the place of character; the comment being that "this is exactly true," but that in the cross is found the only way for the formation of right character. I think the vicarious substitutionary element of Christ's sacrifice is not set aside by the resultant effects of the cross in the hearts and lives of believers. As the central truth of Christianity, it may be viewed from many differentstandpoints, each of which presents its own aspects, and all true.

We certainly sympathize with this brother in what he says about this subject as being many-sided and inexhaustible, and also with his view of the relation of the cross to the formation of right character. If there was anything that we made emphatic, when privileged to preach the gospel, it was this. And we have never since written a line with the intention of denying or disparaging this truth.

Nor would we deny that there is a "vicarious and substitutionary element in Christ's sacrifice"; we have only sought to free this feature of His work from misrepresentation, and especially to guard our readers against a common perversion of it, namely, that Christ died to save us from the judgment due to us for our sins, rather than to save us in and through required judgment. It makes a vast difference-not merely in theory, but in its effects upon conduct and life-whether we regard Him as a victim suffering penalty instead of us, under a legal system which required Him to endure the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin, or whether we view Him as freely and lovingly uniting Himself with us in our own nature in order that He might take part with us under its burden of sin and penalty and bear it, not instead of us, but with us and for us, and by His divine strength and purity deliver us out from under it and set us free. In the latter case it is seen that God's forgiveness does not exempt me from the penalty which His righteous law imposes for my wrong-doing, and which, because His law is perfect, can never be set aside. But He forgives by imparting to me the strength and righteousness of His divine-human nature, which has power to inwardly cleanse from all sin, and He converts the very penalties I must needs submit to, even that of death, into the instruments of this cleansing. They serve to kill out the old man and to clear the way for the formation in me of the new man which after God is created in

righteousness and true holiness. This gospel, therefore, gives no encouragement in the delusion that I may go on in sin, negligent and self-indulgent, and finally escape the consequences by a full amnesty and act of pardon on the ground of a righteousness wrought for me by another and imputed to my account. I need to know, and all men need to know, that if I do wrong I must suffer the consequences, and that surer than the motions of the stars is the unerring law, "Be sure your sin will find you out," and "He will render to every man according to his work."

The Christian, however, instead of setting himself against this law and hoping to escape from it, at once submits to it and accepts the just judgments of God against him under it, even to the surrender to death of this old man of sin, which deserves to die, and out of whose death and judgment alone he can rise to newness of life. He thus judges himself that he may not be condemned' with the world, and to the extent to which he thus humbles himself under the mighty hand of God he will in due time be exalted.

This question of the nature of the atonement seems to us to rest just here upon the purpose of the death of Christ. Is the cross a divine method to free man from the just consequences of sin, or from sin itself, and so to bring him into a condition of moral excellence in which penalty is no longer necessary? The first view is met by the unanswerable objection that, under the government of God, there can be no penalties which are not perfectly just and wise, and therefore it could be neither wise nor just to set them aside. Men therefore must be saved, not from these proper penalties, but through them and beyond them. A supreme evidence of this is that God's way of saving man from death, the wages of sin, is not to remit this just sentence, but to execute it, and after its execution to provide for him a recovery out of and beyond death. The very perversion of the gospel, which it is the mission of this magazine to expose, would never have arisen had men been taught to believe that they cannot possibly escape the payment of sin's wages, and that God's grace provides to deliver man not from his well-deserved death, but out of and beyond it, through a resurrection from the dead. The prayer of Jesus, who gave Himself to

death for us, was not that He might be saved from death but out of it. (See Greek of Heb. v, 7.) Thus the substitution of eternal torment for death as the penalty of sin, and the consequent monstrous perversion of the purpose of God in resurrection, stand connected with a false view of the atonement as a governmental device to free men from the just consequences of sin, rather than as a provision to take up the case of lost man after the infliction of its penalty and to cleanse and restore him through and by means of it.

RE-INCARNATION.

