Ex Libris [ C. K. OGDEN ' THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 6-J- THE DESTINY OF TIEE CEEATUEE OTHER SERMONS. THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE OTHER SERMONS. PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. BY CHARLES J. ELLICOTT, B.D., DHAIf OF KXETKB, AXD PKOFESSOB OP DIVINITY, KING'S COLLEGH, LONDON. SECOND EDITION. LONDON : PARKER, SON, AND Eol'RN, WEST STRAM). LONDON: SAVILL AND EDWARDS, PKIKTBBS, CHANDOS STBBET, COVENT GARUEK. E44rA PREFACE. r I^HE first four of the following sermons were A- preached by me before the I'niversity of Cain- bridge during the month of March, 1^5^, in the capacity of Selcet Preacher for that month. The fifth and sixth sermons were preached before the same honourable audience, the former in the morning of one of the Sundays in Lent, lS"> LS57, at the request of the Vice-chancellor. These two sermons are here added, partly in tardy compliance with a wish expressed at the time that they should be published, partly, and more especially, because they both illustrate, and arc illustrated by, the Course with which they arc asso- ciated. On the suggestion of friends, a few hastily gathered notes are appended to the who!'- : ;ix i; was considered that the subjects \\!nch arc her. discussed are all of a kind that require this furtlu mode of illustration. in justice, however, to myself, 1 feel it right to say, that as the sermon> \\rre not written with n view to publication, no record wa< kept of the many sources from which the opinions expressed in them were derived. Tin' note?-, tlui\- forc, inn^t be regarded, and kmdlv I'.ilowcd for, a- siui|'iy illustrative collections ;uid reminiscences of mere general reading, rather than a> the rc-nlts ot' a definite course of >tudv, of which ih' -ennons im'u'ht VI I'RE'FACIE. he considered the exponents. They arc, I am well aware, very incomplete; still they may, perhaps, serve their purpose, which is only that of interesting the general reader, and of directing the student to sources of information from which he may complete and fill in what in the sermons is only imperfect and in outline. As to the sermons, they must speak for themselves. They are all on subjects of great moment, and attempt to give a few faltering answers to questions that T verily believe arc almost daily rising up in the hearts of most of the earnest thinkers of our own time ; but which, nevertheless, by a kind of common consent, arc either at once repressed, or only answered with a temerity which too often places its own intuitions in undisguised antagonism to the written word of (rod. I am well aware that the answers that I have presumed to make will provoke much criticism. It will be, not improbably, urged, that the interpretations of Scripture on Avhieh these sermons are based are narrow and bibliolatrous ; their deductions chimerically literal ; that their general views of life are depressing and melancholv ; that they speak of nought but obstructions and re- tardations, where all is buoyancy and progress; that they see only unreal and sentimental shadows, where all is vivid and exhilarating sunshine. l>e it so. I have neither the will nor the ability to enter into controversy; but thi> only will 1 say, that 1 would sooner trust the results of an honot, lair, yet exact interpretation oi Sciiptnrc, than the mere plausi- bilities ol' a ^prcious Philosophy. Nay, I am old- PREFACE. Vll fashioned enough to be fully persuaded, that if modern thinkers lent an car to the express declara- tions of Inspiration as readily as they do to the deductions of philosophy if we perused the Book of Life as studiously and as dutifully as we do the Hook of Nature, our theology would be of a higher strain, and our philosophy no less attractive and veracious. I cannot forget that the Father of In- ductive Philosophy was sincerely of the opinion that there were some questions which even science must be content to hand over to religion for their complete, or approximately complete, solution. 1 Science may teach us much, but when we gaze far into the past or far into the future, we must always observe that it signally fails us ; we ever find, that between the farthest point to which its deductions may help to lead us, and the beginning or the end, there is a chasm that cannot be bridged over. Hut it is not for me to discuss such things. The main aspect of these sermons is practical and consolatory, not polemical and antagonistic. My humble object has been to put before the young, the generous, ami the impressible, some high and enno- bling views of Scriptural truth ; and it' J have suc- ceeded in this great and important object, if 1 have raised the religious tone of one heart that has gone with my words, if 1 have been permitted to he the feeble instrument in raising one sinking brother from the deep waters of doubt and perplexity, il I have pointed out even 1 so generally to one lone wau- Vlll PREFACE. derer in tliis world's weary wilderness tlie narrow way to Christ, then I shall solemnly rejoice, and my joy no man shall take from me. Then, indeed, I shall feel that 1 have given up to publicity and criticism my cherished speculations and private con- victions, not wholly, not utterly in vain. To the younger members, then, more especially, of that ancient and illustrious body which I have been appointed to address, I desire earnestly and affection- ately to commend these thoughts. There is much ill them with which the young will perhaps readily sympathize. There is a speculative tone which is often distasteful to those who arc pre-occupicd with, what arc called, the realities of life, but which rarely fails to interest, and, I most religiously believe, to edify, those on whom the morning sun of life has not yet ceased to shine. To the young, then, yet not to the young only, to the generous, the pure, and the thoughtful among us, I humbly dedicate these sermons, with earnest prayer to Almighty (iod, that His blessing may go with them, and out of their very weakness and imperfection, may perfect Ills glory and His praise. TJ M-: I! \1'IAI-)I T\ \u(i\l''l^ 'AO|'\TU MOM2 Mi:*.), Ti M II K Al _\()3:A, i.ii hni. iii.vAi. n.'N ' i h..< N L; N . A.MHV ADVERTISEMENT THE SECOND EDITION. TIIK present edition, which solely owes its appearance to numerous friendly requests that the Sermons should he reprinted, (litters very slightly from the lir.st edition. A few trilling alterations in language have hcen made here and there, and a few verbal modifications introduced in parts of Sermon V., where the kind criticisms that have been passed on that sermon have shown that such were desirable. A few additions have also been made to the authori- ties in the notes, but no attempt has been made; to alter their general character, it being felt, on mature reflection, that such notes, though only of the slight and unpretending nature alluded to in the Preface, are, perhaps, better adapted to the speculative sub- jects which they are designed to illustrate, than more elaborate and systematic compilations. KXKIT.K, Jan. iK6>. CONTENTS. SERMON I. I> A(t K Tin: DKSTINY OF THE CKKATUKI:. VANITY .... 1 SERMON II. THE DKSTINY OF TIIE CKKATUKK. SUFFKUING . . . *ji; SERMON III. Tin: DKSTIXY OF THE CKEATUHE. DEATH .... ~>o SERMON IV. 'I'm: DKSTINY OF THE CKKATI/HK. Ri:sTrn"nx . . 77 SE1{M()N V. 'I'm; THKKF.FOLP NATL'KF. OF MAN ... ... ]n:l SERMON VI. Tin. CnMMrMoN OF SAINTS .... \~2>\ SERMON I. THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. VANITY. ROMANS viii. 20, 21. The creature was made subject to vanity, not williiiyl;/, but by reason of Him who hath subjected the same, in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondaye of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. THERE arc a few texts in the New Testament, more especially in St. Paul's Epistles, that seem to point to the deepest and uttermost secrets of creation. Often half isolated from the argument, emerging suddenly from a more restricted context, gathering up what has seemed specific into declara- tions most comprehensively general, they reveal to the reader, at one time, such far-reaching issues, at another, such retrospective dispensations, that the immediate occasion, the unfolding argument, or the applied exhortation, seems lost and forgotten in the majesty of the incidental revelation. All we feel conscious of, is seeing along a vista into the past or the future so marvellous yet so divine, that all life seems in an instant to acquire a deeper meaning, all the mystery of our being to assume a fresh signifi- 13 2 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. cancc. The perplexed thoughts of weary years adjust themselves suddenly into order and coherence ; the long looked for is at last fully seen; the long searched for at last found. Of such a class of passages I could not well have chosen a more striking and notable instance than that which will form the subject of our meditations this afternoon. Few texts are more comprehensive ; few reach further both into the past and into the future ; few afford more serious topics for Christian meditation. I feel, indeed, that in choosing such a text I am, in some degree, laying myself open to the charge of presumption, and of intruding into things not fully revealed ; still, in this particular case, I am somewhat emboldened by the remembrance that all the more sober and thoughtful interpreters of the present day arc plainly converging to a common explanation of this mysterious passage, 1 and are distinctly tending to re-afh'rm the ancient and tra- ditional interpretation of the early Church. 2 And again, I cannot be insensible to the fact that our text carries with it practical applications of no common importance, applications which, by the blessing of the Eternal Spirit, may become fruitful unto salvation, and may serve to add a reality and solemnity to the common aspects of our daily life. These indeed 1 cannot hope, on the present occasion, to do more than generally indicate ; but I feel that 1 See note A. a .Sue note- 15. l] VANITY. 3 I am addressing an audience that can readily supply all that may be lacking, and that will perhaps be more benefited by having a few suggestive outlines presented to their view in the compass of a single sermon, than by any attempt to enter into details and enlarge upon applications, which would easily occupy my whole allotted course. I trust, indeed, with the blessing of God, hereafter to discuss kindred and illustrative subjects ; but this, on which we arc now about to dwell the subjection of the creature to vanity will, I am sure, be most beneficially treated, if reduced to the limits of one sermon, and exhibited at one view in all its characteristic unity and com- rehensivencss. before entering more immediately upon the con- sideration of the separate clauses, let me call your attention to two facts in reference 1 to our present text : /V/'.v/, that few passages have tended more distinctly to cull out the cxcgetical or doctrinal pecu- liarities of successive expositors, and consequently, that few passages require us more cautiously to exclude all interpretations that have a subjective aspect, and reflect too strongly the prevailing senti- ments and opinions of the age in which they appeared. Sfi'oiiiUy, that no text has suffered more from the arbitrary limitation of the terms in which it is expressed ; and that in no case will it be found more advisable to give boldly to every term the most com- prehensive meaning the context will warrant, and to cvcrv clause its fullest and most extended significance. 4 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. The application of these two considerations meets us in the first clause : ' The creature was made sub- ject to vanity/ On the latitude assigned to the term ' creature/ or, as it may perhaps be better translated ' creation/ the interpretation of the passage mainly depends. And here, without occupy- ing your time with detailed reasons, I will venture to assert, that, after most anxious consideration, I cannot doubt that Irenseus and the Greek Fathers were right in giving the term ' creation' its widest application/ and in referring it to all creation, animate and inanimate, which stands in any degree * o of relation to man. I am aware that the great name of Augustine is urged as confining the term to man- kind in their unconverted state ; but if you examine the passage where this opinion is maintained, 2 you will at once see how clearly his own words show, that he here receded from his usual expansive interpretation of Scripture under the pressure of Manichsean antagonism. I am aware, too, that arguments have been founded on the impropriety of ascribing a feeling of yearning and longing to an inanimate world : these, however, we may be content to pass over in silence, when biblical language supplies so many illustrations, and when the most calm and unimpassioncd thinkers have felt no diffi- culty in using words and expressions in a great degree similar and analogous. 3 1 See note C. 2 See note D. 3 See note E. 1.] VANITY. 