as we shall shortly see, of a new race, superior to angels, and in the likeness of Himself. The Divine gift of essential immortality was bestowed upon a Man, who is now seated on the right hand of the Majesty on high, "far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but in that about coming" (Eph. i. 21).

In the fulfilment of the Divine Purpose, and in order to the full revelation of God's character to the universe, this gift of Immortality the resurrection life of the Man Christ Jesus-is imparted to other men. Worthless in themselves, they are made the necessary medium of showing forth the riches of the grace and the manifold wisdom of God. Together they constitute the Body of Christ, the manifestation of the fulness of Him who filleth all in all. They are one body, because they have a common life. This life is deathless (athanasia); it is incorruptible (aphtharsia); words never applied to man out of Christ, nor to angels.

Running all through the Epistles of the Apostle Paul there is a triple chord of truth, viz., Grace, Atonement, Life.

Grace is the sovereign, unpurchasable, unchangeable love of God which saves, immortalises, and exalts helpless and worthless sinners. It is briefly defined in the words, "The gift of God is eternal life." A gift is necessarily gratis, on the ground of the ability and willingness of the giver to bestow. The gift of life must in its very nature be bestowed without antecedent choice on the part of the recipient. Moreover, God has left nothing to chance in the carrying out of His purposes. The future possessors of Immortality were given by the Father to the Son in eternity; an eternity which knows neither past, present, nor future. Before the commencement of the first geological era their names were catalogued in the "Lamb's Book of Life."

No doctrine so excites human enmity as this, yet none is more clearly stated in the Bible. God is no more bound to bestow immortality upon a man than He is upon an ant. Both are the objects of His care and the recipients of His blessing. God gave man life, and he is morally unfit to live for ever. His life, with all its drawbacks, is still a boon and a blessing, but it is righteously subject to death. The moralist may thank God for Virtue's present reward, but he has no right to complain that God passes him by to bestow immortality upon a sinner.

From this very sovereignty springs the freedom of grace. "The gift of God is eternal life." What God has to give He gives freely, absolutely, unconditionally. . . . But before the object of Grace can become its subject-before immortality can be bestowed -Sin must have been taken out of the way. This was done by the work effected upon the Cross. Infinite Wisdom and Mercy had joined all the elect of God with Him in that transaction. They were already counted of God as one with Christ. They were, according to God's estimate, identified with Him, as though they

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really and personally hung there too. He had identified Himself with them and with their sins. The penalty of sin descended upon His head; the same penalty which will by-and-by utterly destroy the wicked, so that they will" be as though they had not been." The sins were consumed, the penalty exhausted for ever. Christ, the believer has already endured the death which is the wages of sin. He has been judged once, and he will never enter into judgment again. He is justified-made righteous-in the sight of God eternally. The conscious reception of this justification is (ek pisteos) in the way of faith.

The believer is not only reckoned of God as having died with Christ, but he is also risen with Him. As thus risen, and only because he has thus risen, he possesses eternal life. This is a real life, a new principle of being, as real as the natural or psychical life with which plants, animals, and men are endowed. It differs from that, in that it is incorruptible, holy, and deathless. Its source is the Second Adam, the immortalized Man, on whom the Father conferred the gift of "life in Himself." Hence regeneration is an actual thing, not a symbol. Its recipient is "born again," born from above, born of the Spirit, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. That the spirit thus born is a real entity we learn from 1 Cor. xv. (and many other Scriptures), where we are told that just as to each soul or vital principle of plants, animals, and men God has given an appropriate body, so this new life shall receive in resurrection its appropriate body. So then the doctrine of Resurrection depends on the doctrine of Immortality derived from Christ alone. It is nothing more nor less than the visible manifestation of a hidden life, and has its analogies in the manifestation of hidden vegetable and animal life.

The Christian is now the possessor of this life, but "it is not yet manifested." When Christ our life shall be manifested, we shall also be "manifested with Him in glory." The possession of this life is the basis of all New Testament exhortation to holy living. The believer is addressed, not as a psychical, but as a spiritual man, and it is to his spiritual intelligence the truth is unfolded which it is said that the "psychical man cannot receive." As risen with Christ, he is exhorted to set his mind on things above, not on things on the earth, and to put to death his members which are upon the earth. False teachers are declared to be "psychical, not having a spirit." It is said of Christians that God "hath made us alive together with Christ, having forgiven us all trespasses, and hath exalted us together, and seated us together in the Heavenlies in Him." The believer is virtually there now because his life is there "hid with Christ in God." From that standpoint his spiritual perceptions are taught to look down on all earthly things, and he is thus exhorted to "walk worthy of the calling with which he is called." He is a child of God-a son-to wear in a little while the likeness of Him who deigns to call Him

self the first-born among many brethren. As one with Christ, he belongs to a new creation, in which all things are of God; which God has reconciled to Himself, and in which sin is not imputed. There is now no condemnation because he is in Christ Jesus. These facts, which have for their substratum the possession of an actual new nature, form, with their correlated facts, the whole basis of Christian ethics. The facts are always stated first, and the invariable exhortation is, to live in correspondence with them.

