NOTICES. It is, MRS. R. writes: "Once more I take the opportunity of acknowledging my thankfulness to you, and all contributors to the RAINBOW. I assure you, a source of great comfort and instruction to me." "H. G." writes: "The Lord be praised for placing you in a position to honour Him; for you will, as a faithful soldier of Jesus Christ, hold forth the Word of LIFE, nothing daunted by the adversaries; for the Lord thy God is with thee, whithersoever thou goest. Enough!" "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN " rendered good service to the cause of freedom years ago. It told wonderfully upon public feeling by its graphic simplicity and truthfulness, and was no mean factor in hastening the doom of slavery in America. Mr. F. E. Longley, Warwick Lane, has just issued this famous story, "Complete and unabridged," for one penny! A GENTLEMAN who saw the RAINBOW for the first time in the house of a friend three months ago, asks why we do not advertise it largely, as he is confident that "Christian people only require to have their attention called to its doctrines, to embrace them with thankfulness and joy, as the very truth of the Gospel, bringing glory to God and peace to men." "J. W." writes: "I do not forget that you are ploughing along in the valley, sometimes with weary eyes, but always with steady purpose.' "C. F." Letter and lines received. Immortality is the natural inheritance of no creature; it is supernatural; the gift of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. You rejoice in this truth; so would all Christians if the scales of a pagan tradition were taken from their eyes. We are doing our utmost to diffuse this blessed light. A LADY writes: "I have so much enjoyed reading the Divine Side of the Question,' and feel so thankful for the help and comfort derived from the RAINBOW, which, under God, we owe to you. My husband bids me tell you how much he has gained from The King,' and 'The King Rejected,' and from the articles on 'The Abrahamic Covenant.' He says the RAINBOW is doubly valuable out in the wilds of India, where he is at present, for he has no Christian fellowship." "L. B." writes: " Although it must seem somewhat impertinent for me to express satisfaction with your work, it is absolutely impossible to avoid doing so, since both 'Ebenezer' and 'The Church' are so good! The former shows clearly my own experience. Why there should be so strenuous and persistent an opposition to Biblical facts, and that continued hugging of the most revolting fancies, so plainly contrary to the whole tenor of the Scriptures, it is extremely difficult to understand." "M. C." says: "Mr. Holding writes in forcible style on the Peshito. It is among the things that I never could believe that the disciples wrote in Greek. It is not usual even in these days for persons to write in any language but their own; and what could be the object of writing in Greek for the benefit of Jews and the lower orders of Syrians?" THE RAINBOW: A Magazine of Christian Literature, with Special Reference to the Revealed Future of the Church and the clorld. FEBRUARY, 1882. THE REVISED VERSION ON THE WAGES OF SIN. VERYONE who attaches special importance to any theological view must naturally feel anxious to know how the Revised Version of the New Testament is likely to affect the spread of that view amongst the general mass of English readers. Let us see, therefore, what impression it may reasonably be expected to produce on their minds with reference to the final destiny of those "whose end is destruction." 1. In the first place, by the word hades being left untranslated, and the word gehenna, wherever it occurs, being given in the margin, though most unfortunately rendered hell in the text, much confusion is avoided as to the former, and, at least, a suggestion thrown out to the unlearned to inquire what the latter place, round which such infinite horrors have accumulated in the popular mind, really is, or was. It will be no longer possible for the most ignorant reader to imagine that our Lord intended to represent the rich man as having received his final doom in "hell." Some years ago an excellent clergyman published a sermon on that parable; in the course of which he said: "Some people say there is no hell; I say there is a hell; and Christ says so too, in this parable." If the Revised Version had been out then, his hearers would have seen that Christ does nothing of the kind; that is, He makes no reference whatever to any such hell as the preacher was contending for. The rich man was in hades, the place of departed spirits; and the parable describes, under the image of bodily sufferings, his remorse of conscience, immediately after death, at the thought of his misspent life. As to what would happen to him when he was raised from the dead at the final judgment, it says not a word. When, however, the wicked are threatened with future destruction, body and soul, in gehenna, those readers who are not absolutely blinded to the necessity for any inquiry by the traditional ideas E attached to the English word hell, still left in the text, will naturally be led to ask the meaning of our Lord's own word, gehenna. And when they learn that it was the valley of Hinnom, outside the walls of Jerusalem, where fires were kept constantly burning to consume the refuse of the city, they can scarcely avoid seeing the incongruity of making such a place an emblem either of an eternal abode of misery for immortal beings, or of a purifying process whereby the wicked would be brought to repentance. Gehenna was neither a place of penal servitude, nor a reformatory. The refuse was not kept there festering for ever in its own corruption; neither was it purified: it was utterly consumed; and thereby presented a striking picture of the ultimate entire destruction, not of a sinner's happiness, nor yet of his sinfulness, but as our Lord distinctly specifies, of his "body and soul," the component parts of his being, "himself." From this the intelligent reader will easily see, what is so plainly suggested by several passages in the Old Testament, that the fire not being quenched by no means implies that what is cast into it will continue burning there for ever, but rather that nothing can stop the process of destruction until its work is completed. If the fires of Gehenna had been put out, or left to die out, the unconsumed refuse would have lain there polluting the atmosphere; just as orthodoxy imagines that the skies of heaven will be eternally darkened, and the universe eternally begrimed, by the smoke ascending from the torment of immortal souls, clothed in bodies that have been specially immortalised for the very purpose of enabling them to live on, ever burning but never burnt up. The fires were not allowed to be quenched, just to prevent any such abomination. Gehenna could not become a cesspool, because whatever was thrown into it "utterly perished" with a "swift destruction." In this connection, it is a decided gain to have the correct translation "unquenchable