5 Without pausing longer on this point, let us at once pass onward to the mournful declaration that is embodied in the first clause, ' The creation was made subject to vanity.' Who can resist pausing on so startling a revelation ? Who, as lie turns his eyes on the wide realms of creation, does not feel strange queries forcing themselves on his attention, and demanding of him an answer ? Who, as he gazes on the fairer features of nature, the sunny landscape, the sheltering woods, the clustered moun- tains, docs not feel the force of the inscrutable antithesis? All so fair, yet all subject to such a destiny; so beautiful, yet so doomed. Is there one graver thinker among us who has not craved for the solution of a mystery so seemingly inexplicable? ( "YN hat !' we sometimes say, in our deep perplexity, ' "what can be the meaning of this law of vanity in reference to creation generally ? I can understand the ruin of my own soul, I am forced to acknowledge its corrupting lusts, 1 can feel its rending passions, I can trace out the slow corrosion of evil habits, the convulsive movements of sudden sins, 1 can mark all this in myself and others ; but these guiltless creatures of God's hand, what have ///''// done? These animals that minister to my wants, and die unreeked of and unheeded, whence come their strange accumulations of sufferings? This wide-spread plant- world, that contributes to my food, or bears balm to my wounds, whence comes its often thwarted development and stinted growth, its palpable subjrc- 6 DESTINY OY THE CREATURE. [SERM. tion to something more than perishableness, its bondage to something worse than decay ? Is there no answer? Is the attribute of Preserver to be denied to the Creator, or given only under such limitations as make it a very mockery and a bitter- ness. Verily, is there no answer ?' Yes, surely, the text supplies an answer, deep and mournful, yet, if rightly understood, unspeakably consolatory. The answer is, that it was ' by reason of Him who subjected it/ Not, observe, by Him, simply and directly, but, by reason of Him} owing to some determination of His counsels, some interposi- tion of His will. And who was lie ? Are we to say with some interpreters, that it was Adam, and refer to a mere man what seems to involve the agency and providence of God ? Are we to say that it was Satan, and introduce conceptions of a destroyer and an adversary in the consideration of a text, which tells alone of the sovereign will of a Creator and Restorer V 2 Can we consistently believe it to be other than God, God the all- wise and all-just, who was moved to subject His creation to this mournful law ; who, in accordance with the deep harmony that exists between all parts of His creation, Avas pleased to decree that, along the cloudy paths of suffering and mutability, all things should emerge together into the perfect day. But who that has deeply considered this subject * (id roy /.' or4'aiTa : pomp. Winer, 6V. 49. c, p. 356, note. - See note l'\ I.] VANITY. 7 would not fain ask still further, What is the exact nature of this subjection, and, above all, when did it take place? Is it coeval with the first dawn of creation, or is it to he referred to an historic era no older than the race to which we belong ? These are momentous questions, which no sound interpretation of this text must leave wholly unanswered. "With regard to the first, let us be especially careful to bear in mind the peculiar amplitude of the term ' vanity.' It is not said that the creation was subject to death or corruption, though both lie involved in the expression, but to something more frightfully generic, to something almost worse than non-exist- ence, to purposelessness, to an inability to realize its natural tendencies and the ends for which it was called into being, to bullied endeavour and mocked expectation, to a blossoming and not bearing fruit, a pursuing and not attaining, yea, and as the analogies of the language of the original significantly imply, to a searching, and never finding. 1 Let us bear this well in mind, lest we find ourselves involved in those difficulties into which nearly all have fallen, who have sought to limit this purely scriptural, but profoundly significant and comprehen- sive term. But further, ll'/n-ii >//>/ ////'.v x/>fy\'c/iii Ink*- jJa<'C ? Is it, as some of the popular thinkers of our own day would fain persuade us, in consequenccof some primal 8 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sEKM. law, that reaches backward into the furthest regions of the past, and that was originally designed to in- clude both us and all mankind in the necessities of a common bondage? 1 Or, is it not rather, as, indeed, our own hearts already half tell us, and the guarded language of our present text seems not obscurely to indicate, not the original law, but a counter-law, a judicial dispensation, which opposition to the will of a beneficent Creator served to call forth and to ratify. In one word, is it not sin that has caused all this, that has cast this shade on creation, and drawn the bar sinister across the broad shield of the handi- work of God? It must be so. And yet it is a plausible hypothesis that refers all to a primal law impressed on the earliest manifestations of creation. It is a startling retrospect that shows us imperfection and incompleteness in the first commencement of being, and discloses to our \ic\v evidences of suffer- ings and death in the most remote periods of the earth's history. Does not science seem to contribute to the decision ? Do not the very stones AVC tread on show to us the hooked tooth, the beak for rending, and the claw for tearing? Do not the rocks tell of rapine and destruction and death, ages before man was called into existence ? 2 Does it not seem, then, that, after all, we mu>t rectify our conceptions, and refer this subjection to some law which existed long anterior to man, to which man must have yielded whether he had sinned or no, and to which his actual 1 Suu note 11. See note ]. I.] VANITY. 9 sin only added some embitterment and enhancement? So a popular philosophy would suggest. But, inde- pendently of the strong feeling of our hearts, inde- pendently of the connexion of sin and death, which the verses preceding the text distinctly imply, inde- pendently of the reference, in the verses that follow, to the bond that unites the future of man with the future of all the other portions of creation with which he stands in any degree in contact, independently of the strong presumption, that is thus suggested, of sonic melancholy past, in which both were united, independently of all these considerations, can we say that such an hypothesis is in any way compatible with the plain declarations of the text, or with the simplest deductions which are suggested by the analogy of Scripture ? Does it not fail in several important particulars ? In the iirst place, does it not tacitly confound the more generic term ra //'/(// with the more specific term (h'df/t ? In the second place, docs it not assume this most unlikely fact, that man, created as he was in the image; of his ^lakcr, and framed as lie was by the special operation of 11 is divine hands, was to share the lot of creatures called into being under conditions significantly different ; not separately formed, but collectively summoned forth from the secret chambers of a prolific earth? Is it not, fur- ther, almost at variance with the cardinal text, ( Death passed through unto all men ;' ' not all 10 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. things but all men, as if it were almost intended to mark, that death was a law and a process that ori- ginally had no existence or significance for man ? And lastly, docs it not rob of all its real meaning and potency the curse which man's sin brought on the material earth, and by consequence, on all the forms of life to which that earth gave origin : ' And to Adam He said, cursed is the ground for thy sake ; in sorrow shalt thou cat of it all the days of thy life ; thorns also and thistles it shall bring forth to thee ; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field/ x Are the theories of a speculative philosophy to lead us implicitly to deny such mighty and such specific declarations ? God forbid ! I do not doubt then, brethren, that the counter- law, by which the whole creation has been made subject to vanity, is to be referred to no other epoch than the fall of man. Prior to that time all nature was lovingly obeying the laws impressed on it by God the herb Avas yielding its seed, the animal was bringing forth its kind, each to be succeeded by a more numerous growth of its own species, or to make way for more highly organized types of animal or vegetable life. Decay meant reproduction, disso- lution development, death a return into the general life of nature, which was to be succeeded by a more prolific emergence. All was obeying the beneficent laws of the Creator; everything was tending in its 1 (Jen. iii. I 7. 1.] VANITY. 11 own measure and degree, to a final perfection, and if the speculation be not over bold to a final annihilation of any evil that might have flowed as a consequence from the fall of angels, by those very fore-ordered processes to which we, in our ignorance, give the names of incompleteness and imperfection. "NVhile all things were thus harmoniously fulfilling the law of their existence, while everything was thus 6tretching forwards to higher measures of perfection, Man, the highest and noblest of God's creatures, formed out of the elements of the same material world, yet with the image of his Maker on his brow, and the breath of divine life in his nostrils, was culled on the theatre of Being to lead all things onwards to their highest developments, to act the part of the choragus of creation, and, himself exempted from death and dissolution, to assist throughout the whole development of the mighty working, whereby (lod was to become all in all. Pause only, brethren, and consider the mystical relation of man to his Creator, and to that earth from which he was taken. Mark how in that won- drous union of body, soul, and spirit, 1 man was fitted by his Maker to be- a kind of mediator between the Infinite Father and the finite, but blameless creatures of His hand. Consider only, how the body of man is the link between the material world and the im- 1 On this .-ul'j'.Tt .-(.. Sinn, u V. 12 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sEKM. material soul ; and how the soul is the bond between the body and the spirit ; and how the spirit is that which formed some medium of connexion between the soul of man the true centre of his personality and the eternal and infinite Spirit of God. When a being thus constituted, thus mysteriously related to the material world, fell from his allegiance to his Creator, can we readily believe that creation was a mere uninterested spectator ? Does not every consideration prepare us for what we know from other passages of Scripture, and which our present text seems clearly to confirm, that man's voluntary sin produced an effect upon the whole material world ; that it cast its shade over all the realms of nature, and caused creation, involuntarily and reluctantly (what a mournful and suggestive antithesis there lies in those words, ' not willing'), to submit itself to the effect of an act committed with the full assent of a rational will, and on the deliberate choice of a volun- tary agent? Yes, let us doubt not that the sin of man wrought all the ruin that we now can trace both in nature and ourselves, and caused the beneficent Creator, in conformity with those counsels sealed in silence from the beginning of the world, to subject all that, of which man was the pre-eminent creation, to purposelcssncss, vanity, and corruption. Is there in such a dispensation anything so totally inconceivable, so wholly at variance with the analo- gies of things as to make us doubt the possibility of its existence, or to preclude our believing that sin I.] VANITY. 13 is an interposing cloud between us and the Father of Lights, that has cast its palpable shadow on the face of all created things, that the world since the fall is, as it Avcre, a world without sunshine ? To adopt an illustration from the ordinary appearances of nature ; what a difference there is between the aspects of a fair landscape Avhcn viewed under a clouded, and under an unclouded sky ! What a real difference, not in sentiment and feeling, but in actual appear- ance, between the darkening mountain, the misty valley, the obliterated distance, and the joyancc and beauty of the same scene when gladdened with sunshine ! How shadow enhances substance, how form becomes defined and distance expanded, how each individual object seems subordinated to the general effect, and how the whole scene seems only to suggest continuance and extension, and to be itself only a part of a yet fairer and more radiant distance ! Even so is it now. "We cannot, indeed, fully verify the simile ; we know not what the world actually WHS, still we can form some inferences by observing what it /.v. Everywhere the same appearance of something that bc-clouds and darkens, everywhere the same traces of aberration from appointed ends, the same hints of perverted tendencies, the same tokens of frustration and decay. Even with the acknowledged phenomena of rapine and death in a pre-Adamite world, borne steadily in view and made the most of in argument, set now before your eyes the scarcely doubtful instances, of depravation of 14 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. instincts, the exhibitions of wanton cruelty in the lower animals, the occasional glimpses of something worse than ferocity, the traces of a startling malignity, especially in some of the species of more venomous reptiles, which it seems hard indeed to believe was natural and original. Add all these things together, and then finally consider if there be anything really inconceivable in the thought, that the effects of man's sin are to be traced in the material world, yea, that the whole creation has become subject to vanity owing to the rebellion of its suzerain, and is now, as the Apostle tells us, ever groaning and travailing in its alien and unnatural bondage. But is it to last for ever ? No verily ! The most consolatory, though most mysterious portion of the text now claims our attention. This subjection on which we have been meditating was mitigated by the infusion of a 1-opc, which remains to this day un- changed and unimpaired. ' The creation was sub- jected to vanity/ says the Apostle, ' in hope that itself, the creation (for this, I cannot doubt, is the most simple and natural translation of the clause) 1 the seemingly hopeless creation shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.' In these consolatory words the point of real and startling importance is the close bond that connects man with the material world, especially 1 See note J. I.] VANITY. 15 ill the relation of Cnne. With man's sin came at once the curse that fell upon the earth ; thorn and thistle began to germinate the very day that Adam sinned ; confusion and discord began at once to work amid the tendencies of created things. And even so shall it be in the restitution. The earnest expectation of the creature waits for no doubtful or chimerical future, for no ill-defined or uncertain hour of emancipation ; it waits, as the Spirit of God here infallibly declares, for no less a sure and certain epoch than that of the manifestation of the sons of God. The restoration of man and the world will be as contemporaneous as their first bondage and subjection. When the num- ber of the elect is complete, when the last of the mystical one hundred and forty and four thousand 1 shall receive the seal of God on his forehead, when the last drop shall be added to the brimming cup of the afflictions of Christ, 2 the last tear shed, the last sigh breathed into the air, the glorification of the creature will have fully commenced, the sunlight of the nuelouded presence of God will again irradiate His works, the weary night of creation will at length have passed, the long-looked-for dawn at last come. And now all are longing and all are tarrying ; hound together by the affinities of a common spiritual prin- ciple ; united in ruin, yet still united in hope. While faith, in the form of belief to the Christian, and dim intuitions to the heathen, is the prerogative of the 1 Jii.