Thus, also, this truth is the foundation of the true Church. This is represented in 1 Cor. xii. as a living organism, fulfilling, through its members, the inner law of its being. It is not an organisation held together by the pressure of external laws and regulations. As the head and life of this organism is in heaven, its status is heavenly. Here and there a little company may be found, which, waiting in faith upon God for gifts of ministry, manifests organic life in the distribution by the Holy Spirit of these gifts among its members. This is not possible where human authority, human election, and human organisation are allowed to rule.

The law of this new life is also that it always seeks its source. Its tendency, when unchecked, is to rise to the level of its fountain. It loves Christ, trusts Christ, glorifies Christ, and acts out Christ in its practical behaviour. In the same man, while in the flesh, this new or spiritual life exists side by side with the old or psychical nature, and is in direct opposition to it. The one is Christ-seeking, the other self-seeking. As the one principle or the other holds sway, the Christian is heavenly or earthlyminded.

As thus made one with Christ, the believer is properly identified with Him now in earthly rejection as by-and-by in heavenly glory. He sees himself separated by death and resurrection from a cosmos which lieth in the wicked one. It is, therefore, impossible that his hope should rest in the improvement of the world, and he is compelled to receive as literal truth the promise, "I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am there ye may be also." His Lord's return is the hope which is the anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast. Identified with Christ, his hope centres on the hour of His vindication. He rejoices in the prospect, not of his own happiness or glory, but "in the hope of the glory of God."

The same principle of interpretation which accepts the Lord's return as the proximate hope of the Church leads us to believe in an immortality derived only from Him. It is a mystery to me how any intelligent Christian can believe the one without believing the other.

Finally, the doctrine teaches the ultimate destruction of all evil. Nothing is eternal but good. It tells of a universe re-headed up in Christ; of a kingdom which, when the last enemy has been

destroyed, the Son will deliver up to the Father, that God may be all in all; of new heavens and a new earth, in which there shall be no more sorrow nor crying nor pain, when God declares," Behold, I make all things new." In that purified and reconstituted universe the saints will be with and like Christ, and will to all eternity form with Him the expression to its inhabitants of the wonders of the love and the riches of the wisdom of the Godhead. Contrast with all this the theory that man is immortal; that evil is eternal; that the death of Christ is but the partial remedy for the great misfortune that befel the universe when evil began to be; that notwithstanding this mighty sacrifice, countless millions must suffer in hell for ever; that regeneration is a mere symbol, and all its blessed results, in the "intimacy and fulness and security of the believer's union with Christ," are mere figures of speech, and tell me which of the two statements is discord and which is harmony? May my readers "all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of THE CHRIST!!"

0

THE ELDER BROTHER.

WONDERFUL! What can we say to this?
What thanks express for such transcendent bliss ?
He, the great "Prince of Life," the glorious King,
Whose worth and work celestial beings sing,
Calls us His "brethren," and " is not ashamed"
To have the fact throughout the world proclaimed!
His brethren? We, of dust and death the kin?
Feeble and erring, and defiled by sin?

Whilst He is sinless, spotless, and divine,
Through whom the Father's glories brightly shine?
How can it be, or can it be believed,

That we such peerless honour have received ?
Brethren of Him upon whose head the light
Of God's Shekinah fell, that wondrous night
Which for all time reveals the holy story

Of the high mountain crowned with awful glory?
A symbol and a prelude of the day,
Eternally decreed, which shall display,
In actual fact accomplished, the designed
Far reaching purpose of Jehovah's mind.
Brethren of Him who walked on earth a God,
Demons and death obedient to his nod;
Whilst tempests felt His all-commanding will,
And owned the regal mandate, "Peace, be still!"

Brethren of Him who from the dead arose,

A mighty victor over all His foes,

And went to heaven, while glory round Him shone,
To take His place upon His Father's throne?

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Yes! it is true; the sons of God" are one

With Him who sits upon the Father's throne!
Called, chosen, changed, the life in Christ is theirs ;
Of Him the" brethren," and with Him the "heirs."
No nimbus yet descends upon their brow,
No stephanos proclaims them royal now,
No glory-halo, star, or diadem

Asks passers-by to bend the head to them.
Their grandeur is in promise, and the Lord,
Their elder Brother, will redeem His word;
The amaranthine chaplet will be given

When He, their "Life" immortal, comes from heaven.
Their place on earth, if far from earthly throne,
Obscure and lonely, to their Lord is known.

And though in royal courts they have no speech,

The book of life contains the name of each.

Enrolled in heaven, the Son hath made them free,

And in the glory with Him they shall be.

When God's great purpose with the Church is gained,
His will performed, His glorious end attained,
The universe made holy, sin unknown,

Sorrow and sickness from existence gone,
Creation freed for ever from its thrall,

Our song will be-" OUR BROTHER DID IT ALL!”

EDITOR.

BEFORE

THE APPEAL TO SCRIPTURE.*
CHAPTER II.

QEFORE we proceed to consider Mr. Cox's appeal to Scripture in proof of his theory of a universal restoration, we would say that, in our judgment, he represents the prospects of the heathen, unless further trial be given them in another age beyond this, as much darker than Scripture warrants us to hold. He seems to think the very wisest and best men of the heathen world are shut out by Scripture from any hope of salvation, unless they obtain a further probation in another scene. "If Socrates," he asks, "and Plato, and Aristotle, if Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, would have fallen at the feet of the Son of Man, and joyfully have taken Him for their Master and Friend, are they never to hear the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth? Are they to be damned for not having heard them ?" (21.)