THE REDEMPTION OF THE BODY.-Mr. Whitehouse's book on "The Redemption of the Body" contains a careful examination of a passage of acknowledged difficulty (Rom. viii. 18-23). The writer passes in review the. opinions of commentators from St. Chrysostom downwards, and comes to the conclusion that, while there is no approach to unanimity, "even the most reasonable interpretation is far from satisfactory, and apparently neither in accord nor in sympathy with the language of St. Paul." Mr. Whitehouse dismisses what, he says, "may be considered the generally received interpretation," the regeneration of the world, on the ground that "the destruction of the universe is in many ways announced" in Holy Scripture; not the regeneration. But against this assertion we have such passages as Isa. lxv. 17 and lxvi. 22; Rev. xxi. 1; 2 Pet. iii. 13; which at least suggest the possibility that the fire of the great day may be the means of purifying and refining the universe, transforming it into new heavens and a new earth, making all things new. Compare our Lord's use of the word regeneration in Matt. xix. 28; also Acts iii. 19-21; Eph. i. 10; Col. i. 20. The great question is how the word κτίσις, creation," or "creature," is to be understood. Mr. Whitehouse quotes the current interpretations, which may be briefly classified as (1) The whole universe; (2) Inanimate creation; (3) Animate creation; (4) Animate creation with some limitation, as “all nature exclusive of intelligent beings"; or "the unrenewed creation," all nature exclusive of true believers. He proceeds to give his own opinion. "Our main contention is that κTíσis means nothing more or less than the human body, and that it is of its present sufferings and future redemption that the Apostle is speaking." He examines the nineteen passages of Holy Scripture in which the word occurs, and infers that "it is a word which cannot be limited to one signification or application; its meaning must depend upon and be decided by the context." Its primary meaning is the act of creating; its secondary, a creature or thing created; in several places it is used distinctly for human creatures, as Mark xvi. 15; 2 Cor. v. 17; Gal. vi. 15; Col. i. 23. Mr. Whitehouse draws attention to the words Aoyisopar, I reckon (ver. 18), and oldaper, we know (ver. 22). He asks, supposing that the Apostle himself had arrived at the conclusion that the whole creation in the sense of nature is groaning and travailing, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, could those to whom he was writing know a truth so deep and mysterious with the full knowledge implied in οίδαμεν ? 'Even we," he adds, "with our enlarged vision, do not know it now." "But," he continues, "if the κTíσis be the human body, then each one would certainly know of his own physical weakness, pain, and suffering.” But if it is difficult to refer words so intensely personal as árоKapadokia, ἀπεκδέχεται, συστενάζει, συνωδίνει to the inanimate creation, is it not equally difficult to understand them of the human body alone apart from the informing soul? How can the body be waiting in earnest longing for the revealing of the sons of God? How can will and hope (vers. 19, 20) be ascribed to the body? It is true that St. Paul lays great stress on the

dignity of the Christian's body. Our bodies, he tells us, are members of Christ (1 Cor. vi. 15): they are the temples of the Holy Ghost (1 Cor. vi. 19): they must be kept in honour (1 Thess. iv. 4): the Christian is willing indeed to be absent from the body, for even in the disembodied state he will be present with the Lord; but what he earnestly desires is something beyond and above the disembodied state: it is to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven" (2 Cor. v. 2), that spiritual body which the Lord Jesus will make like unto the body of His glory (Phil. iii. 21). The resurrection of the body is an article of the faith on which St. Paul loves to dwell, a truth too much lost sight of in the present time. But is it not better to understand this difficult passage of the whole man, body, soul, and spirit? The body is now dead because of sin (ver. 10); St. Paul describes it (chap. vii. 24) as "the body of this death," or as it, perhaps, should be rendered, "this body of death." In ver. 13 he tells us that the Christian must mortify the deeds of the body; in the passage before us he represents believers as anxiously waiting for "the redemption of the body." It is not the body apart from the spirit which groaneth and travaileth, waiting for the revelation of the sons of God. The body apart from the spirit is dead, dead because of sin. It is not indeed a vile body (the Apostle would not use that word of one of God's most wonderful works: see Ps. cxxxix.), but it is the body of our humiliation. The animal desires and appetites which spring from the wants of the body are the instruments of that law of sin which is in our members, which wars against the law of our mind (chap. vii. 23). The Christian must mortify the deeds of the body, and thus he causes some of those sufferings of which the Apostle speaks (ver. 18); he is willing to be absent from the body (2 Cor. v. 8), if that absence brings him nearer to the Lord. He is groaning now in this natural body (oμa &vxikóv), earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with the spiritual body, of which the natural body is represented in 1 Cor. xv. 44 as the germ or seed. It is not the body which has this earnest expectation: the body isolated, apart from the spirit, must be mortified and kept in subjection. What the Christian. longs for is a spiritual body, a body fitted to be the tabernacle and the organ of the indwelling informing spirit. "The sufferings of this present time" are not all of them bodily sufferings, and even those which do arise from the body are felt and realized by the soul. The body is not capable of comparing those sufferings with the glory which shall be revealed. The creation which waits with earnest expectation for the revelation of the sons of God must be identical with those creatures who endure the present sufferings and can compare them with the future glory. It is the intelligent creation which was made subject to vanity which alone can realize the wail of dissatisfaction, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." That creation was made subject to vanity, not of its own will, but "because of sin" (ver. 10), because of the first sin, the sin of Adam, which brought death and suffering into the world. But that subjection was from the beginning attended with hope. The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head. Creation shall be set free