-v. vii. 4. a >.: S-. nil' >n II. \>. 40. 10 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. rational creature, hope is the gift that has not been denied to the irrational creation. Hope is common to all : hope binds nature and mankind in a close and enduring union. And so now all are waiting. The Church is waiting ; the souls under the altar are waiting ; l the kindreds of the earth are waiting ; the world of animate things is waiting ; the whole realm of inanimate nature is waiting ; yea, more, as the next verse discloses, waiting in self-acknowledged suffering, groaning and travailing as in birth-pains, conscious of a common captivity and a common ruin. Not only we ourselves, the Apostle tells us, the ra- tional and accountable creatures of God's hand, not only we, that smaller company who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, 2 strug- gling for freedom from vanity and corruption, not only we, the chosen ones, arc thus longing and tra- vailing, but with us all creation is blended in that never-quenched aspiration. All the sufferings of the wide-spread domains of nature form a part of that earnest and mournful cry. All tli at animals suffer at the hands of man, all that they suffer from one another, all their exhibitions of wanton cruelty, their deep-seated aversions and connatural hostilities ; all, again, that -nature suffers from the hand of man, the poisoned vegetation round peopled cities, the blazing prairie, the desolated forest, 3 all that it suffers from the wildness or churlishness 1 Rev. vi. 9. 2 Rom. viii. 23. 3 See note K. I.] VANITY. 17 of the elements, tlic storm-swept champaign, the inundated valley, the convulsed landscape, all that tells of frustrated growth and retarded progress, untimely violence and freakish change, all tend to swell that mighty cry of suffering and travail that is now ever sounding in the ears of God, all serve to call forth the deep longing for the hour when man, the masterpiece of God's works, shall be clothed with incorruption, when nature shall be restored, and the apocalyptic vision of the Apostle shall be a mighty and living reality. ' 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.' 1 And now, to gather up our foregoing meditations i'lto a few distinct statements, it would seem that the investigation of this profound text leads us to the following result. First, the recognition of primal laws mysteriously wise and mysteriously beneficent, of which the cha- racteristics were, providential development and con- servative change,- -laws that might /y.v.sv///// have in- volved some reference to the lapse in a spirit-world," but in which there was no trace of perverted action, confusion, or vanity. Secondly, that man, bv an act of disobedience, brought himsrlf and his race under the alien dominion of suffering and death, and caused all the rest of creation to be subject to a counter-law of 1 licv. xxi. I. a Hi u Serni"ii II. j>. :y. C 18 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. vanity, depraved instincts, perverted tendencies, and injurious change. Thirdly, that this subjection was, nevertheless, mercifully alleviated, to man, by the blessings of a sure promise, to the other portions of nature by the infusion of a hope ; and that both thus bound together in one common feeling of longing and ex- pectancy, are awaiting that redemption of the body in man which shall be the immediate precursor of the restitution of the world and the consummation of all things in Christ. Such, brethren, are the principal features of a text that has not inappropriately been termed ' the Evangel of creation;' such, a few leading outlines of one of the most comprehensive revelations in the Book of Life. In a subject so elevated, involving so many and such mighty issues, and opening np so many avenues of speculation, I dare not hope to have done more than to have secured a partial or suspended assent : yet if to one of you, my elder brethren, these fleet- ing Avords have tended to supply an answer to one single doubt that may have tried your spirits, if in you, my younger brethren, the general subject has awakened any higher aspirations, or aroused vou to a truer consciousness of the deep mystery of life, I shall solemnly rejoice, and shall offer up my prayer to Almighty God that He may quicken us all to look forward with more longing eyes and more ready hearts to the coming of our Lord. Mav He make us I.] VANITY. 19 feel more vividly the power of 1 1 is resurrection working in our souls, and trace with holy awe, both in ourselves and all things around us, the develop- ment of the mighty counsels of redeeming grace and restoring love. Let me conclude with two out of the many prac- tical reflections, which this present subject seems most especially calculated to awaken. First, let us not fail to recognise the disclosure that is here made of the frightful nature of sin, con- sidered as something spreading and diffusive. If, on the one hand, the intense nature of sin, its blackness and venom, in a word, its nature in reference to unlit i/, finds its fullest exponent in the awful truths that the Sou of the ever-living (Jod emptied Him- self of 11 is glories to redeem fallen man; so, on the other hand, the diffusive nature of sin, its nature viewed in reference to tjHd, //'////, is nowhere more strikingly disclosed than in the revelation that is now before us. Does not our text imply that sin was such that it spread over a whole creation, marred the harmonies of a world, pervaded the substance and the produce of a fruitful earth, entered into all the varied realms of animal life, calling out anti- pathies, multiplying sufferings, and giving a new and bitter aspect to beneficent laws of transmutation and change '.' And yet how lightly we talk of sin ! How readily we lend an ear to any one who teaches us to think hopefully of this spreading nicer, that is eating away c Z 20 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. the very heart and life of us and of all things ! The forward thinkers, as they are termed, of our own age are ever too ready to persuade us that sin, after all, is only something isolated and external, merely an immoral atmosphere that always remains both in quantity and quality the same. But is it so ? Can we dare, with such a text before us as that 011 which we have been meditating, cheat ourselves Avith such hopeless sophistries ? Surely, if there is one truth more than another which our present text tends to enforce and to enhance, it is this, that sin is co- extensive with every development of the animate and inanimate world, that it is the noxious bindweed which is winding itself round every form of a once fair creation, ever blossoming into vanity and suffering, ever ripening into the fruitage of death and corruption. But (secondly, let us turn to the consolatory reflec- tion, that though the old creation is thus marred and ruined, yet that the new creation has already begun. Yea, doubtless it has already begun. It was ratified on our Master's cross. It was commenced in Ilis resurrection. It has become developed by baptism in His name; His Church is its first fruits; His grace its moving principle ; His love the mystery of its evolution. And that love is pervading all things, 1 O o " yea, why should we fear to say it, not only the inward and spiritual, but the outward and material world. Though we may not be able to dis- tinctly recognise all its plastic powers, though fools I.] VANITY. 21 may mock, and gainsaycrs deny, though moralists may tell us that amelioration is a dream, and pro- gress a mere motion in a circle, though AVC our- selves may at times doubt our own hopes, yet if we have eyes to see and hearts to believe, we may still feel some present loosening of the chain that binds all things to the law of vanity and corruption. AVe may trace alleviations of suffering in many things around us, often in strange and unlooked-for ways; sometimes by incidental discoveries, sometimes by more deliberate applications of the great laws of nature, those so-called mechanical triumphs of which our age is so fondly yet so ignorantly proud. There are commencements everywhere. Though we may not sec more than mere beginnings and initial move- ments, though our eyes may iall on sleep before the lights of the coming day have appeared above the still clouded horizon, yet in patience and hope let us possess our souls; let us quit ourselves like men in the hourly struggle with sin, and remember that every triumph over a temptation iu our Redeemer's name, every victory over a warring lust in the power of the Spirit, is an unwinding of a chain of the bondage of vanity, is an act in the emancipation of a world. \Yith such high thoughts as these, with such a lofty destiny before us, can we remain insensible to the solemn and vital call to practical holiness which these meditations cannot fail to supply '.' Shall we, my elder brethren, inmates of this anei.'iit seat of 22 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. learning and piety, we to whom God has vouchsafed so large a measure of His grace, forget our high calling of teaching and guiding others, and merge ourselves in apathy and selfishness ? Is it for such as us to spend the hest days of our lives in dreamy or perverted hopes, to think that this earth is for mere intellectual triumphs and self- glorifying pro- gress, when all around is suffering and travail ? Shall we be narrow and churlish in our love, when every- thing so tends to call it forth ? With such a struggle going on around us, are we to shut ourselves up in our little citadels of fancied pre-eminence, or worse, with a petty spirit of detraction,, with unkindly words or mordant satire, to disown our fraternal bond, and imitate the very antipathies of a lower and captive creation ? Are we to become daily move unfruitful in our faith, and to think that calm abstractions will lead us to heaven, and a decent apathy avail us in an hour, when nought save the energy of vital belief cither can or will fit us to be the co-operators with our redeeming and restoring Lord ? Or again, is it for you, my younger brethren, to dally with sin and corruption in its coarser and more repulsive forms, -when the suffering voice of nature is telling you how the iron of bondage is entering into its very soul, and is calling upon you in the strength and glory of youth and life, to devote the blessed gifts of a fresh and buoyant heart to the service of the Almighty Restorer ? Can vou resist I.] VANITY. 23 the summons to join the armies of heaven in their holy war against sin and death, and to be found the loyal and true-hearted skirmishers before the mighty host that is mustering and gathering, unfolding its banners and marshalling its legions, momently awaiting the (cAeucr/za, 1 the signal-shout, when lie that hath on His thigh and His vesture a name written King of Kings and Lord of Lords 2 shall go forth conquering and to conquer ? In one word, the summary and great practical lesson of all that I have said, is the necessity of per- sonal and individual holiness. Man's sin, yea, one man's sin, cast all this shadow on creation ; man's holiness, the holiness of the many, shall co-operate in its restoration. All things join in this call to prac- tical holiness, and shall it remain for ever unnoticed and unheeded ? (!od our Creator calls on us to be holy; lie has called us, as lie himself says by the mouth of His Apostle, not to selfishness, not to un- cleanness, but to holiness/ 5 (Hod our Redeemer calls on us to follow the steps of His pure and holy life. God the Sanctifier pleads with our hearts, and with groans that tongue cannot tell, calls on ns to fulfil our Maker's will His will, even our sanctifieatiou. 1 Our suffering brethren call upon us. Yea, and all Nature mutely joins in that never-ceasing appeal : the animals that gaze strangelv and wistfullv in our 1 t Tlies.K. v. if>. 24 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. faces ; the short-lived and fading loveliness of all things around us, all are calling on us, consciously or unconsciously, not to put back the hour of their restitution, not to delay the coming of the glorious liberty of the sons of God. And can we resist such calls ? Shall we individually contribute nothing to such mighty issues, or, worse still, shall we arrest the progress that has already been made ? Already new and mysterious forces are at work all around us, silently permeating all forms of life, secretly entering into all elements of the material world. Let us bethink ourselves of our responsibility if we now join with sin and corruption. Let us pray to remember in the hour of temptation that to yield is not only to commit an individual act against our own souls, but to join a triple league that we renounced in baptism, to go over to the adversary, and, as far as in ns lies, to arrest the development of the new creation, to rivet the bondage of corrup- tion, nay, more, to be found fighters against a reconciling and restoring God. From such frightful antagonisms, from such semblances of the malice of an apostate creation, may He, in the largeness of His mercies, ever turn us and protect us. May He call us, and may AVC hear. May every soul among us be moved to do his part in a world's restoration ; that so, when the great Restorer's feet shall stand on Olivet, in that mystic day ' when it shall be neither clear nor dark, I.] VANITY. 