sonal manifestation. The fullness of the Godhead is now in Him bodily.

3. Ground is thus laid for a distinction between what man is in essence and what he has become in personal manifestation. He is essentially divine in origin. and nature, but as developed and existent, he has become sinful, and therefore mortal. We therefore infer that the constant declaration of Scripture that man is mortal and must be "punished with everlasting destruction" (II Thess. i, 9) because of his sin, apply to him as existent and as developed into a personality that is unrighteous and unfit for eternal life in the presence of the Lord. Whatever element in man's being is divine is incapable of sin, and therefore cannot be destroyed. Man must therefore live on in essence, while his existent personality must be destroyed so far as it has not been brought into subjection to the divine spirit within him.

4. The end of man's salvation in Christ is the renewal and transfiguration of him in person, so that his fullydeveloped personal manhood shall be a perfect expression of, and vehicle for the divine nature, which is the essence of his being. Man must become the temple or dwellingplace of the living God: "Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto Himself” (Phil. iii, 21). While on the one hand, therefore, the terms of salvation are such as to prompt at once the inquiry, "Who then can be saved?" it is seen, on the other, that "The things which are impossible to men are possible with God." It is seen also that both sides of Scripture teaching-the retributive

and the redemptive—are alike true. For, in an important sense, all men are saved in the fact that the essential nature in every man, in which lies his permanent and indestructible individuality, lives on after death, and after his whole. body, so far as unyielded to God, is cast into hell for destruction; while, on the other hand, it is seen that the person-the extrinsic manhood-of no one is saved, but is burnt up in God's consuming fire, except so far as it has been laid upon the altar of His service and has become a living sacrifice to Him.

Universalism and orthodoxy are therefore both true in part. The former teaches rightly, that a being who in origin and nature is essentially of God can never perish or be forever lost. The latter teaches rightly, that no sinful existence can dwell with God, but must be destroyed forever from His presence.

5. But neither of these systems have rightly understood the meaning of the great gospel hope of the resurrection of the dead. The Universalist, indeed, has properly insisted that the "all" who are to be made alive in Christ must be as comprehensive as the "all" who died in Adam. But he has not properly discriminated between this promise as applicable to what man is in essence and what he is in personality. Resurrection is a divine provision for saving the essential man, out of the wreck wrought by sin and death of what he was in embodiment or as personally manifested, in order that he may take on another body and so pursue his path to the goal of perfect personality. But the ruin may have been so great that the former person may have lost himself and be cast away. While the orthodox have so perverted the meaning of this gracious

provision as to strip it, in the case of the unjust, of all redemptive and beneficent intent, making it to be but the means by which the body of man already destroyed in death and hell shall be re-formed again and immortalized as the instrument of the soul's eternal torture.

It was to correct and to hold up to its deserved reprobation this monstrous perversion of the primary hope of the gospel that this magazine was from the first especially devoted.

AN ELECT RACE.

Such a race are Christians said to be in the revised reading of I Peter ii, 9: "But ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that ye may shew forth the excellencies of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light."

A striking feature of the New Testament writings is that they are much more concerned with the perfecting of believers than with the enlargement of their numbers. Their anxiety is for the upbuilding of the Church, not so much by additions from without as by development from within. The gathering and perfection of an elect seed as the appointed instrument of the world's salvation was the object of the labors and teachings of the apostles.

The weakness of the Church in later times has arisen very much from the neglect of this primary object of Christian endeavor. The desire to gather in the world. has superseded the desire to make pure and clean the channel through which the grace of God reaches the world. This error is the result of ignorance of the plan

of God for the world's salvation. It has been assumed that all that God Himself can do to save human souls and fit them for His presence must be done at once, and that the Church's agency in this salvation does not reach beyond the boundaries of this present life. Hence her supreme effort has been to get as many as possible within her fold, with the result of lowering the tone of piety among her members and of obscuring the sense of her own high calling. That calling is that she should become "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation." This calling implies that she can best bless men, not by inviting them into her own ranks before they are fitted for it, but as an unobstructed medium of the blessings which God has in store for men. It is not true that there is no reach in God's salvation beyond the present age or outside the circle of the Church. It all proceeds from her as the centre, but in ever-widening circles to "all the families of the earth," unto whom she is the seed of blessing, and her work goes on through the ages to come. Our Lord's priestly prayer for the unity and perfection of the Church was to the end that the world might believe. And if the effort of the Church were more in this direction of unity and perfection, and less of enlargement, the world itself would sooner be saved.

NEW IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

This new idea of the Church is involved in the views we have been urging of the solidarity of the race, of the connection between its generations in the penalties of wrong-doing and the rewards of right-doing, and of the probability that the resurrection of the unjust is their re

embodiment in this earthly life for further judgment and discipline. These views imply that, while the whole existing body of humanity must continue to bear a burden of iniquity from the generations of the past, it acquires also a cumulative power from the righteous deeds of its elect members in the past to throw off this burden and to make further progress in righteousness. The doctrine of Christianity makes this view most clear and definite. Jesus Christ, as the one elect member of the race who in all things has the pre-eminence, bore the sin of the whole world, triumphed over it by His righteousness, and in rising from the dead infused into the race a new spiritual energy in the power of which it shall finally be victorious over sin and death. But His victories of grace and power continue to be wrought through the Church, the members of His body. And just as His own power of blessing mankind was not and could not be fully manifested until His resurrection, so it is absurd to suppose that the power of His saints to bless their human brethren is arrested by death. On the contrary, death opens up to them, as it did to Him, the very sources and springs of blessing to the And as He was raised to become Lord both of the dead and the living (Rom. xiv, 9), so the saving energy that flows from Him through His members has relation to the dead as well as to the living.

race.

In an important sense, therefore, both Christ and His risen saints are perpetually and cumulatively incarnating themselves in humanity, to the end that it may be changed "from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord." And the existing body of the Church on earth is the embodiment and channel of these saving powers in heaven,