from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. It is not the body only which now serves the law of sin, which hopes for liberty, but the aurós éyú of chap. vii. 25, the whole man, the self in the fullest sense of the word, though indeed it is the higher principle, the sanctified intellect, which chooses that service which is perfect freedom, and the lusts of the flesh connected with the wants of the body which allure to the bondage of corruption. Indeed, the whole creation (here for the first time we have "the whole," aσa Kтíσis) groaneth and travaileth in pain together, or perhaps "with us," as in the margin of the R.V. Here it may be that St. Paul extends his glance from man, the centre of the creation, to his surroundings, and recognizes the truth that for Adam's sake the ground was cursed, and—

"Bids us see in heaven and earth,

In all fair things around,

Strong yearnings for a blest new birth,

With sinless glories crowned."

---Christian Year, "Fourth Sunday after Trinity."

But he does not dwell on this thought, which seems to be only an illustration, if indeed it was really in his mind at all. He uses the same combination with distinct reference to the human race in Mark xvi. 15 (máσy tŷ ktwei), and again in Col. i. 23. His mind seems never to have dwelt much on outward nature; he never mentions the many fair and wonderful sights which he must have witnessed in his travels. Probably he is repeating and enforcing what he had said in ver. 19. He does not proceed, as some have thought, to distinguish believers from this whole creation in ver. 23. The translation of the R.V., "not only so," is better than that of the A.V., " And not only they." There is no pronoun in the original. Not only does the whole creation groan and travail in pain together, but, included in that whole creation, true believers also groan. They have indeed received the firstfruits of the Spirit, the Spirit of adoption (ver. 15), which is "the earnest of our inheritance" (Eph. i. 14). But they are still compassed about with infirmities, with temptations, with sorrow and suffering, and they look forward with an earnest longing for the inheritance itself, the inheritance of the saints in light. The revelation of the sons of God is the manifestation of the adoption, the complete realization in all its glory of that filial relation of which the first gift of the Spirit of adoption is the germ and the beginning. Then the Father which seeth in secret will reward openly those who are in truth His dear children; His glory will be revealed in them; they will be revealed before the universe as the sons of God. But that revelation involves the redemption of the body. The whole man must share. in the glory of the resurrection. The body which was once presented unto God as a living sacrifice (chap. xii. 1) must be redeemed from the bondage of corruption. It is subject to that bondage during the earthly life; it is subject to pain and suffering, to sickness and decay; it is sometimes made the instrument of unrighteousness unto sin (chap. vi. 12, 13); it becomes at

last subject to dissolution and corruption; and flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But we look for the redemption of the body, that the whole man, body, soul, and spirit, may attain to the promised inheritance. And the Lord Christ, who Himself rose from the grave in His human body, is able to change the fashion of this body of our humiliation and make it like unto the body of His glory. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. This is the redemption of the body for which we pray when we beseech Almighty God shortly to accomplish the number of His elect, and to hasten His kingdom, that we, with all those who are departed in the true faith of His holy name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in His eternal and everlasting glory."

