life, out of Christ, beyond this, where do sinners get the life they are punished in till burned out? It must be from Christ, for creation has not given it to them. That is, they get, not their wicked life, in which they are fallen, and enemies to God, but a new life of Christ, in which to be punished in another world. I do not see the moral sense or attractiveness of this doctrine. Fur ther, I understand an immortal soul that is at enmity with God and excluded from Him, though once formed to own Him, being for ever miserable. But why God, out of pure pleasure, should keep alive a soul to torment it for a time, only to burn it out at the end, for no possible effect, I cannot conceive. It does not alarm men now. For tell them that they will simply perish in the end, and it is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The infidel finds it a very comfortable and reasonable doctrine. It is in vain to say, it is not honest to say, that men fear total destruction and perishing more than any thing, for its advocates resist eternal punishment because it is dreadful to think of. They know it is not the same thing. No doubt man does not like dying or perishing, in itself, as to this world, where he is alive, but to come to an end in a future one, where there is only torment, he likes very well.

My horror of this doctrine is, its weakening our sense of the nature of sin, of our responsibility, and of the atonement. If sin means eternal exclusion from God's presence, it is dreadful enmity against God now, exclusion from God then. If death is the only wages of sin, Christ had no more to suffer for me. Nay, if I am a Christian, He had nothing to suffer, if I die before the Lord comes. I have paid the wages myself. If it be only some temporary punishment I had incurred, He had only that to bear. "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me" has lost its force. It is in vain to say, He gives us life. He can, in itself, quicken without dying. If He died, He died for my sins, and bore them. If death be the wages, millions of saints have paid them. And if a partial punishment be all I had to bear, it is all Christ had to bear. The sense I have of sin and its desert is not, being forsaken of God, shut out

from Him when I can know what it is, but a temporary punishment, a quantum of offence,-which is all I have to think of, and all Christ had to bear, if anything.

It is alleged, I have been told since I wrote this, that there is another view held, namely, that the soul, having its life in Christ is in Christ when a man dies, and is, so to speak, lost in Him, and then at the resurrection be comes a conscious person again. This is a mere notion, and a foolish one too. It destroys not consciousness nor has anything to do with sleeping, but personality. It applies only to saints, and as to them is in direct violation of the testimony of Scripture, which attributes personality to the saints when gone hence. "To-day shalt thou be with me.' There are the distinct persons. Again, present with the Lord." There must be a distinct person to be present with the Lord. And so with other texts. That our life is hid with Christ in God, the only allusion to an idea approaching it in Scripture, proves, as far as it goes, the contrary; because it is spoken of saints living on the earth, where their personality is unquestionable. But the best answer to it is, it is a mere human invention. In the hiding in God we are associated with Christ. He also now is hid in God,-I suppose a conscious person, and it is in contrast with our appearing to others when He appears, not to any living personality in which we enjoy His presence. It is, we have seen, spoken of our present state, when living personality is unquestionable.

There is another word I have omitted to notice, basanizo, and basanismos, torment. This, we are told, comes from a Lydian stone used to test gold. Very likely, but the conclusion that, therefore, the words, when passed into common use, meant 'to prove," and not "to torment," is simply false. Thus, Matt. viii. 6: "My servant lieth sick, grievously tormented." What has that to do with the lapis Lydius? 2 Pet. ii. 8, [Lot] vexed his righteous soul." In Rev. ix. 5, the verb and the noun are used for the torment of a scorpion's sting. Matt. xiv. 24: "tormented by the waves." So of the men, Mark vi. 49,-showing how the etymological meaning was wholly forgotten for the fact of torment.

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Rev. xiv. 11: those who worship the beast are tormented for ever, have no rest. Rev. xviii. 15, we read of Babylon's torment; xx. 10, the devil is tormented day and night. Is he put to the proof as gold by the lapis Lydius? Matt. xviii. 24, the unforgiving servant delivered to the tormentors. The attempt to deny that basanismos, because that in its etymology it is borrowed from the lapis Lydius, means torment, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a mere fraudulent effort to pervert the plain fact.

