sentinels, as worked out elaborately in the "Gospel of Nicodemus," Dr. Hooykaas deems to be quite absurd. "Is it," he asks, "likely that the enemies of Jesus would have heard a prophesy of his rising again when his very friends never dreamed of it for a moment, and when he had never once spoken of his resurrection in public? Is not the conduct here ascribed to the councillors and the soldiers - the latter of whom would have needlessly exposed themselves to the heaviest punishment so clumsy and childish as to be impossible? But once set aside these difficulties and accept the picture as emblematic, and how fine and true its strokes appear!" The powers of Church and State have combined against the Nazarene and brought him to his fall. On the one side, the high priests and Pharisees defending the Law, the temple, and last, not least, their own authority and influence, against the sacrilegious blows of this seducer of the people; on the other side, the procurator, who cherishes no personal hostility to him, but overcomes his own indifferent toleration, and sacrifices the Nazarene in the interests of order. The new religious movement is crushed forever by this combination. Both Church and State combine to keep it down. The one puts its seal upon the stone, the other sets its watch before the grave,-in vain! As by the finger of God the seal is broken and the watch is smitten down. Jesus stands up! Though hurled to the ground, he rises again: his momentary defeat was but a step to his abiding triumph. The alliance of ecclesiastical and civil authorities is powerless against the truth, against the kingdom of God, against the Christ. The triumph is his. It has its witnesses in every age, in our age, in our hearts, whenever the principles of Jesus vanquish the obstinate resistance of routine and prejudice, of impurity and selfishness; whenever his ideal conquers the commonplace reality. Of this triumph, every Easter that Christians observe is the grateful record and "the joyful promise." In this the truest sense, "Christ has arisen " indeed! Another lesson in the premises has most eloquently been set forth by Mr. Chadwick: There was another burial of Jesus than that in the fresh rockhewn sepulchre of the New Testament tradition. It was in a tomb where thousands were already buried,- buried alive under the forms and ceremonies of an effete religion. Into this tomb, the friends of Jesus, the apostles, and the brothers who, in his lifetime, had given him no countenance, made haste to carry him; not his emaciated form, not his nail-wounded flesh, but the real man,- his thought, his spirit. But from this burial of Jesus there was indeed a resurrection; and the angel who rolled away the stone of the sepulchre was no supernatural being, with his countenance like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.. No! but a man who, according to his own description, was "in bodily presence weak, and in speech contemptible." Nevertheless there was that in him which was sufficient for the burden that was laid upon him. With mighty, ringing strokes, he hewed his way through manifold obstructions, straight to the spirit of Jesus,- his inmost thought and life, and bade it rise up and come forth; and even so it did. And Christianity, that might else have been a Jewish sect, losing itself in arid wastes of pedantry and ritual after a few generations, entered upon a career of universal influence. This was the real resurrection of Jesus, the triumph of his essential spirit over the Judaizing narrowness of the Church of the Apostles; and it was a resurrection of infinitely greater significance than any impossible resuscitation of his mortal body. And Paul of Tarsus, the man through whom it was accomplished, was of such mind and heart and will that, in comparison with him, all bent with toil and scarred with battle though he was, the dazzling brightness of any legendary angel is " no light, but rather darkness visible." -John White Chadwick (The Man Jesus, p. 221). The emotions of the faithful women have suggested still another lesson: And like them, too, I am troubled As I tread my way alone, While my faithless heart is wondering In the grave, yet not to earth, Breath of truth and holiness. Anon. Seth C. Beach. CHAPTER XXXVII. ELECTION. What Two Views as to" Divine Election and Fore-ordination," and the Teachings of Christ and Paul thereon? (1) THE Calvinistic: that God, being absolute sovereign, has from the beginning predestined some angels and men to eternal life and joy, and fore-ordained others to everlasting death and punishment.* (2) The Free-will view: that election and predestination are only temporal; that this is the meaning in each of the places where Paul uses the word [pro-orizo ]; † that both in the physical and moral universe there is an eternal reign of law, in one sense without variableness or shadow of turning; and that, in Paul's argument, ‡ God's showing his "wrath letting the evil consequences of sin be made known. means his The evolutional phase of the latter view is that we are what we are because the universe is what it is; if it acts upon us, we react upon it. Thus Herbert Spencer has defined life to be "the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistence and sequences." The hypothesis of evolution in its scientific aspect presents three factors,- heredity, environment, and adaptation. By heredity is meant the tendency of our organism to develop in the likeness of its progenitor; by environment, the sum total of the physical conditions by which the developing organism is surrounded,― the ambient world; and by adaptation, the disposition so to modify as to bring an organism and its environment into harmony. This may be accomplished either by progression or retrogression. Mr. Spencer elsewhere defines evolution as "a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integra tions.' As to the "Supralapsarian " and "Infralapsarian" Calvinistic views, see ante, chap. xix. † Rom. viii., 29, 30; I. Cor. ii., 7; Eph. i., 5, 11. Rom. ix., 22. How happened it that, amid the grotesque myths which were the current beliefs of antiquity, this one clear, authoritative assertion of creation by law sprang up and maintained itself in Israel? How happened it that the doctrine of an ascending order of life was put into the religious primer of Israel? How did it come to pass that a Jewish patriarch and lawgiver krew to some extent the fact of the orderly development, "the increasing differentiation," the progress from type to type, and to ever higher forms of the creation? And that, too, centuries before the accumulated results of the laws of heredity in the brain of a Herbert Spencer had recorded themselves, through his physiological organization, and for the wonder of a late age, in his First Principles.