likewise (what is equally true, taking for want of a better term a certain word in a technical sense, and without disparaging its nobler associations): "The world by Puritanism knew not God. A clew to sound order and authority we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life."*

An impulse to do a thing is in itself no reason why we should do it, because impulses proceed from two sources, quite different and of different degrees of authority. St. Paul contrasts them as the inward man and the man in our members, the mind of the flesh and the spiritual mind. Jesus contrasts them as life, properly so named, and life in this world, the former full of light, endurance, felicity, in connection with the higher and permanent self. And the means by which a man might be placed in the former was by dying to the latter. "Whosoever would come after me, let him renounce himself,” — let him die as regards his old self, and so live. This was what Paul meant by bearing about the dying [necrosis] of the Lord Jesus that the life of Jesus may be made manifest in our body. By the "himself" to be renounced - the "old man" to be put off, the life in this world —was meant "doing the desires of the flesh and of the thoughts' [thelemata tōn dianoiōn, Eph. ii., 3] which Jesus had already put his disciples in the way of sifting and scrutinizing, and of trying by the standard. of conformity to conscience.- St. Paul and Protestantism, passim.

Similar testimony upon the necessity of the dying of the lower self in order that the higher may live, comes from witnesses of every assortment of antecedents. Goethe sings out,— [Stirb und werde!

Denn so lang du das nicht,
Bist du nur ein tri Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.]

"Die and re-exist! for so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom."

Selfishness, . . . the most inhibited sin in the canon.— Shakspere.

A covetous man does not possess his wealth: his wealth possesses him.- Bias (One of the "Seven ").

Dr. J. F. Clarke, in his ninth discourse on the "Ideas of Paul" (text, II. Cor. v., 19: “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself "), concludes :

All theories of the atonement fall into two classes, mythological and moral. The mythological theory teaches that it was some trans-

*Culture and Anarchy, p. 66.

action in the supernatural world, some work done to satisfy the divine justice, or to make peace between the unreconciled attributes of God,- to make it possible for God to forgive his penitent child.

The other theories are moral. They teach that Christ died to manifest the eternal love of God,-not to create it, but to make it known; and that his death is the supreme example of a power which comes down from heaven into human hearts, to purify, redeem, and save the world. It teaches that we all can live and act in this same spirit, all be mediators of this divine life, all can unite with Jesus in reconciling men to God and to each other.

Paul said that he rejoiced in his sufferings, which enabled him “to fill up that which was behind in the sufferings of Christ" (Col. i., 24). This text has much perplexed the theologians, whose theories declare that Christ's sufferings were a full and perfect satisfaction for the sins of all mankind. Paul seems to declare that his own sufferings supplied that which was deficient in those of Christ. The truth is that human self-sacrifice carries on the work of Christ. All sufferings generously endured for the sake of our brothers partake of the nature of Christ's sufferings, and do the same atoning work. They make it easier to believe in a Divine Love, because we have seen the same love in man. If men forgive us, we believe God can forgive us. Man's love, therefore, like that of Christ, reconciles the world to God; and all the blood of martyrs has the same redeeming power with that of Jesus.- Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, April 2, 1881.

On this theme of salvation,- of growth into at-one-ment with our moral environment, through the method of Jesus (introspection and self-renunciation),- Mr. Whittier has sung in a strain whose key-note of sweet reasonableness must have been derived from the Master himself. The extrinsic topic was the (sometimes) silent meeting of the Friends or "Quakers."

So to the calmly gathered thought
The innermost of truth is taught,
The mystery dimly understood,
That love of God is love of good,
And, chiefly, its divinest trace
In Him of Nazareth's holy face;
That to be saved is only this,-
Salvation from our selfishness,
From more than elemental fire
The soul's unsanctified desire,
From sin itself, and not the pain
That warns us of its chafing chain;

That worship's deeper meaning lies
In mercy and not sacrifice,

Not proud humilities of sense

And posturing of penitence,

But love's unforced obedience;

That Book and Church and Day are given

For man, not God,- for earth, not heaven,

The blessed means to holiest ends,

Not masters, but benignant friends;

That the dear Christ dwells not afar
The king of some remoter star,
Listening at times with flattered ear
To homage wrung from selfish fear,
But here amidst the poor and blind,
The bound and suffering of our kind,
In works we do, in prayers we pray,
Life of our life, he lives to-day.

Among the Hills, and Other Poems: The Meeting."

But how as to those poor souls that have little or no power to think? To whom little has been given, little will be required. Not the worst misfortune in the world was that of the "Daft Catechumen":

He wore the cowl, he kissed the cross,

He handled book and beads:

The friars plied his stupid head

With litanies and creeds.