There are a number of Hebrew words out of which something has been attempted to be made, in one tract I have seen, as acharith, tikvah, opher, etzem and otzem, tzelem, and others; but what is said of them does not really deserve any notice. It astounds somewhat a person who has the smallest acquaintance with Hebrew, or can use a dictionary and concordance. But I recall the reader's attention to the fact, that "this mortal" is said distinctly of the body, not of the soul. "This mortal shall put on immortality," "our mortal bodies" and the like. That consequently we read of killing the body, and having no more that they can do. We read of God,

as the "Father of spirits"; "the God of the spirits of all flesh"; and "that formeth the spirit of man within him." The fact that the angels do not die and are not mortal is the plain proof that it is a false use of God only having immortality, using it to prove men have not immortal souls; for the same argument would prove angels were also mortal,-which is false. But of this I have spoken. It is immortality in and of Himself.

It has been attempted to say, there is no appeasement of wrath with God. The words ilaskesthai, ilasmos, ilasterion all have exactly this sense. They meet the qualities or attributes, in God, which are necessary and must be maintained or He is not God as He is, or not God at all, to maintain what He is, His holiness and righteousness. But He is supreme in love.

I press, too, on my reader that when a man receives eternal life, he takes notice of all his past evil and sin as that for which he is responsible. If a beast received eternal life,—and the theory makes animal life the same

in all, could a beast hold himself responsible for all his previous conduct as a guilty, responsible soul? Are they to be judged as in their nature capable of guiltily rejecting Christ? If not, the whole theory is a disgraceful fraud on our minds. If athanasia was literally, as to the fact, to be applied only to God when Paul wrote it, then the saints who had got eternal life had no immortality even then, or else mortality applied only to their bodies, which is the fact in Scripture, for, as I have said, the saints are spoken of as mortal, like the rest. Thus it is evident that mortal, corruptible, death applies to the state in which we are down here as men living on the earth, where death is entered by sin, and to the separation of soul and body. It is, as Scripture speaks, killing the body, and has nothing to do with the soul person who, in his soul, has eternal life, has not athanasia more than another, has still to put it on. That is, it has nothing to do with the dying nature of the soul, or the contrary. It means that it cannot cease to exist in the state in which it exists at present; not that it has it in itself, as God, but that is its condition by His will. What puts on immortality is what was liable to death, -this body which could be killed in a saint as in a sinner, for the saint lives because Christ lives, his soul cannot die more than Christ now; yet he is as mortal as the sinner, and so, in fact, did Christ die. Did he cease to exist, or did He not truly die? Does it cease to be true that God only hath immortality, when we are raised,- for then we certainly have athanasia?

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When I find all these efforts to falsify the use of words, I know the source of this doctrine, and that no lie is of the truth.

B. M.

VOL. I.-New Series. 9

186

No. XI.

SELF-JUDGMENT.

"I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee, wherefore I abhor myself.”—Job xlii. 5, 6.

"For if we would judge ourselves we should not be judged." -1 Cor. xi. 31.

IT is a common saying that " self-preservation is the first law of nature," and, without doubt, nature does prompt self to preserve itself in every condition and circumstance. Naturally man cares for self before any other object, and whether it be in connection with his life, his possessions, his ease, or his character, self has the first place in his thoughts and affections. Even the law of God fully recognises this, for (addressing man as it does in his unregenerate state, 1 Tim. i. 9, 10) it says, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Greater love than this God's law does not exact from man to his fellow.

Now, as self is a selfish and a jealous being, justification is its first impulse when accusation or conviction is brought against it. Naturally, if it can avoid it, self will never condemn, but will always justify self; and thus self-judgment is a work not of nature, nor of willingness, but of compulsion and constraint.

Self-judgment, however, lies at the very basis of Christianity in the individual soul, and it is the inseparable condition of a walk in communion with God.

I think we may say that self-judgment is an effect of the conscience of a man (sinner or saint) being brought into the presence of a higher standard of righteousness than it has hitherto apprehended; for although self-judgment is a spontaneous act of the conscience of man,—as distinguished from his being judged by another,—yet self cannot judge self apart from a standard, and that standard or measure must be outside self, and to be of