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CRITICS. By Rev. Principal DOUGLAS. (J. N. Mackinlay).-The introductory lecture given at the opening of the winter session of the Free Church College in Glasgow has been published in pamphlet form, in order that, as the author says, the Church may know the attitude towards the advanced school of Old Testament criticism, which he has maintained during the thirty-five years he has been Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Theology. We cannot say that the lecture impresses us with the feeling that the author is at all fair in his judgment of those who have departed from the old-fashioned opinions in Biblical criticism, or attempts to give any explanation of the phenomena, that have given occasion for the multifarious theories concerning authorship and dates, which have been current in recent times. He begins by referring to the state of matters in 1857, when he was appointed professor. At that time questions as to the authorship of different books of the Old Testament were being discussed in connection with the writings of Dr. Samuel Davidson. A little later the Colenso controversy broke out, and since then the discussion has never ceased. He attributes the favour shown to new views of the authorship of the Pentateuch to personal vanity. "Those who deemed themselves superior in discernment to the common run of people " adopted the critical view which was "in favour with the corresponding class in Germany." One might as well have said that the sciences of astronomy and geology had their origin in the vanity of persons who "deemed themselves superior in discernment to the common run of people," and that those who founded those sciences were to blame for unsettling the minds of their contemporaries. No fair-minded or intelligent reader could be satisfied with this explanation of matters. It is far nearer the truth to say that the science of Biblical criticism was quite a new one, and that it was reasonable to expect that it would come into collision with conventional opinions that had come down from a pre-scientific and uncritical age. Principal Douglas offers no defence for any of the positions held by the "traditional school," a designation he accepts quite contentedly as that of the school to which he belongs, but thinks it sufficient

to give a brief but not a clear narrative of the various theories concerning the composition and dates of Old Testament books, especially of the Pentateuch, which have prevailed from the beginning of the century down to the present time. He fairly enough objects to the high-handed manner in which many critics treat as interpolations passages of Scripture which do not fit in with their theories. But one can scarcely understand the bitterness with which he mentions the fact that those who treat the book of Joshua as intimately connected with that of Deuteronomy have substituted a Hexateuch for the well-known Pentateuch, and "use the imaginary (sic) name with scarcely a thought that explanation is needed"! What explanation is needed? From the frequent allusion to the fact that such and such a critic, of whose works he disapproves, is dead, one would be inclined to infer that the rate of mortality among advanced Biblical critics is unusually high, and that a departure from traditional views is something almost equivalent to "tempting Providence." One is by this time tolerably familiar with the fact that a theory which might be "widely held" in any other country is "rampant" in Germany, and therefore is not surprised to meet the phrase in the present pamphlet. The assertion, too, that “many English people, hitherto profoundly ignorant and indifferent, are gulping down the whole of a criticism which is really played out on the continent," we have heard before, though the combination of metaphors is new. The final paragraph of the pamphlet will give our readers a better idea of its style than any description could do. "Not that I have any wish that discussions about the age in which this and that book were written should monopolize your thoughts, or even get the largest share. We are often asked about a book by critics; what matter does it make who wrote it, and when? To which I am ready to reply in the most friendly manner, that it has been they who have pressed such questions, and wasted their own and their neighbours' strength in these discussions. At the same time I wish it to be understood that we esteem their arguments, at the very best, to be indecisive, convincing only to those who wish to be convinced, and that we hold to our old convictions; and, further, while we concede the utmost liberty we can to those who are enamoured of these literary speculations, even while we believe them to be mistaken, we attach very great importance to these controversies on date and authorship, when the usual beliefs have been discarded for a special purpose, and when the discussion is maintained by assumptions which have been carried into the Church of Christ from the camps of Agnosticism, Pantheism, and Anti-supernaturalism."

THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE. By Rev. E. B. WENSLEY, B.A., Vicar of All Hallows, Kent. (Elliot Stock).—A paper on the above subject, read by the author before a Chapter of the clergy of the rural deaneries of Rochester, Gravesend, and Cobham, and afterwards to a meeting of the Maidstone Clerical Society, has been printed by request. It contains a strong protest against the statements made concerning the dates and author