fire" substituted in Mark ix. 43 for "fire that never shall be quenched." Many persons are greatly affected by the mere sound of words; and the old translation is much more calculated than the new to suggest that the fire will burn on to all eternity; from which some would infer, though it by no means necessarily follows, that there must always be something left which requires its action. Homer speaks of an "unquenchable fire" breaking out amongst a fleet of ships; but he would hardly have described it as a fire "that was never quenched." That in using the word "unquenchable," and saying that "the fire is not quenched," our Lord had no intention of asserting its endless continuance, ought to have been seen from His associating it with the "worm " which "dieth not." Can we conceive Him to have invented such a monstrously incongruous figure as an immortal worm preying upon an immortal body, which it is for ever devouring, but has never eaten up? Should we have required the last verse of Isaiah to teach us that our Lord was referring to two well-known means of putting away the dead-burial and burning; in one of which nothing is left ultimately but the skeleton; in the other nothing but ashes? The worm, as it is expressed according to Hebrew custom-the worms, as we should say go on devouring the dead body until there is nothing left for them to devour; the fire burns, until not a trace is left of anything that ever entered into its structure. This is the simple meaning of the worm not dying, and the fire not being quenched. The words could mean nothing else, as written by Isaiah; they manifestly do mean nothing else as spoken by our Saviour. The fact, which the new translation will make known to many for the first time, that the words were used once, and not three times, at the close of that discourse related by St. Mark, possesses, of course, no controversial value whatever. But it is not unlikely to have some little practical effect, if we may judge by the tone of triumph with which the supposed three-fold repetition has been constantly paraded. The popular mind has probably been swayed by a vague idea that our Lord must have meant something frightfully horrible, and extremely difficult of belief, to have felt it necessary to repeat the statement three times in the course of a minute or two; and so the infinite horror and absolute incredibility of the medieval hell rather confirmed people in their impression that it was the veritable picture which our Lord here intended to draw. But there was nothing hard to believe in the warning that Jesus actually uttered. The loss, not only of "glory and honour," but also of "immortality;" the "death" which is "the wages of sin," not the mere bodily death which man can inflict, but that of the whole being, body and soul, which only God can inflict; the "everlasting destruction," accompanied by "tribulation and anguish," by "weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth," which is to be the end of the finally impenitent, these are, no doubt, depicted in colours well calculated to arrest the careless, and to strike terror into the "stouthearted, who are far from righteousness." But there is nothing to put any strain upon our faith, or to require any unnatural reiteration of assurance to make us believe it. All the objections that have been raised against it are founded entirely upon our ignorance of the means and the processes by which the Divine sentence will be executed. But there is no difficulty in believing the fact that they who have "judged themselves unworthy of eternal life," will not live for ever; while there would be very great difficulty in believing that, being constituted as man is, those who have neglected the great salvation offered to them in Christ, will perish by a painless, or instantaneous extinction. How it will be accomplished, it is impossible for us to conceive; but we may be sure that it will be in a way which will satisfy the conscience of the universe, and compel all creation to say Amen. 2. Neither must we overlook the two-fold improvement, slight though it be, in the rendering of Matt. xxv. 46-" And these shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." Those who did not know that the "everlasting" of the old translation in the first clause, and the "eternal in the second clause, represented the same Greek word, had an impression that our Lord applied the stronger word to punishment, because He knew that "human reason," and "sickly sentimentality," would rebel against what they supposed to be the punishment intended, namely, the being stereotyped for ever in obdurate wickedness, and kept alive for the sole purpose of being tortured. It is well for such persons to have their minds disabused even of that little mistake. On the other hand, those who are illogical enough to maintain that, because the life, to which the ambiguous word eternal is applied, will be actually endless, therefore the punishment, to which the same word is applied, must also be endless, may be glad to find the verbal identity indicated in the New Version. But even if that contention were admitted, the maintainers of the theory that the death which is the wages of sin means the endless torment of a soul and a body that can never die, would be met by the fact-which the Revisers emphasise by preserving the true order of the contrasted words, "eternal punishment" and "eternal life "-that the punishment must, at least, include the loss of life; otherwise the righteous and the wicked would both go away into eternal life; the one into an eternal life of happiness, the other into an eternal life of misery. Therefore, if the punishment spoken of in that most difficult parable is endless, it can only be so in its effects; just as the fire, from which Sodom and Gomorrha were said to be "suffering " long after they had ceased to exist, was called "eternal fire," though it had long before died out, because the destruction it wrought was irremediable. "Eternal redemption" is not eternal redeeming; "eternal judgment" is not eternal judging; neither is "eternal punishment" necessarily eternal punishing. It is satisfactory also to notice that the Revisers have adhered to the general word "punishment" as the rendering of kolasin, instead of changing it to correction, or chastisement, which universalists maintain to be its only true meaning, in direct opposition to the usage both of the Septuagint and of classical Greek writers, who constantly apply it to the punishment of death. Its derivation, no doubt, suggests the idea of corrective discipline; but its application was by no means confined to that. It is rather remarkable that certain writers should press so strongly the derivation of this simple word as applied to future punishment, in presence of the fact that the words paideum, paideus, and their cognates, which mean only fatherly chastisement, are never used of "the wrath to come;" while ekdikesis, timoria, and their cognates, which mean only retributive judgment, are employed to describe it. It is still |