- Dr. Newman Smyth (Ola Faiths in New Light, p. 171). Attach what weight we may to the physical causes which have brought about this evolution, I cannot see how it is possible to conceive of any but a moral cause for the endowments that made the primordial germ susceptible of their action. And, in the so-called laws of organic evolution, I see nothing but the orderly and continuous working out of the original intelligent design.- Dr. William B. Carpenter, F.R.S. (Modern Review, October, 1882). As Rev. W. R. Alger has remarked, “Man now living on the earth is a focalizing epitome of the typical cosmic forces whose play has produced the entire series of existences from the first reactionary molecule or simplest sentient thing up to the perfected human organism which is in itself a concentrated universe." Thus much as to physical evolutional election.* So, not inaptly, did Paul say the potter may mould one lump of clay to humbler uses than another. A good illustration of the operation of the like law in the moral world is given by Dr. J. F. Clarke, in his tenth discourse on the " Ideas of Paul": Here are two brothers; we will call them Esau Brown and Jacob Brown. When they were boys, Esau was careless, generous, brave; he did not learn his lessons very well, but he was a great favorite with the other boys. He often got them into scrapes, but he never betrayed them. He honestly owned up, and took the punishment himself. He was a great plague at home, and his mother did not love him as much as she loved Jacob. Jacob was always ready to help her about the house; he was thoughtful and careful. He brought his mother little presents on her birthday; but Esau, though he loved her, never remembered to do anything of the sort. Jacob used to trade with his companions, and had a money-box full of halfdollars and dimes. At last, as they grew to be young men, Esau got into a serious scrape, and his father scolded him severely; and he *And see M. J. Savage's Religion of Evolution, passim; also Dr. John Cleland's Evolution, Expression, and Sensation, passim. concluded to go West, but had no money to go with. Then Jacob offered to give him two hundred dollars, if Esau would sign away his share in their father's property; and he did so. Jacob Brown went into business, and became a prosperous man, and, when he died, left half a million dollars to the Hospital for Women and Children. Esau Brown moved from Ohio to Iowa, from Iowa to California, and from California to Oregon, and never seemed to accomplish much in any place; and, when he died, he left his widow and children to the care of his brother, who, I am glad to say, made them comfortable. So people said, "What a mysterious providence that the Lord should have done so much better for Jacob Brown than for Esau Brown, when, really, Esau was as good-hearted a man as you ever saw, and Jacob was a little close." And Rev. Moses Gilead, preaching the funeral sermon, took his text from the first chapter of Malachi, second verse,-"Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the Lord; yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau, and laid his heritage waste.' But the real truth of the matter was that Jacob Brown was prosperous, not because he was good, but because he was prudent, industrious, economical, and had good business habits. The Lord did not really love him more than he loved his brother. The Lord did not elect him to everlasting life in the other world, but he elected him to be the man to endow the Women's Hospital in this world; and to be able to do that was something. Just so the Lord elected the Patriarch Jacob and his descendants, the Jews, to establish the doctrine of Monotheism in the world. He elected them to teach mankind faith in God as a Ruler, Judge, and Personal Providence. The Jews were like their father Jacob. They inherited from him his undoubting faith in one God, his God, and the God of his children. They inherited his pacific habit, his tendency to trade rather than to war, his tenacity to his convictions, his sagacity, and knowledge of men. Therefore, they were the right people to receive and preserve the Mosaic Law, and that has been their business in the world. They were the chosen people; chosen for that because their character fitted them for that. They were not chosen to possess an exclusive heaven hereafter, but to do a special work. here. They were chosen, elected, predestinated for that work when they were born and before they were born. They were chosen when they were so constituted as to be the right persons to do the work. When the Lord made them so, he chose them. Their election and calling was written in their organization, in the shape of their brains, and the temper of their character.- Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, April 9, 1881. And it is in the nature of things that brain shall conquer brawn. This common-sense view seems best for mere mortals who cannot afford to waste time in coming to the result of Milton's angels, who on a hill apart discoursed Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, |