25 but in the evening time it shall be light/ 1 we may be numbered with His faithful ones who have borne the heat and burden of the day, and to whom there remaincth rest for evermore. Zech;J. xiv. 4. SERMON II. THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. SUFFERING. JOB xiv. i . Man that is born of a woman is of fiw days, and full of trouble. TN our meditations last Sunday, brethren, we were -*- led, by the solemn tenor of the profound text which I attempted to illustrate, to sad and serious views on the present condition of the creature. We were brought to acknowledge in all that creation with which we have any direct connexion, the working of a mysterious and pervasive counter-law ; we were led to contemplate a destiny if I may use such a term of all created things around us, startling in its universality, mournful in its evolution, and strikingly suggestive in respect of its origin and early development. Though we were obliged to pass over much that in detail was inexplicable or insoluble, though there were suggested to us many questions, to which we could only give faltering, and perhaps unsatisfying answers, we did, I trust, still distinctly perceive and acknowledge the existence of laws of perverted action, depravations of instincts, thwarted SUFFERING. 23 developments, injurious change, all of which, under the generic term of Vanity, were to be referred for their origin to the disobedience and fall of man. "VVe may now suitably and profitably take a step onward. \Vc have contemplated the universal sub- jection : let us now proceed to trace out its more concentrated and specific manifestations in the mystery of suffering, and so prepare ourselves for a future consideration of its more complete develop- ment in the awful climax of death. Yet let us l)e careful to order our thoughts soberly and wisely. Let us attempt no comprehensive esti- mate of the various forms and degrees of suffering, but simply, by the light of Scripture alone, endeavour to gain a clear view of the aspects in which it is presented to us both in the Old and in the New Testament. Lrt us mark the changed relations it assumes, the altered attitudes in which it is found in the two Dispensations, and then from all, let us, bv the help of God, draw such practical consolations as mdv serve to make us more bravely patient, more hopeful, yea, more thankful, in our sojourn in a world which at every turn flings back on us the shadows of our own disobedience. It is clear that such a mode of treating this diffi- cult subject tends inevitably to limit our meditation to suffering, as seen and felt in our o\vn race. But it must be so. For the origin and import of sull'er- ing, considered in its most comprehensive relations, and regarded as the lot of other orders of creation 28 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. beside our own, involves mysteries, and apparently points backward to primal dispensations, which on this side the grave we can never hope to understand, and on which it is fruitless, if not irreverent, to speculate. It is certainly, and it must be acknow- ledged a startling fact, that ages before the sin of man cast the shadow of vanity on the world, suffering in one of its forms, the corporeal, was certainly pre- sent. As I said last Sunday, the very stones and rocks bear witness of it ; the acknowledged presence in the pre-Adamite world of the fierce and fell race of the carnivorous animals, 1 renders its past existence a certainty; and to deny it is as fruitless as to deny its present manifestations and potency. We must distinctly admit it as a startling fact, a fact of which we cannot venture to give any explanation, but still a fact which need cause us to feel no prac- tical difficulties, and which is in no way incompatible with our conceptions of God as a just and beneficent governor of the world. Though attempts to explain the seeming difficulty are worse than idle, yet let me offer briefly the two following observations : First, in every endeavour to view suffering in its most comprehensive and general aspects, we must be especially careful to draw a clear line of demarcation between the corporeal sufferings of the individuals that belong to loAver genera unendued Avith foresight and reason, and the mixed mental and corporeal See note A. IT.] SUFFERING. 20 sufferings of a personal and intelligent being, the immediate child and offspring of God. Between the individuals of races, brought forth by a prolific earth, 1 and the living sonl that drew its existence from the breath of God, the difference is really so great that it does not seem either unreasonable or evasive to pause before we refer to a common origin, or group in common analogies, the sufferings of two orders of creation thus widely different in origin, relations, and characteristics. Secondly, the scattered hints and speculations of earlier writers, afterwards more fully developed by some of the deeper thinkers of the seventeenth century, that regard the early history of the world and the fall of angels as in some sort of connexion, are certainly not wholly unworthy of our consideration. 2 How far the disturbance caused by that fearful lapse was propagated through the other realms of creation we know not. How far demoniacal malignity might have been permitted to introduce or multiply sufferings in the early animal world, Scripture does not even incidentally reveal. Still, it docs not seem utterly presumptuous to imagine that there might have been the same powers of evil partially and pcrmissivcly at work in a pre- Adamite world, that at a later period, when man's sin had wrought a still more frightful confusion, were per- mitted to drive the swine down the steeps of Gcnncsarcth. 1 ' 1 Gen. i. 24. 3 See note 13. a MaUli. viii. ;:. 30 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. To which let us add by way of corollary,, that if we are here thought to open ourselves to the objection of modern speculation viz., that even thus, under such permissive aspects, we are ascribing evil to God as its remoter origin, we still shrink not from the pressure of such an inference. Let us remember that the Lord has declared twice by the mouths of His greatest prophets, with all imaginable distinctness, that he is the Creator of evil as well as of good 1 yes, unrestrictedly the Creator of it ; and that it is the eternal prerogative of His omnipotence that out of the mouth of the Most High should proceed both the one and the other. 2 Let us only be prepared to view the indissoluble connexion of evil, suffering, and sin, and then whether the supposed evil we contemplate be Adamite or pre-Adamite, mundane or ante-mundane, we need fear no Manichsean sophistries, we need seek to shelter ourselves under no spurious views of the Divine benevolence. All, however, we can safely say is this, that man's sin caused all things to be subjected to vanity; and that one of the outcomings of this vanity was suffer- ing and dcatli to the race of man, erabittermcnt and enhancement of suffering to the races of the animal creation, 3 a signal embitterment, if we take nothing further into account than the accumulation of it, which is to be referred to the tyranny, the cruelty, and the perverted wants of the fallen race of mankind. 1 Isaiah xlv. 7. ! Lam. iii. 38. 3 Sec note C. II.] SUFFERING. 31 But let us leave these difficult questions, and now address ourselves solely to the aspects and significance of human suffering as respectively exhibited by the two Testaments. The contrasts are very striking, instructive, and consolatory. To begin with the Old Testament ; the first thing that cannot fail to strike us is the melancholy and gloomy aspect in which suffering is nearly always presented to our view. It seems ever to reflect the just wrath of Jehovah, ever to be designed as some- thing punitive and judicial. AVc recognise it dis- tinctly in the first sentence on sin ; we hear it in the language addressed to the first mortal sinners ; ' And unto the woman lie said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and conception/ 1 ' and unto Adam lie said, cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou cat of it all the days of thy life/- A Ye trace it in the deepening curse on Cain, in which, beyond all the suffering of ill-requited labour and toil, there appear the more peculiarly mental sufferings of exile from v. home of love, the dreary lot of the fugitive and the vagabond. 3 AYe see it further in all the histories of the patriarchs, with Avliom sorrow and suffering, if not always viewed as the immediate result of sin, were still recognised as belonging to the inevitable condition of sinful mortality: ' Few and evil have been the d vs of mv vears.' 1 AVe i. iii. 1 6. - ( !fii. iii. i 7. 3 (Jen. iv. 1 1. 4 (.'oiiiji. Clcn. xK ii. sage in the first chapter of the Kpistle to the Colossians, in which, when speaking of his sufferings for the Church, the Apostle uses these weighty words, ' I fill up the lacking measures of the afflic- tions of Christ.' 1 The exact meaning of these words has, 1 am aware, been the subject of much contro- versy : after mature deliberation, however, I can scarcely doubt that the passage was rightly explained by some of the early Keformers,- \\hen they under- stood the aillictions of Christ, to imply - not the personal sufferings of , Jesus, which it were blasphemy to say could admit of any addition or supplement, 1 Yt.T. :.)., ai'7fii'u~\i]in7j n't !'ir-fi>iiftiiTii 7u/r "\ivM.ir ror XniTn f. : St-c ii'-tf * I. 42 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. but the afflictions of Christ Mystical, of the Redeemer in His still suffering Church. The doc- trinal inference, then, must be this ; that holy human suffering, even in its individual manifestations, is all tending to one mighty end, all adding drop after drop into the fore-ordained cup of the sufferings of Christ in His Church ; and that when the cup is fully filled up, when the last suffering has been endured, and the last sorrow over-past, the end will be nigh at hand, and He that cometli will come and will not tarry. Strikingly accordant with this, is a Baysterious passage in the book of the Revelation, in which the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and the testimony which they held, arc repre- sented as crying out unto the Lord, to delay His vengeance no longer, and to hasten His judgment. And that exceeding bitter cry is stilled by the decla- ration that they were to tarry till the lacking measures of suffering should be filled up, and till the fore- ordained aggregate of the afflictions of the Church should be fully consummated : ' And it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also, and their brethren that should be killed as they were, should be ful- filled/ 1 If this application be correct, then is suffering finally presented to us in the most com- prehensive and most consolatory aspects that it is possible for the mind of man to conceive ; most 1 llov. vi. ii. II.] SUFFERING. 43 comprehensive, because involving so close a con- nexion with the consummation of all things ; most consolatory, because assuring us that individual suffering, in all its higher and purer manifestations (more especially Avhen seemingly undeserved, or transcending the ordinary limits of mortal misery), is neither unmarked nor inoperative, but that every pang and every tear have their issues in the hasten- ing of the kingdom of Christ. Oh ! what real consolation this speaks to us when we turn our thoughts backwards, and muse on the tempest of unexampled suffering which broke over so many of our countrymen in the year just past. 1 When, in our blindness and dismay, we would almost arraign the justice of God for leaving the servants of His Son to have endured such extremes of pagan hatred, such cruelty, such malignity, how this thought stills us, that all were filling up some of the yet lacking measures of the sufferings of Christ ; yea, that not a pang of quivering ilesh was fruitless, not one agony in vain. All added a few more drops to the cup of the afflictions of Christ, all ministered to the hastening of the hour Avhen sorrow, and pain, and death shall be no more, and when they that have been partakers in their Lord's sufferings shall he called to His right hand to reign with Him for ever and ever.' And here let us pause. Our meditations have now reached their climax, our speculations their furthest 1 The ve;vr of the Indian Mutiny. 44 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SEEM. bound. We have seen that, which in its' first aspects bore the brand of divine anger, become so changed in all its features as to appear at last a token of God's paternal love, a blessed assurance of the sympathy of Christ. That again, which once stood in close alliance with sin and death, is now seen to be one of the more mysterious bonds that unite all holy sufferers on earth with their once suffering and now glorified Lord. And, lastly, that which once seemed to be an alien element and disturbing force in the develop- ment of creation, is now a very part of the providen- tial government of God, and a holy instrument in the furtherance of His kingdom. In conclusion, permit me to offer a few sentences of homely exhortation. To an audience like the present, composed for the most part of isolated members of distant and uncon- nected households, and consequently less directly acted upon by common sufferings or reciprocated sympathies, the application of our meditations must necessarily be somewhat general and inclusive. To you, my elder brethren, I will presume to urge the vital necessity of receiving and bearing the sufferings wherewith an all-wise and all-merciful God may be pleased to try our hearts, not only in a spirit of patience, but also in one of thankfulness and love. There arc probably very few here present, especially among those who have lived half the allotted days of man's life, that have not been visited by suffering either in its holier form, as a part of the providential II.] SUFFERING. 