boldly and gladly on the sunlit ocean of Divine love, lest some watching brother should cry, " Heresy! He has gone beyond the creed; that is against the standards!" But whilst we look on this cry as simply foolish, as it is impossible to put all God's thoughts in any creed of human composition; yet, upon the other hand, we must not add to the book by believing, or wishing to believe, more than it actually contains. The work that Christ has done for God and men is confessedly very great, even if we accept the estimate of it given by the narrowest sect in Christendom. If we limit the issues of that work as some people take pleasure in doing, impossible as it is for me to understand, far less to appreciate, their motives, still those issues, it is admitted, require eternity for their development, however few the actual recipients of the Divine life. Well, then, seeing that at the narrowest estimate the work of the Saviour is so wonderfully great and gracious, may I venture to go beyond the limits of the most generous orthodoxy, and say that the work of Christ will not be done while there remains a sin, a sigh, a tear, a pain or a groan in creation? I take the risk of this position without fear. Whether it be orthodox or heterodox is a question which I do not ask. These words have no meaning to me. I do not wish to assign to the Son of God and Son of Man more work than He has undertaken; but neither can I confine that work within a narrower circle than revelation describes as the area of its manifestation, and thus deprive our Lord of a portion of the glory due to His name.

Let us get the key to our inquiry by a brief glance back. Let us walk with the wonderful Man by the banks of the Jordan, the Lake of Galilee, the vineyards of Judea, the slopes of Olivet, the hillside, the wilderness, and other spots for ever sacred to us, notwithstanding all the abominations that have desecrated Emmanuel's land for weary centuries. What do we find in this man? What is our impression concerning Him? That He is strangely compassionate, gentle, tender, loving; that the mysterious power that is in Him, is put forth, without fee or reward, to heal disease, to remove sorrow, to dry tears, to cast out demons, to raise the dead; that He is grieved when men refuse the blessings He wishes to bestow; that His moral indignation bursts like a tempest of thunder and lightning upon the official hypocrites whose conduct dishonoured Moses, disgraced His Father's temple, and fearfully misrepresented His Father's character; and that all this time His pity streamed out, a very river of life and gladness, to the victims of sin, upon whom priest and Pharisee looked with contempt, whilst from His lips there fell the gracious words, "Your sins are forgiven; go and sin no more." In a word, our verdict respecting this Man must be, "He is perfect!" But if perfect He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; for perfection has no degrees and knows no change. His exaltation therefore to the Father's right hand, for a time, has not weakened the flow of His pity for the sad and suffering of the

race whose nature He took with Him to the ineffable light, nor cooled His zeal for the Father's glory, which glowed in His heart when He lived on earth. The revelation of the Father's character, so terribly misunderstood and misrepresented, was the very heart of the Saviour's ministry. That object is before Him still. He has been carrying it on all these centuries in the hearts and minds of millions of our race. He has been revealing the Father to believers ever since His ascension-I have declared unto them Thy name and will declare it-and when these heavens open on the grand day of His return, He comes to put down all authority and power by which the will of the Godhead is opposed. "For He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet." That one Scripture is so marvellously comprehensive, that we might rest the case here, and claim for our Lord the glory of subduing all things to God, of stilling the storms of time and bringing in the great calm of the new age. But this is only one of the proof texts to which hope turns so gladly, as the belated traveller to the polestar when his landmarks are wrapped in darkness, or, to use a Scripture similitude, when the believer longs for his Lord to come and heal the nations he looks for the beautiful day star, the herald of the glorious sun.

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On a mountain in Galilee our risen Lord met the eleven by appointment, and during the interview made use of these words: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." thoughtful man can read that brief sentence without feeling that he must pause and reflect. If you can think at all this great saying must arrest your thoughts. AH power in heaven and earth to one who three days before was put to death as a blasphemer of God and a rebel against Cæsar? His perfect character-unchangeable because perfect-is our guarantee that He will use this supreme power for the best interests of the universe. He will do right only and always, whether He deals with friend or foe. If because of His regal position the princes of this world are coming to nought, He will do them no injustice. If He appoint princes of His own election in their place, it will not be an act of party favouritism but a recognition of their fitness for office, and a reward of their faithfulness during the time of His absence. If the powers of heaven are to be shaken, it is because spiritual wickedness in high places, under the prince of the power of the air, exercises a malignant influence, and the Lord is about to purify the heavens which are now not clean in His sight. To still the groanings of creation and to prepare for the new heavens and the new earth, in which righteousness is to dwell, will involve great cosmical as well as moral and spiritual changes-in fact a universal revolution under the direction of the perfect wisdom and power of the Man of God's right hand, the Son of Man, whom He has made strong for Himself. It is a very wonderful thing this alliance of Deity with glorified humanity in removing evil from creation. It fills the

mind with wonder when the thought is fairly grasped that a man. is the chosen executive of the Godhead for the accomplishment of its original purposes in the creation of the heavens and the earth and of angels and men. What a triumph over the enemy through the very nature he seduced from allegiance to the throne! The bruised heel shall crush the head of him that bruised it. The Man of sorrows shall fill heaven and earth with song; and through the despised and rejected One the time comes when God shall be all in all. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall their be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

May the Lord graciously hasten this glorious consummation! Amen!

APOCALYPTIC INTERPRETATION.

FOR the last thirty years there has been a great lull in regard to

the above question-we mean as to how it should be pursuedwith what principle to guide us-how we should, as it were, feel our way.