This same correspondent writes also in reference to another point in our teaching as follows:

I confess that your theory of the resurrection of the unjust through re-incarnation has somewhat staggered me, but have noted that you do not advance it dogmatically but admit that there is no definite positive proof of it in Scripture. At the same time, for one who accepts the incarnation of the eternal Son of God, I cannot see that your suggestion of re-incarnation should be utterly incredible. As a mystery it does not compare with that greatest of all mysteries. It seems to me to fit in well with the theory of resurrection you have set forth, as always and essentially redemptive.

We are grateful for the moderate way in which our friend passes judgment upon this question. It is true that we do not enforce this doctrine as a dogma or as plainly taught in Scripture. It has for us grown to be an opinion because it adapts itself so well to a doctrine we are sure about, namely, the redemptive nature of resurrection. It seems evident

1. That resurrection is the restoration to life in manhood of one who was dead.

2. The two possible forms of the type of embodied being, called man, of which Scripture speaks, are the heavenly and the earthy. The Risen Christ is the pattern of the first; Adam, or the man in flesh and blood, is the pattern of the second.

3. Only a select and limited class of men are prepared to rise out of this earthly life to the condition of the heavenly,—only those in whom Christ is now formed as the hope of this glory.

4. All other men, "the unjust," can be restored through resur

rection only to the lower or earthy plane of manhood. On this plane they may, through further judgment in the flesh, learn to live according to God in the spirit.

5. Such resurrection, whether to a life on this earth or on some other planet, is re-incarnation.

6. The laws which govern the development of life on the earth, the principle of heredity, the links which bind one generation with another, and the facts of the science of life in general, together with the teachings of Scripture in accordance with these facts, and especially its repeated promises to some existing generation which can be made good to them only as represented and repeated in their descendants, all make it probable that past generations are introduced to life again on the earth and through the eclipse of a rebirth in infancy, and that, in punishment of past sins, they thus "lose themselves," only to find themselves again when the plane of the higher and heavenly manhood is reached on which all things are restored.

7. The mysteries of life and death and resurrection, of judgment, and of heaven and hell are thus brought much closer to us than we have hitherto imagined. The mystery of the interlocking and intertwining of human lives, the one in the many and the many in the one, is explained. So also is the fact that one can bear the sins of another, and suffer penalties and win rewards for those who have gone before them. This mystery of re-incarnation may include, not merely the repetition of a single former life in some other one, but many such lives may be gathered up and represented in another, who may work out for them deliverance or help them forward toward it.

This opinion about re-incarnation as the mode of resurrection for further discipline and trial of the unjust is not, however, a necessary feature of the doctrine of redemptive resurrection. If any prefer to believe that this renewed trial in embodied life takes place in some future age of the earth, or even on some other earth, this does not at all affect the principle for which we have all along been contending, that resurrection lies at the other pole of the divine dealing from death, the wages of sin, and that it is therefore benignant and redemptive.

VOL. VIII.]

OCTOBER, 1892.

[No. 10.

FIXED PRINCIPLES.

Certain fixed principles underlie the teachings of this magazine. Among these are:

1. God only hath immortality, and men become immortal only as they are made partakers of His divine nature. This rules out the idea that there can be any such thing as immortal existence for man in endless mis"All the wicked ery. "The wages of sin is death." will He destroy." With this accords all the teaching of Scripture concerning the two alternatives in man's destiny: He must receive "everlasting life" or "perish" (John iii, 16).

2. The fact, however, stands out on the first pages of Scripture that man was made in the image of God, capable of union and fellowship with Him, and having, therefore, the germ and potency of a divine nature. Adam was the son of God (Luke iii, 38). Jesus taught men to call upon God as their Father, and sought to awaken in them the consciousness of their relationship to Him as such, to arouse in them the latent energy of the divine element in their being, and so to develop them into sons of God, But, more than this, He incorporated our nature into the divine, and so transformed it through death and resurrection as to make it divine not only in essence, but in per