45 dispensation of God, or its more judicial aspect as the bitter, though now merciful chastisement of sin. Are they few among us, who, on the one hand, have had some experience in suffering in its more purely mental and spiritual characteristics ? Have not our own sins, or the sins of others, cast shadows over our hearts, which no sun of future joys can, on this side the grave, ever wholly dispel ? Have not old mis- deeds often strangely found us out, suddenly con- fronted us in an hour when we thought not, and by the bitterness of unlooked-for affliction made us feel that verily there is a God that judgcth? Are they few again, on the other hand, who have experienced suffering under all those various circumstances under which it appears inseparable from the condition of fallen mortality ? Have not most of us been sharers in its more touching manifestations? Have we not known what it is to lose those we have dearly loved, to have felt the pressure of dying hands, and to have gazed into dying eyes ; and have we not felt in our after bereavement that dull anguish of heart, that strange combined feeling of mental and physical suffering, which none save those who have truly suffered can ever adequately conceive V Or, lastly, have we not known the mystery of physical suf- fering, the gnawing tooth of pain, the wrench of agony, the sleepless night, the weary day? Have we not every one of us had experience in some or all of these things ? ]5ut let me ask, have we borne all with that holy resignation, that thankfulness and 46 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. joy, which our present meditations seem so plainly to inculcate ? Perchance not. I fear there is much in purely intellectual pursuits that often tempts men to exhibit more of Pagan endurance than Christian patience, to league with the outer world against the inward, or, worse still, to sit proudly down with their little handful of sorrows, soured and sullen, to wear the haughty livery of disappointment, and by the gall of bitter words and the peevishness of a repining tongue to show that God's calls have been worse than unheeded, that His fatherly love has been despised, and the holy and mystical sympathy of His Son either disregarded or rejected. I greatly fear that, with mere intellectual men, it is often so, perhaps to a far greater extent than we may at first be disposed to admit. But, at any rate, let it not be so with us. Here, at least, there are holier influences than those of mere intellect. Here there have been generations after generations of the patient and the brave, meek sufferers, true-hearted confessors, loyal martyrs, men who despised not their Master's cross, nor thought lightly of His sympathy : and shall we individually in the hour of trial prove ourselves unworthy of such a spiritual ancestry ? Shall we show ourselves callous and dead to the quickening memories of such examples? When the holy shadow of God's hand may next fall across our paths, may His grace be in our hearts ; may we feel and acknowledge all purer suffering to be what it really is, a note of the sympathy of Christ, a token II.] SUFFERING. 47 of His fellowship, a state of holy co-operation in hastening His kingdom, yea, an avenue to future blessedness and glory. For is it not written, and does it not remain, the enduring principle of the Cove- nant of Life, that they who walk in white must ' come out of great affliction/ 1 and ' that through much tribu- lation we must enter into the kingdom of God.' 2 Again to you, my younger brethren, I would fain speak with all earnestness. Do not, I beseech you, cast aside the meditations of this afternoon as if they were something in which you had no interest, as if the freshness of your health and strength, and the frank joyousness of a sunny heart, promised a long immunity from that which our text declares to be the certain heritage of mortality. Youth, brethren, is no guarantee against suffering: the very youngest among you may be summoned to enter into the cloud of pain, affliction, or trial, before the setting of to-morrow's sun. Mere courage, again, is but a poor staff to lean upon : for blameless in the eyes of God and men as is that frank bravery, which so commends you to one another, yet remember that to use it defiantly and proudly when God's hand is upon you, is to show yourselves rather children of Lucifer than the bravely-patient servants of Jesus ; and is, in all respects, as grievous a sin as the vaunted philo- sophy or stoical indifference, which 1 have- just speci- fied as the peculiar temptation of older men. If 1 llov. vii 14. " Acts .\i 48 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. you are called in your young days to bear your Master's cross, steel not, 1 beseech you, your hearts against His divine sympathy ; spurn not the un- utterable blessing of a fellowship in His sufferings, and the august privilege of hastening His coming and His kingdom. Above all things, put no false construction on my words. If the general tenor of the sermon has been consolatory, by its effort to demonstrate the different aspects of suffering under the Law, and under the Gospel, yet remember that the iron link between sin and suffering remains unbroken. Remember, that, so surely as you sin, so surely shall you suffer. And oh ! think of the melancholy bitterness in later life and maturer years, of clearly seeing by that frightful resemblance of the sin and the suffering, which is ever such a startling characteristic of all judicial affliction, 1 that it is your Cambridge sins that have at last found you out ; and of feeling in your sorrow and shame that you carry remembrances which tears cannot wash away, and that you walk the earth bearing in your own bosoms a fearful witness to the certain chastisement, and cleaving curse of sin. Such suffering, the suffering of the evil-doer and the sinful, an Apostle 2 has w T arned us has none of those holier aspects on which we have been medi- tating. By the grace of God, if borne with lowliness 1 See note H. 3 i Pet. iv. 15. II.] SUFFERING. 49 and thankfulness, it may be overruled to blessed issues, and may ultimately minister to salvation ; but it ever bears too close an alliance with sin and shame to be contemplated without the deepest melancholy and misgiving. It may engender sullenness, apathy, and utter deadness of soul, and then the last state will become even worse than the first. If we are called to suffering, oh ! let us pray, young and old, that it may be with Christ and for Christ ; and then, however heavy the cross, however wounding the thorns, however lacerating the scourge, all will seem light and endurable. It will indeed be the token of our Father's love ; it will indeed be the mystic sign that we belong to the most blessed company the world has ever seen, even those who have come out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, and to whom the words of apocalyptic pro- phecy stand fast for evermore : ' They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and (/ sin ; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. rpHE forcible and comprehensive text which I have _L just read, will in some measure prepare you for the subject, to which, with the help of God, I pur- pose directing your meditations this afternoon. Our first musings on the law of Vanity, to which the creation has been subjected, naturally led us onward to some further reflections on the mystery of suffer- ing ; and these again seemed to suggest, and even to require of us, some consideration of a subject still more deep and mysterious, the true nature, signifi- cance, and relations of Death. I am, indeed, well aware that I am entering upon the discussion of a subject that involves much that is perplexed and debateable, and that has ever been regarded as belonging to one of the more difficult portions of speculative theology : still, with the assisting grace of God, I will presume to pursue my onward course ; more especially, as it is my earnest conviction that III.] DEATH. 51 sonic of the recent investigations 1 of this subject have led to untoward issues, and that opinions rela- tive to death are now daily gaining ground, which, it does not seem too much to say, are tending to under- mine the very foundations of all vital Christianity. That comprehensive truth, which an earlier age wisely considered as the basis and substratum of all its teachings viz., that tin; unirersal dominion ii f ih'nHt /.v the perpetual a/it/ enduring erlifi-nct' of the corruption <>f our iiah/re is now either secretly carped at or inferentially denied. As the true con- sciousness of sin has become more and more lost or impaired, so surely have the scriptural aspects of death, and their clear and vivid reflection of our lost and fallen state, faded imperceptibly away, either, on the out' hand, into mere materialistic recognitions of a common lot, or. on the other, into the wild and presumptuous anticipations of a false and morbid spiritualism. Let the higher degrees of conviction of sin be once lost in the heart, and the Christian teaching of the nature and significance of death will surelv and speedily follow. Hut, let us at once address ourselves to a sy>tc- matic consideration of our present subject. In the consideration of a theme so wide and com- prehensive, it is difficult to know where to begin, and>till more difficult, in the compass of a >ingle sermon, to discuss, even superficially, the many qnes- 1 See note A. 52 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. tions that press themselves on our attention as we proceed onward in this extended domain of Christian speculation. AYe shall, however, probably follow the simplest if not the most logical course, if we first take a hasty survey of the problem which modern speculation has essayed to solve, and of the solutions which it has propounded. Then, with minds some- what cleared and prepared, let us turn reverently to the general teaching thereon of Scripture, as derived from its most cardinal declarations ; and thirdly, let us sum up all in a brief investigation and expansion of the important text which I have chosen as the general guide to our present meditations. I. If we take our point of departure from the fundamental distinction between man and all other living creatures, to which I alluded last Sunday viz., that man has a personal existence, while other creatures are but the conditioned individuals of their various cra, it is impossible to stifle the feeling that the presence of death in our own race, especially iu its more siiddeu and painful forms, is a strange and, at first sight, startling phenomenon. Xor do any general considerations, apart from Scripture, tend in any way to diminish the difficulty. Nay, they enhance it. For the more we dwell on the seeming prerogatives of our humanity, and the more closely we observe the distinct lines of demarcation between the dissolution of the component parts of a rational being, and the mere resolution of the life of the animal iuto the common life of nature, the more HI.] DF.ATII. 53 persistently does this plain question present itself to our thoughts, Why, then, do we die? Why are beings thus endued with the awful gift of personality subjected to the conditions and restrictions of the genera of a lower creation ? This, in fact, is the cardinal question in its simplest form ; and to this question modern speculation will be found to have given substantially two answers, the one, on the side of a somewhat coarse mate- rialism ; the other, on that of a proud and repulsive spiritualism. These it will be well for us briefly to consider, as both have more secret adherents than we may imagine, and as both really tend to set aside some of the more momentous declarations of Scripture, and to becloud the most consolatory aspects of our faith. If asked why we die, tin; iinitt-rnilixt points to the analogy of all things around us, to the earthly elements of which our frame is composed, to the apparent law that dust must come to dust, and to the seeming impossibility of flesh and blood, even in a state of siulessness, ever progressing to immortality. He bids us to take good note of all these common conditions, and to mark the pervasive action of all the>e general laws, and to rest a->ured that after all, death, properly considered, can be no curse, but is only a staire in a development, a erisi- in a lite-fever, asleep that is to usher in more exalted powers of being, and a stronger and a fre>her lite. 1 Such an 1 See ,.,,te 15. 54 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. answer, we may observe, lias ever a necessitarian. aspect. All ideas of providential interpositions become infercntially denied, all the blessed meaning of the Atonement becomes perverted or volatilized. It is of the earth, earthy ; and to the earthy alone can it wear any semblance of plausibility or consolation. The answer of Spiritualism is somewhat different, and perhaps, at first sight, someAvhat more plausible. Death it tells us is neither a necessity nor a punish- ment. It is no fixed point through which the line of being must compulsorily pass, no necessary stage in a necessary progress, but simply a providential interposition, a fore-ordained means of cleansing and defecation, a friendly entrance by which we are to pass from an outer world of darkness and corrup- tion into an inner world of light and immortality. It regards the present union of soul and body as dis- tinctly involving conditions seriously detrimental to true spiritual progress. But death we are told puts an end to this unnatural state ; the bond is severed ; the encumbering body is resolved into its connatural dust, while the spirit, unperturbed and disenthralled, realizes all its purest conceptions and all the highest tendencies of its being. 1 Such is the answer; but, if considered for a moment, it will be seen at once to give rise to a question in- finitely more difficult to answer, '"Why then was man so constituted, why were we born into a material 1 Hee note C. HI.] DKATll. 55 world at all ?' And to this question, on the hypo- thesis of the encumbering and alien nature of the body, I cannot conceive any answer can be returned, that docs not ultimately base itself on dualism, and will not, on discussion, be found to reflect some of the worst forms of Maniclucan error. 