The late Rev. E. B. Elliott arrested much attention in his "Hora Apocalyptica" to the Historic or Præterist line of interpretation, which makes the greater part of this grand series of Prophecies already fulfilled; and the late Dr. Cumming, with considerable ability, popularised Mr. Elliott's views. But he rashly ventured, as all must now admit, to base upon them a precise date for the winding up of this dispensation by the second coming of our Lord; and in consequence, the Historic School of Interpreters has sustained no little loss of prestige, notwithstanding the recent labours to recover it of the excellent Mr. Grattan Guinness.

The main disability, we are persuaded, which attends this School of writers is, that the events they assign to the various prophecies as their fulfilments, were confessedly not discerned beforehand by the people of God unto their deriving enlightenment from them, as foretold; whilst only as fulfilled, i.e. turned into history, they are held to be profitable to us.

The conviction therefore seems quietly spreading among the children of God that only in the still Future (except indeed in the

way of typical rehearsal or application meanwhile) lie the real fulfilments of that large continent of prophecy-the Apocalypse-including even the rise of the Seven Churches, constituted, perhaps, of an election of Jewish believers, called forth from the Nation after the rapture of the Church-to witness amidst the then ensuing Antichristian apostasy to the imminent return of their once rejected Messiah.

Accordingly, if this be so, there is no occasion for separating, as is generally done, the circumstances of the Seven Churches from the subsequent visions of the Book. On the contrary, they would appear to blend into each other and form one grand perspective of the Future, as may be seen from a comparison of the following passages :-Chap. ii. 3, with xiii. 10, xiv. 12; chap. ii. 9, 10, with xiii. 5-8; chap. ii. 13, with xiii. 2, xvi. 10; chap. ii. 16, with xix. 21; chap. ii. 18, with xix. 15; chap. ii. 20-23, with xvii. 2, 4, xviii. 3; chap. iii. 3, with xvi. 15; chap. iii. 12, with xxi. 2; chap. iii. 21, with xx. 4.

Other parallels might be adduced, but the prosecution of this point we leave to our readers. One fact, however, we desire to commend to their devout and careful consideration, namely, that when John saw the visions of the Apocalypse, he "was in spirit on the Lord's Day," i.e. THE DAY OF THE LORD-not the first day of the week, our Sunday, nor that period of the Coming of the Lord (His zapovoia) when the rapture of the saints is to occur-but the interval which is to succeed till the Lord descends to the earth, during which the Antichrist shall be running his career (2 Thess. ii.) and which the Apostle Paul enlarges on as "the Day of Wrath and Revelation (Apocalypse) of the Righteous Judgment of God," fraught, as he adds, with "indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile "-(Rom. ii. 5-9)—the very order of the visitations under the trumpets and the vials as affecting Antichristian Jews and Gentiles in the Book of the Revelation.

Be it observed further, that after the introductory vision seen by John of the Stars and the Candlesticks, with the Son of Man walking in their midst, these symbols respectively of the Seven Churches and their Angels, seem to have been dissolved from before him; as in the scene of the Transfiguration, when Moses and Elias disappeared, so that when the terrified disciples lifted up their eyes, they saw no man save Jesus only."

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How, then, does the Lord proceed to speak of these symbols and their import? With a discrimination, surely, to be reverently noticed. For we find the definite article used in the designation of the former and omitted in the latter. "The seven stars are Angels of the Seven Churches, and the Seven Candlesticks are Seven Churches." The implication is at once suggested that both Angels and Churches had not, at that precise time, the actual existence contemplated in the vision, but pointed onwards to the future.

The mode of expression is exactly that which obtains in Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream: "The seven good kine are seven years, and the seven good ears are seven years (Gen. xli. 26). Here the article is similarly used and omitted (and it is the same in the Septuagint) specifying the emblems which Pharaoh saw, "the seven good kine"-"the seven good ears; " but leaving their signified period indefinite to suit the future-" are seven years,' are seven years; and so it follows, v. 29, "Behold there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt."

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With this clear precedent for such construction, what forbids it to take our Lord's words, "The Seven Candlesticks are Seven Churches," as equivalent to His saying, "There come Seven Churches." On the other hand, if these Churches existed, as contemplated, is it not incongruous to suppose that they would be indefinitely denominated without the article-" Seven churches." Nor is there anything really to disconcert in the view that visions seen and recorded eighteen hundred years ago should be addressed to Churches still in the womb of the Future. For, be it remembered, that by Elijah the prophet (and how early in his ministry we know not) a letter of denunciation was indited to Jehoram, king of Judah, which letter nevertheless reached not its destination, i.e. was not delivered to the degenerate monarch till some seven years after the prophet's ascension, when the impiety denounced became ripe for judgment (2 Chr. xxi. 12-15). What forbids that the supposition that this letter, while specially designed for a particular crisis, was circulated even from the time when it was written, among the schools of the prophets and the faithful people of the land, to whose care it was confided, and through them passed into the hands of Jehoram ?

This is certainly a somewhat analogous case to the divine Seer (John) addressing to future churches (i.e., gatherings of Jews) in Asia Minor, these letters-the burden of the Apocalypse; while yet in transitu, we, the Church of this dispensation, as their depositaries, blessedly possess them for their admonition and encouragement.

As to the à priori argument in Mr. Grattan Guinness's recent pamphlet, that the Futurist system leaves unrevealed the events affecting the Church of God for these last eighteen centuries, and "deprives our holy faith of the marvellous and matchless support which, at this stage of the dispensation, it receives from the fulfilment of prophecy," the simple answer to this is, that the evidential support of Christianity (if this be what Mr. Guinness means) is not the main design of prophecy; nor have we a right to postulate that while the seed of Abraham are disorganised and off the stage as a nation, the Prophetic word must treat of Gentile affairs.

As has been said by a talented writer on this very point: "Israel's calling was earthly; and, therefore, the record of the Divine dealings with them, whether in history or prophecy, of which Old

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