out it still represents its life; nay, he says this is a very common representation in the Bible. The instances he gives are singular enough:Jonathan's words to his father, "Wilt thou sin against innocent blood, to slay David without a cause ? " David saying (Ps. 94:21), "They gather themselves together against the soul [or life] of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood;" Ezek. 3:18, The blood of the wicked required at the watchman's hand ; Pilate's words, " I am innocent of the blood of this just person ; " the people's answer, " His blood be upon us and on our children ;" Judas's confession, "I have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood ; " and then he curiously remarks,-

"From all these Scripture-expressions we thus see that it is very common for the Scriptures to say Hood instead of life; and especially is this very common when the question is of a life sacrificed in death, as we have seen already from the examples quoted" !

Truly we have. So that a life sacrificed is still "life" for the Swedish professor, and not death at all; and we may read, " His life be upon us and on our children," etc., etc.! What can one say? What need one say? The life which is not death turns out to be a " sacrifice in death; "and he even ventures to quote, "The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many," as explaining "we have redemption through His blood," and to say, as the conclusion of it all, "The blood of Jesus is nothing else than His life given in His death for us." Of course it is; but what is "life given up in death" as distinguished from death ?

All the texts in which "blood" is spoken of here speak of death, yet Dr. Waldenstrom would teach that it is not death at all that is meant. What is it, then ? " Life given up in death"! ! And this is proved by the very texts which were to show us the difference.

To what is all this leading us ?We shall soon see:-

" In Matt. 26:28, the Lord says, while He hands the blessed cup to His disciples, ' This is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.' In and with and under the wine He gave them His blood, made them partakers of His life, which He was now about to lay down for them in death. When He handed them the bread, He did not say, This signifies or represents My body;' but, ' This is My body;' and when He handed them the wine,"He did not say, 'This signifies or represents My blood;' but, 'This is My blood.' Thus, while giving them the bread and wine, He made them real partakers of Himself, joined them to Himself as members of His body, and made them partakers of His life."

Here, then, is the key of Dr. Waldenstrom's position. He is, as we see, thus far still a Lutheran, though with a strange gap in his defenses as that, through which the enemy will surely find an easy way. Go back to Marburg and the table-cloth, and conceive, if you can, Luther maintaining his thesis with the admission made that the blood of Christ was a figure, though the drinking it was literal! Dr. Waldenstrom apparently must believe this, although the Lord actually speaks of the shedding of His blood in the text quoted ; but this means, he tells us, His life laid down. Let us meet this straightforwardly, then:is it true that the Lord made His disciples then (or that He makes them now) partakers of that human life which He laid down for us ? It is not true ; or, if it be, it should be shown us plainly. It is "everlasting life" of which we, blessed be God ! are made partakers :was it everlasting life that the Lord laid down for us ? Can everlasting life become extinct in death ? Will even Dr. Waldenstrom say so?

Thus simply is the whole argument overthrown. As for the Lutheran view itself, it is as contrary to Scripture as it is to. reason; and Scripture is never contrary to reason, though it often transcends it. But Scripture plainly says that the Lord's Supper is a remembrance, and a remembrance of His death. The bread and the wine thus represent Christ's body and blood separate, as they are in death :the blood is shed; we show forth Christ's death till He comes. He Himself says, with reference to such a misunderstanding of like words elsewhere, "Doth this offend you ? What if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before?"-as if that would end all thought of this kind,-" it is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing :the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." (Jno. 6:61-63.)

(To be continued.)

Jesus, let Thy presence with me
Set my heart's affections free ;
Lead me, teach me, keep me near Thee,
In Thy love for me.

Once I lay beside the water,
Once I stood beneath the tree,
Once a leper, once a beggar,
But Thou calledst me.

Once I sat in nature's blindness,
Once I wandered o'er the tombs,
Once I fell among the robbers,-
Thou didst heal my wounds.

Jesus, Lord of life and glory,
Set my heart's affections free ;
Teach me well the wondrous story
Of Thy love for me.

Oh, what wonder ! oh, what mercy !
Thou didst touch the bier for me ;
Thou didst bid them loose the grave-clothes,
In Thy love for me.

Once the Sycamore I clambered,
Thinking thus Thyself to see ;
Once in sin the city wandered,
All was dark to me.

Jesus, let Thy presence with me
Set my heart's affections free ;
Teach me, lead me, keep me near Thee,
In Thy love for Me.