1 It might be thought that such views were wholly incompatible with revelation, and that their main- tenance involved a real denial of all that was dis- tinctive of Christianity, lint alas ! brethren, modern speculation has learned the wisdom of wearing the mask of revealed religion, and of stealing into the heart with the pass-words of inspiration. If we use against it the arguments of Scripture, it knows how much more effective it is to dilute rather than to deny, and it has found by experience that glosses serve its end better than unqualified contradictions. If we simply and honestly appeal to such passages as our text, in which the Holy (ihost has been pleased to declare the existence of the indissoluble bond between sin and death, both materialist and spiri- tualist join in telling us that we must reconsider our definitions, and search and see whether such passages as our text contain any reference to physical death at all ; whether it be not rather to ,v////v/W/ death, and to a state, and to conditions with which the hodv has nothing to do. Nav, more, it' we urge passages in which the context shows that a reference 56 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. to physical death is indisputable, we then are told that the effect of the fall was only to give death a fresh aspect, and that what before was and would have been natural, has now received an ethical signifi- cance, 1 and thus far but thus far only has assumed the character of a punitive dispensation, and wears some of the reflected hues of a definite judgment, and of a primal curse. Such is modern speculation. Such, alas ! arc vieM r s that find acceptance in many a heart that may never have formally investigated them. Such views are usually masked and disguised : they arc often made to wear the outward trappings of Scriptural diction, they are often clad in other liveries, and are not at first sight always easy to be recognised; still of their mischievous existence in our popular literature and popular Christianity no patient and competent ob- server can entertain any reasonable doubt. Year by year our so-called forward thinkers are encouraging us to push sin and its intimate connexion with physi- cal death more and more into the background of over-lived prejudices and outworn creeds : ' What has sin to do with death ? Death is but a necessity of the flesh, or a victory of the spirit : why are we to fear death?' And with feelings and sentiments like these, thousands and tens of thousands in this country who bear the name of Christians doze out an apa- thetic life, librating unconsciously between dualism 1 See note E. HI.] DEATH. 57 and materialism, and never seeing death in its true aspects till it meets them face to face and discloses all, and then it may be all too late. The true nature of sin may have remained too long unrecognised ; the need of a Saviour too long unfelt; and now that death is actually come, there may remain nought save a hopeless obduracy, or a passionate and perhaps un- availing amazement. II. But let us leave these melancholy aspects of modern speculation, and turn to the plain declara- tions of the word of God. Yet let us carry with us two useful hints, which the foregoing speculations have indirectly tended to suggest. Firtt, that Scrip- tural statements on the connexion of sin and physical death arc commonly evaded by the assumption that spiritual deatli is alone alluded to ; and, consequently, that wi: must be unusually careful not to press isolated passages, such as our text, as bearing upon physical death, until it has been made clear, either from the context or from the analogy of Scripture, that that form of death actually forms the subject of the passage. Sn-o/nll//, let us not fail to observe that all considerations derived from Scripture lead us ultimately back to the time and circumstances, under which death first appeared in connexion with our race ; and that until these arc can-fully examined and properly estimated, no deductions from isolated texts can be fully relied upon, or made u-c of with complete confidence in practical applications. Let us then, in accordance with these hints, pause 58 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. somewhat before we make use of our text as a final answer to the question which forms the subject of our present meditations. Let us prepare ourselves for properly appreciating the full force of its declarations by first considering briefly some of the details of the Creation and Fall of man, to which it reverts, and more especially the important preliminary question, whether death was from the first a condition involved in the very formation of man, and a necessity to which he was designed to succumb, or only a possible and avoidable contingency ? The decision on this question is of great moment. For if the former alter- native be true, the reference of our text cannot be simply and distinctly to physical death ; if the latter be true, its testimony to the connexion of sin and that form of death is explicit and irrefragable. But let us not anticipate. To begin then ; I may first advert to what I have before had occasion to notice, the strikingly dif- ferent modes of production in the case of man and the lower animals. The words of Scripture seem scarcely to leave any reason for doubting that the lower orders of creation owed their origin to the infused vivific energies of the very realms they were hereafter to occupy. At the word of (Jod, the waters teem with living creatures ; the winged fowl fly in the expanse of heaven ; the earth brings forth the living creatures that were ordained to occupy its surface. Earth, water, and, perhaps, air, arc the mediate instruments of creation in the case of the III.] DEATH. 50 animal world. 1 But how strangely and significantly different is the creation of man ! Man is not called forth living and breathing from the womb of a mother- earth, like the creatures over which he was to have dominion. Earth only supplies the material ; the life-giving element comes immediately and directly from God : ' And the Lord (Jod formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living soul.'- Add to this the further declaration that, as regards the mystery of form, man bore the image and likeness of his Maker, 3 and we have before us a revelation, in respect of the composite nature of man, of a dis- tinctness that it is impossible to misunderstand, and of an importance that cannot be over-estimated. Fearfully and wonderfully was man made : on the one side the material body, on the other the vivify- ing spirit ; out of their union emerges the human soul; all united by the most mysterious atlinities, all enshrined in a form that is expressly declared to have been an image and similitude of the ineffable per- fections of the triune (lod. Is not the gulf between such a being and the rest of the animal creation indescribably vast'' Are \ve indeed to believe with modern speculation that such a being would have died it' he had continued in the perfection in which he was created! I >oes it seem natural, does it seem conceivable, that a fabric so 1 Sec note F. : (!en. ii. 7. 3 <' : srr in'te (!. 60 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. rare and so marvellous was to be dissolved like that of the beasts that perish ? Was such a fair monu- ment of the creative wisdom and power of God de- signed originally to fall before the lower potencies of physical death ? Is it not, and must it not be true, that even as the ancient author of the Book of Wis- dom has declared, ' God created man to be immortal, and made him an image of His own eternity?' 1 Conceding, as we may do, with Bishop Bull, that such an immortality was pendulous and imperfect, 2 and would have needed the application from time to time of renovating or conserving energies ; can we still do otherwise, than with that great divine accept the opinion of Nicene and ante-Nicene writers, and unhesitatingly avow our belief, that Adam, in his state of innocence, would not have died, but would have gone on from glory to glory, until at last, to use the noticeable language of Thcophilus of Antioch, ' he would have become canonized or consecrated, and ascended from Paradise to heaven r' 3 How this progressive immortality would have been maintained, it is profitless to speculate : this much only it docs not seem improper to say, that in our ordinary reflec- tions on the subject, we far too much exclude from our remembrance the existence of the tree of life. Who shall say that this might not have been a natu- ral means of immortality, the living minister of a living influence by which the possibility of dying a 1 \\ isdom ii. ?;. 2 See note II. 3 See note I. HI.] DEATH. Gl possibility confessedly implied iu the earthly nature of the body might have become continually abro- gated and cancelled, 1 until at last, all that was mortal might have been swallowed up of immortality ? At any rate, it is very noticeable that after the sentence of death was passed on man, exclusion from the mysterious clHcacies of the tree of life seemed neces- sary to ensure the fulfilment of the sentence. The Avords of the sacred narrative appear to imply that man had not yet eaten of the tree of life, and that even then, fallen as he was, it might not be too late to avail himself of its quickening energies ; it might yet give a natural immortality to what was even more than spiritually dead. 'And the Lord (!od said, Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil : and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take ufw of the tree of life, and eat, >nt// lire j\>r ever . . . So He drove out the man, and lie placed at the east of the garden of Kden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life/" Hut further, when we contrast the first threat in relation to disobedience with the words of the formal execution of the sentence, the foregoing remarks become still more confirmed and justified. "\\ hen we dwell only upon the threatening declaration, ' in the day that thou eatest thereof thoii shalt Mirely die,'' it might seem fairly doubtful whether the death there 1 See note J. <; Gen. iii. ::, 24. 3 Gen. ii. 17. 62 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. specified is to be regarded as spiritual or as physical. If, on the one hand, the simplicity of the narrative might be thought an argument for a simple reference to physical death ; the indisputable fact, on the other hand that, even according to the half-truth of the serpent, 1 man did not thus die on the day of his sin seems to plead with equal force for an exclusive reference to spiritual death. When, however, with this threat, we combine the expressly physical terms of the actual sentence, ' dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return ;'~ and observe further, the subse- quent exclusion from the natural means of immor- tality presented by the tree of life, the physical reference seems again so far to preponderate, that we appear at last to obtain this compound result. First, that the curse which followed on disobedience was phys'u-al death, the date of which was deferred ; (.ecunilly, that this death had so far a spiritual or metaphorical significance, that it comprehended in it all the miseries, sufferings and privations, which in- crease the tendency to physical death ; and that these, in strict accordance with the declaration of God, commenced the very first hour after the promulgation of the sentence. 3 The only counter-argument of any weight lies in the argumentative form of the condemnatory words; ' In the sweat of thy face shalt thou cat bread, till thou return unto the ground : for out of if. wast l/tuu, 1 Gen. iii. 4. 2 Gen. iii. 19. 3 See note K. 111.] DEATH. C3 taken.' Man, it is argued, must surely here be rather reminded of a natural destiny which he had aggra- vated, than apprized of an alien doom which he had newly brought upon himself and his race. The logical connexion, we are told, implies that a return to the earth must always have been the fore-ordained lot of one who had been taken from it : ' thou slialt return to the earth, because from it was thy original forma- tion." But to this it may be briefly answered, that the best ancient and modern Hebrew grammarians by no means admit this argumentative force to be here natural or correct. It is distinctly asserted by one whose name will ever remain honourably con- nected with Hebrew literature, 1 and who eertainlv had no theological interest in maintaining such an opinion, that the true meaning of the clause is not, ' for out of it wast thou taken,' but ' out "/' f/nc/i thou wast taken ;' the disputed word really being no conjunction, but an antiquated form of the relative pronoun. The verse thus considered has a powerful and tragic force. It reminds man of those elements from which he was taken, only to set before him how utterly he had failed in fulfilling his true destiny, how he had neglected the higher for the lower side of his nature, and how, instead of making what was perish- able immortal, he had yielded himself up to the general powers of nature, and east in his lot with the beasts over which he was created to ha\e lordship and 1 Sec note ij. 64 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM, dominion. ' In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread^ till thou return unto the ground out of which thou wast taken : verily dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' Thus far, then, all general considerations derived from the history of the fall would seem to lead us to the conclusion that Adam, if he had continued in his state of innocence, would not have died, but that, owing to his disobedience, he did die, and subjected both himself and his race to a dispensation, which was for him at first only a possibility, but which his sin turned into a fearful and inevitable certainty. 1 The wages of sin was death' 1 death, in the most comprehensive sense in which the word can be under- stood, vanity, misery, sufferings, dissolution in this world, and, if the promise had not gone before the sentence, death in the world to come. These general considerations derived from the his- tory of the first Adam arc much enhanced if we reverently and devoutly raise our eyes to the second Adam, and meditate on a few of the deeper hints supplied by the Evangelical history. In the first place, in what aspects arc we to regard the death of our Redeemer ? Arc we to regard it with some unguarded thinkers, 2 as only an anticipa- tion of what must have happened in the ordinary course of nature '? Surely there is something abhor- rent in the thought, something from which the 1 Sec Rom. vi. 23. 2 See note M. III.] DEATH. (55 heart recoils, ere the head has reflected on it. What ! was the Holy One to sec corruption? 1 Is it conceivable that lie who had the power 'to lay down His life and power to take it again,'- could have lost by alien agency that which was His own as God, yea, more, His own, His own eternally, as pure and sinless man ? Well, indeed, does the author of the Kpistle to the Hebrews remind us, that the Lord partook of flesh and blood, even as the children whom He came to save.' But Jtntr did lie partake of it ? Did not the second Adam take it of the vir- ginal body of Mary by the quickening power of the Holy Ghost, even as the first Adam Avas formed out of the earth, and called into life by the breath of ( lodV If it be true that the 1 ,ord received a substance from His mother, which the nature of that mother, as transmitted from Adam, had made capable of dissolution, is it not also irrcfragably true, that it was a substance in which that capability had become cancelled and inoperative ; cancelled, becau>e in Him 'there was no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth,'* inoperative, because in Him, as the God-man, there was an eternal tree of life from which nought, save Hi> own boundlos mercies, could even temporarily separate the nature which He had been pleased to assume. These mysterious analogies between him that first sinned and Him 1 IViiltn xvi. 10, Act.s ii. :;. 