'Twas vain. Though lines on lines they taught,

He could learn only three:

I love the Lord, I trust the Lord,

I hope the Lord to see.

Anon.

And how as to those who have a few additional glimmerings?

With wider view come loftier goal!

With broader light, more good to see!
With freedom, more of self-control!
With knowledge deeper reverence be!
Anew we pledge ourselves to Thee,

To follow where thy truth shall lead ;
Afloat upon its boundless sea,

Who sails with God is safe indeed.

Samuel Longfellow.

CHAPTER XLII.

DAMNATION.

What Three Views concerning Christ's Intendment in the Use of the Words "Gehenna," ," "Condemnation," etc.?

(1) THE literalist, (2) the moderate orthodox, and (3) the evolutional.

The first is expressed in Rev. John Brown's "Catechism" (still extensively used) as follows: :

Hell is a place of endless torment, being a lake that burns with fire and brimstone. Wicked men's companions in hell are their father, the devil, and all other evil angels. They will continue in

hell forever and ever. . . . They will roar, curse, and blaspheme God. Two Shorter Catechisms United, p. 14.

And a prominent orthodox professor writes of retribution:In few things is the superlative wisdom of inspiration, and especially that of our Lord, more obvious than in the unmitigated, the peremptory, the absolute revelation of eternal woe. . . The popular mind must hold it with firm, close grip, or it cannot long hold it at all. It never can live subject to the law of chances.Dr. Austin Phelps (The Congregationalist, November, 1882).

Whereupon, a keen editorial observer comments:

A largely increasing number of Christians to-day in all the Churches think "the superlative wisdom of inspiration" is more obvious in what is withheld concerning that doctrine than in what is revealed. Positive revelation being denied, the sentiments of hope, faith, and our confidence in the justice of God assert themselves; and the old doctrine of everlasting punishment goes to the limbo of obsolete dogmas.- Samuel J. Barrows (Christian Register, Nov. 30, 1882).

The second view considers the word "Gehenna " (the name of the offal-depository fire-place near Jerusalem) to be used simply figuratively, as being the only adequate emblem of a soul in a condition of endless loathing, remorse, and despair.* The

*As to the various words translated "hell," see Canon Farrar's Mercy and Judgment, chap. xiv.

parable of the shepherd's goats, the expressions traceable to Babylonian mythology, etc., are considered to refer to an irremediable ultimate local segregation of the finally impenitent.*

The third view considers all those utterances attributed to Jesus that would indicate any belief in the superstitions of his time and country to be either the distortions of successive narrowminded but adoring reporters, or else mere early and temporary beliefs which finally became very essentially modified. It declares that sin's punishment is sin's effect. Dr. Matthew Arnold says:

Jesus employed as sanctions of his doctrine his contemporaries' ready-made notions of hell and judgment, just as Socrates did. He talked of the outer darkness and the unquenchable fire, as Socrates talked of the rivers of Tartarus. . . . It is not to be supposed that a rejection of all the poetry of popular religion is necessary or advisable now, any more than when Jesus came. But it is an aim

which may well indeed be pursued with enthusiasm, to make the true meaning of Jesus, in using that poetry, emerge and prevail. For the immense pathos, so perpetually enlarged upon, of his life and death, does really culminate here,—that Christians have so profoundly misunderstood him.

And, in this connection, it has been mentioned, as not without significance, that Luke (iv., 19, 20) says that Jesus, upon quoting Isaiah Ixi., 2, "to preach the acceptable year of the Lord," "closed the book and sat down"; probably without adding the rest, "and the day of vengeance of our God."

The "cosmical principle symbolized by the serpent has already been considered in one phase, in the chapter on Demonization. As to a personal devil, Moncure D. Conway says:

The doctrine of a personal spirit of evil, originating in Persia, had invested some centuries before the birth of Christ an Assyrian angel of Accusation,- Satan; and he had become degraded from a retributive agent of God into a fiend. There was no philosophy of evil at the time to secure even the mind of Christ against this idea. And, indeed, however repulsive it may be now, at that period it seemed essential to the growth of a pure ideal of God, as Infinite Love, with whom the origination of evil could not be associated. The world was recoiling from the worship of demons under guise of deities, and the new ideal was secured by attributing all phenomena of evil to imps, furies, dragons, all of which were ultimately generalized by Christianity into Satan, whose works it was the mission of Christ to destroy.- Idols and Ideals, App. Essay, p. 54.

*As to purification by fire, etc., see Lydia M. Child's Progress of Religious Ideas, chap. ii., p. 160. (See chap. xlv., post, near the end.) See also The Rosicrucians, passim. + See chap. xviii.