3 1U-I.. ii. 14. 66 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. that alone was sinless, between him that disobeyed and Him that came to do His Father's will, are not without great meaning and significance. We may further illustrate this solemn portion of our subject by briefly noticing the mystery of the Transfiguration. Setting aside all considerations of the immediate objects it was intended to serve, 1 and regarding it merely as a recorded fact, a fact, be it observed, on which the synoptical Evangelists are peculiarly explicit, and to which, years after it happened, one of the eye-witnesses very distinctly alludes; 2 viewing it thus simply and plainly, does it not seem to hint at the glory that was compatible with sinless humanity, does it not suggest deep thoughts of what, in different measure and degree, might have been realized in the sinless children of a sinless forefather ? Though on such profound sub- jects it is ever well to speak with a holy awe and a guarded and reverential reserve, though it is not for darkened and sinful beings like us to draw daring lines of speculative demarcation between the prerogatives of a pure and spotless humanity, and the eternal potencies of an indwelling Godhead, it still does not seem presumptuous to imagine that this wondrous event may supply a hint, a trace, a vestige, of what might have found an analogy in the uncorrupted nature of man. We might perhaps append to this some hints 1 See note N. 2 2 Pet. i. 17. III.] 13KATH. 07 derived from what the Evangelists tell us of the Lord's resurrection-body ; l its seemingly material condition on the one hand, secmingh material in some respects as that of La/.arns, and yet its pre- ternatural and glorified powers on the other; the mysterious continuance on earth for the extended space of forty days, and the final ascent of that holy body into the heaven of heavens. Such reflections, however, would require a far more extended and guarded investigation than can now be ventured on. Enough, perhaps, has already been said 1 will not say to prove, but to illustrate the intimate con- nexion which all general considerations derived from Holy Scripture lead us to recognise between sin and all forms of physical death. III. \Ve arc now in a position briefly to sum up all in an expansion of our present text, to which all the foregoing observations have been designed to contribute. And now with what force and clearness does it speak to our hearts : ' By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin, death.' \\hat death? Some mere synonym for a generally corrupt state? Some term robbed of all its significance ? Never! K\ery speculation on which we have ventured renders such a conception inadmissible and impossible. All con- siderations derived from the historv of the tir>t, \ca, and of the second Adam, are opposed to Mich perilous 1 S.-,.. Hull- 0. i -2 68 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. dilutions. No ! it cannot be. The text emphatically reveals to us this one certain truth, that, by the dis- obedience of the forefather, corruption, dissolution, and death came upon him and his children. The body, the material part, was to be resolved into its dust ; the soul and spirit were to pass into the under - Avorld. The harmonious bond was broken, the primal unity was dissolved. Man was lowered to the con- dition of the animals over which he was to have lord- ship., and, save in the return of the immaterial part to the God that gave it ' the spirit of man that goeth upward n he differed in nothing from the perishing beast, ' whose spirit goeth downward to the earth/ and whose life was being continually taken up and re-absorbed into the general life of nature. Such was the disturbance of sin ; such that dread dispensation which modern speculation would mask and disguise, and of which so many speak Avith such lightness and profanity. ( By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin/ But was this all ? Ilad^in and has sin no further energies and activities ? Did it only introduce a condition common to the race, that remains only a dismal and isolated fact on which in dull hours we may muse and speculate ? Ah, no ! Then were not sin, sin : then might death have had no real intensity, no true sting, the grave no completed victory. Hear further the distinct revelation of the text : ' And so 1 Eccles. iii. 21. III.] DF.ATII. 09 death passed upon all men.' SD, in consequence of this relation between Adam's sin as the cause, and physical death as the effect, death passed upon all men ;' or, if we would fain feel and understand the pregnant force of every word, ' jjuxwl tliminjh n/o all M<-//, n found its way to individuals, came unto every member of the race, often with untimely speed and aggravated violence, sought each one out, dealt with him singly, and made him in his very own body, in his own perishing frame and in his own un- housed spirit, both feel and acknowledge the fright- ful power and pervasive energy of that principle which sin had called into action against our fallen and disobedient race. And lest man should proudly question the justice of such an universal sentence, or deny the equity of such individual application, this pervasive power of death is further confirmed by an appeal to the universality of that from which it sprung: ' Death />.y.sw/ (Itfoinjh unto all men.' And why ? ' For that all have sinned ;' or, as we should perhaps more accurately^translate the words, ' For that all /'!'/>' xniiit'rx,'- sinners in the loins of their father Adam, sinners as naturally descended from his body, flesh of the same flesh, bone of the same bone, yea, more (for 1 doubt not that \\\\* aNo is included), sinners in their own persons, bearing witness by their very deeds, proving, by the sad tcsti- 'fr t/f iruvru ; sci- Mover in /"'. J!<.>-itt'l Trtin.il. of R'JIII. lj /'/'( Cl>r'j;/iiii, \>. xii. 70 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. mony of similar acts of disobedience, that they are one in heart and one in passions with him who brought 011 himself and his race the penal judgment of death. And ever since that first hour of lapse, this power of sin and death has been spreading and widening, developing itself in new forms, revealing itself in fresh aggravations : Adam handed down the fearful heirloom, not only to Caint he wicked, but to Seth the holy ; and Seth to Enos ; and Enos to those that followed him. And now, for nigh six thousand weary years, death has wrought and spread, augmenting itself by the sins of nations, races, kindreds, indivi- duals ; pervading all lands, corrupting all climes, now by more frightful and generic manifestations, the flood, the fire, the famine, the sword, the pesti- lence, now by the more gradual, yet ceaseless ab- sorption of individual life (sixty lives or more, they tell us, each minute that goes past), making every child of man both feel and realize the sad heritage of mortality and the bitter bondage of corruption. Such then, with all brevity, is the substance and meaning of the solemn text we have chosen for our meditations, such the answer we can now return to the homely though pressing question which suggested these investigations If now asked whi/ ice die, we can answer it shortly and truly : ' We die, not, on the one hand, because our nature was originally subject to that law, nor, on the other, because it is an appointed mode of emancipation III.] DEATH. 71 from mere encumbering elements, but, because ire fire ftinners, sinners in the loins of our father Adam, sinners in our own persons, "witnesses in our daily thoughts and daily deeds of the exceeding justness of the primal sentence, and of the true righteousness of that dispensation which has subjected disobedience and rebellion to a judicial and punitive bondage. And now I must draw my words to a close. There is, I regret to fed, much left unsaid ; there are many illustrative topics, many mysterious analogies, which I have forborne even to hint at. That, however, which seems of chief moment I have done my utter- most to make clear ; and I pray God that these two connected truths, which the present subject has mainly tended to disclose, may have found reception in your hearts : .///*/, that if Adam had continued sinless he would not have succumbed to physical death : xri-n,nl/tf, that when he did cease to he sinless he involved himself and his race iu the common fate of the animal, which, to one constituted as he was, had all the attributes of it heavy and enduring curse. Vpon the first of these truths, as Bishop Hull 1 has well observed, depends the proper recognition of the nature (.if the Fall; on the second, the conviction of the exceeding sinfulness of Sin, and of the depth of our own corruption. Let me conclude with a few words of plain and practical application. The hortatory lesson which ' 7W. ll'url-t, vol. ii. p. fo, '. tr<-ni>'iidn i. SUiTtll/n'ilf/i Hi .' Oh, then, may (lod in His mercy give us all His grace, that whether our years be many or few, we mav all be brought dailv nearer and nearer to Him, 76 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. III. that we may become more largely partakers of the death-destroying power of His Son, more completely penetrated in soul and spirit with the quickening influence of the Holy Ghost ; that so when the end come, we may pass there where ' there is no more curse/ 1 and where death hath been ' swallowed up of life.' 2 1 Kev. xxii. 3. 2 2 Cor. v. 4. SERMON IV. THE DESTINY OF TIIK CREATURE. 11 E S T I T U T I O X. REVELATION xxi. 5. And He that sat upon the throne said, fiehiilJ, I make all tJilnys new. IE consolatory declaration which I have just read, forms a suitable introduction to the mysterious subject towards which all our foregoing meditations have been tending to lead us, and to which all that has preceded has been designed to converge. The law of Vanity, even in the very passage in which it was enunciated, had its background of hope. Suffer- ings in their holier and purer aspects were seen to be prevenient and preparatory. Death derived all its deepest meaning from the fact that beyond it lay life and restoration. In a word, all the grave themes on which we have ventured to speculate, have been like secret hands leading us upward to a 1'isgah of thought, from which the wide realms of the future kingdom of Christ might be surveyed in all their glory and universality. Let us then for a brief space this afternoon yield ourselves to these natural guidings of our former 78 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. subjects, and endeavour with all humility and sobriety to raise our eyes towards that which Scripture dis- closes to our gaze as lying beyond Vanity, Sufferings, and Death, even that for which all creation is noAV longing and tarrying, freedom, renewal, and Resti- tution. I feel, indeed, and deeply do I feel it, that I am now presuming to enter upon thrice holy ground, ground whereon it is difficult for mortal speculation to enter without casting around some darkening shadows and defilements. Still, I also feel, that it is perhaps a duty that we owe to ourselves, not to shrink from a humble and reverential attempt to grasp the true outlines of a teaching which includes so much that is consolatory ; and that, too, more especially, as there is no province in speculative theology in which modern thought has assumed more mistaken and more presumptuous attitudes. Much do I fear that, day by day, opinions more or less allied to that seductive form of belief called Univer- salism, or, in plain English, the belief that all will come right at last, however wrong now, are quietly winning their way among the children of this world's wisdom, and that they already number far more secret adherents than at first sight we may be inclined to believe. It takes but little ingenuity to trace it in many of the most popular literary productions of our own times. Poetry often scarcely masks it; 1 1 See note A. IV.] RESTITUTION'. 79 many works of fiction seem almost written to give it currency ; and, what is worse, much of the so-called religious philosophy of our own times, from which better things might have been hoped, docs not shrink from avowing something more than a hope, that a time is coming when good and evil will lose their ineffaceable characteristics, and when all will be swallowed up in an abyss of love and restora- tion. 1 Yet let us waste no time in confuting such notions. Here, at least, in this favoured place, the true issues to which such opinions ultimately lead, the false logic from which they spring,- the intense and frightful selfishness that they reflect, the unholy compromise between things eternally incompatible that they necessarily imply, must all 'seem well-nigh self- evident. The very youngest thinker among us who loves his Lord and keeps his sayings, can, I hope, have no real difficulty in arriving at the certain con- viction that such things involve fundamental error To confute them, then, or to expose them, is, 1 trust, in this place, both uncalled-for and supererogatory. Yet it may do us all good, especially in these; dan- gerous days, if we spend a short time on those portions and passages of Scripture, of which such opinions are the distorted refractions; and if we further endeavour, by sober and Scriptural induction, to gain a true knowledge of what (lod's word tells us of this Kesti- 1 Sco null- 15. 8 Sec n. t C. 80 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. tution, what appear to be its nature and character- istics, and what, if any, the necessary limits of its application. Before, however, we proceed to the investigation of specific texts, let us, in accordance with that method which in discussions of this nature seems ever most sound and trustworthy, first prepare our- selves by a brief consideration of the general teaching of Scripture as to the original condition and consti- tution of man ; that so, by a just estimate of what it once was, and what it now is, we may more truly appreciate the nature and measures of its future restitution. Then, further, remembering well the intimate connexion that ever subsists between man and the material world, let us venture to obtain some faint glimpses of the restoration and restitution of all with which man stands in any degree of con- tact, and with the future of which his own future is so closely and indissolubly connected. When we turn backward to the account of the original formation of man, the first fact of impor- tance, in reference to our present subject, seems clearly to be this, that man Avas created single and alone. Though appointed to be the father and pro- genitor of holy and happy beings who, as the old writers of the Church loved to speculate, were to fill up the number of the lapsed sons of God, 1 he still appears single and isolated. The earth brings 1 See note D. IV.] RESTITUTION. 81 forth abundantly, the waters teem with life, but man, the lord and sovereign of all, is presented to our view as coming from the hands of his Maker the single representative of his race, even without the helpmate that was afterwards provided for him- /. This deserves our especial notiee, this prepares us for the revelation of future unities more mysterious and comprehensive. Not only does the significant fact of man being a personal being, in contradistinction to the collective races of lower animals, at once emerge to view, but the still more profound thought of the oneness of the race ; their oneness in creation, 1 their oneness in the sin of one, their oneness in the redemption by the One, shall it not be, their oneness in restoration ? Xor does siu annihilate this unity of man's race. Nay, rather, as the sad experiences of our own hearts tell us, in some respects even more convincingly aflirm it. Man transgresses against the positive com- mand of his Maker, that single command, so simple, yet so comprehensive/ that command, to obey which was life and glorification ; to disobey, death and corruption. Man transgresses, and all mankind transgresses with him : in Adam all die, even as in Christ all shall be made alive. In sin, mankind is still one. Net sin undoubtedly presents to our view a phenomenon of the utmost importance in considerations affecting the universality of the resti- ' -See note E. a See note I 1 '. G 8.2 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. iJSERM. tution. Though sin does not cause a definite breaking-up of the race, it still discloses the continual divergence of individuals. It hints at fallings away from the great destiny of mankind. the glorification of its Maker ; yea, it shows dread glimpses of gatherings together under the banners of God's enemies, and of associations, which can have no share in the blessedness of future restitution. This is brought strikingly before us by the language of the first prophecy : " And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. n Here, then, the existence of tivo seeds comes into view. Yet let us not misunderstand the words ; not two seeds in any sense that might seem to imply that mankind had lost its unity, that it was to be no longer one family, but two families, the one of the evil, and the other of the just. 2 That can never be : that would tend to rob this consolatory prophecy of the deeper reference that was ever ascribed to it by all the sounder thinkers of the early Church. The seed of the woman must ever point to Him in whom mankind was to be re-created and bound up in a living unity that was to endure for evermore. It marks no mere isolated family, no chosen few, but the race in its Creator and Redeemer, in Him who called it into being, in Him Avho was born of woman to save it, in Him who died for it, and in Him who shall restore it to a more than primal blessedness 1 Gen. iii. 15. 2 See note G. IV.] RESTITUTION. 83 and perfection. It is so, and it must he so. Yet the fearful designation, ' the seed of the serpent/ cannot be without meaning and significance. 1 There must he some other seed, some other I will not say community, hut aggregation of evil beings, which has a real and substantive existence, and which displays its baleful vitality by its ceaseless warfare against the woman's seed, and Him who is Himself that seed and the Saviour of it : ' It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.' There /.v the serpent's seed ; and in our future meditations let us not forget it : for earnestly and emphatically as we may dwell upon the unity of mankind and its sum- mation in Christ, we still must not close our eyes to the fact that there arc numberless, aye, appallingly numberless iiiJiriiliailx, who are so deliberately sundering themselves from the living unity of their race and Him who is its head and representative, that ////>'/ future, and the future of the true race, must be, and will be, eternally and irrevocably different. This most important position, thus plainly dedu- eible from the first page of the history of our race, admits of many illustrations from subsequent por- tions of it. How noticeable it is, when on the birth of her third sou Kve uses language that seems to imply that Cam, considered as the representative of the race', was wittingly ignored ; ' And >he bare a 84 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. son, and called his name Seth, for God, said she, hath appointed me another seed not son, but seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew/ 1 The unity of the race was continued in the ' appointed one :' the man that was gotten from the Lord 2 had severed himself from it, and was looked on as an alien and apostate. Then again, how significant is the fact, that after the flood the one man, Xoah and his seed, form the continuation of the line of mankind. To the one man and his sons, God again vouchsafcth His blessing and His covenant. Generations pass away ; the inhabitants of the earth multiply ; but still it is to the one man, Abraham, to whom the promise is given, and to his seed after him. As the physical line was continued in Noah, so the spiritual line develops itself from Abraham; and with that one line, the God of all mankind is pleased to iden- tify Himself as ' the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob/ Everywhere unity, nowhere division or plurality. One man, one seed, one stock, one nation, one centre and nucleus of developing humanity, even until the coming of Him in whom all again becomes one; and who, by His one sacrifice of Himself once offered, redeems all the race, and becomes henceforth and for evermore, not the Saviour only, but the representative of all man- kind, and who again, by His one Church, demon- strates that the same unity amid seeming plurality 1 Gen. iv. 25. 2 Gen. iv. i. IV.] RESTITUTION. 85 is the mysterious law in the development of the kingdom of God. Ere we completely leave the historical aspects of this portion of our subject, let me briefly subjoin, by way of corollary, a fact which I have before men- tioned, 1 and which, in the wider applications of our present subject, it is desirable to retain steadily in view, the intimate connexion between man and the animal and material world. In the very first day of his creation, man is indissolubly associated with Nature. Not only is he to have dominion over all that livethj but he is to subdue and make his own the earth he treads on. \Vhen he falls, the earth becomes cursed ; when the delude sweeps off his race, the guiltless animals perish with him ; when the covenant is made with the solitary surviving family, the surviving creatures arc specially included in its provisions ; the fowl and the cattle every living creature 1 of all llesh share the blessings of the divine clemency. Even so it is impossible to doubt that when the restitution of man takes place, the restitution of the: earth and its occupants \\ill speedily and immediately follow. The day of the perdition of the wicked, as one Apostle tells us,- will let loose 1 the last luslral fires, even as another Apostle" represents all creation waiting for its final redemption and glorification, as an event strictly and historieailv contemporaneous with the glorification of the elect of God. 1 St.-- Sermon I. p. 14. -3 Pet. iii. ~. :i I!m. vii 86 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. With these preparatory thoughts in our hearts, let us now turn to the special revelations vouchsafed to us by the Spirit in the New Testament, and with His illumining grace, let us endeavour patiently and reverently to deduce from them the nature and ex- tent of the final restitution. There are only three texts that seem to bear directly on this profound subject; but they arc of a character so distinct that we may bless God for having afforded us thereby such sure ground for the highest aspirations and the most consolatory hopes that it is possible for the mind of man to conceive. 1. Let us begin with the lowest and most circum- scribed of these texts, and proceed upward to that which is highest and most comprehensive. The first passage is from that singularly profound chapter, the fifth of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 1 and the words to which I wish espe- cially to direct your attention are these : 'All things are of God, ivho reconciled its unto Himself by Christ, and gave to us the ministry of the reconciliation ; for t/tat God was in Christ, or according to the more plausible construction -for that God in Christ n'as reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them' 2 This most consolatory declaration forms the corner-stone of the doctrine of the restitution. It represents the nature of the first act, and the limits to which the benefit of the first act more par- : Ver. 1 8, 19. - See note I. IV.] RESTITUTION. 87 ticularly extended. The first act was reconcilia- tion, reconciliation by the blood of Jesus ; the first objects to whom it extended, the world. Who shall dare to limit these words? iS'ot even the great name of Augustine 1 shall deter us from saying that the blood of Jesus Christ the blood that was poured out on Calvary effected a reconciliation between God and all His intelligent creatures. Xo man was so far off, as then not to be brought nigh ; no heart so estranged, as then not to be regarded with mercy and pity ; no state so hopeless, as then not to come within the range of His all-merciful for- giveness. Then, indeed, did Clod enter into a new covenant with His own ; then did He, who ever loved the creatures of His hand, love with all the deptli of fatherly affection. His own Son, the Son of His love, died for mankind, and in that death all sin was forgiven. Yea, and the eilicaey of that sacrifice remains undiminished and unimpaired: the restora- tion of the race has been commenced. Every year sees it evolving and expanding. Kvery generation, whatever cvnieal moralists mav sav, sees it advanced a step in its progress.- Amid all hindrance and ob- struction, whether from within or from without, deadness of hearts or coldness of faith, worldliness and profanity, persecution and the suonl, the King- dom of Christ is still spreading; the elect are as-em- bling ; the hidden ones are gathering ; the nations 1 S.'f note J. - ,Str iioti- K. 88 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. of the saved are multiplying ; the true spiritual unity of the race is coming more distinctly into view ; reconciliation is making itself more sensibly felt in the deep heart of our common humanity. Salvation is verily come, and restitution will not tarry. Four points of great moment this important text places before us : First ; that a reconciliation has been and is effected between God and the world. Secondly : that the objects thus reconciled, speci- fied in the first portion of the passage by the more limited term us, and in the second by the more com- prehensive term, the world, must be regarded as neither more nor less than all mankind . Thirdly ; that this reconciliation was effected by one mediating cause, and by one only, even our Redeemer Jesus Christ. Fourthly ; and this, according to our present view of the construction, is what is noticeably cha- racteristic of this passage, that Christ was the per- sonal sphere in which this reconciliation took place : that it was not only by means of Him, but in Him, in Him and in His atoning sacrifice, in Him as the redeemer and true representative of humanity, that the divine agencies of reconciliation have their energy and existence. 2. AVith these results fresh in our minds, let us at once pass on to the second text, in which the subject of that which we have just considered is reaffirmed and reiterated, in language in some respects identical, but yet with expansions so remarkable and suggestive, that I will pray of you a clo.-e attention to the terms IV.] RESTITUTION. 89 in which it is expressed. This second text forms part of the first chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, 1 and the words, accurately translated, are these ; Tor in Him it pleased the whole fulness (of the Godhead] to dwell, and by Him to bring into former reconciliation all things unto Himself t having made peace through the blood of Hi* cross, by Him, I say, whether they he the thing* upon t/te earth or the things in the heavens.' 2 Now there are changes and additions in this mighty declaration that must have struck every attentive lis- tener. The relation of time is somewhat changed ; the nature of the reconciliation more exactly defined ; its medium more emphatically specified ; and the objects to whom this blessing is extended, more com- prehensively enumerated. In our former text the reconciliation was mainly regarded as jni*/ ; here the language seems to hint at applications more expressly future. The simple fact of the reconciliation was there dwelt upon; here, by means of a slight change in the flexible language of the original, the precis nature of that reconciliation, and the distinctly retro- spective element it involves, are brought into minus- takeable prominence. 'There it was ' to reconcile;' 1 here it is 'to reconcile back again,' 1 -- to bring back to a state of primal harmony, 5 and to re-establish a condition which existed when (!od looked \\ith divine complacency on His creatures, when ' (Jodsaw e\ery- 1 \\r 19. 2 See note L. 90 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sEBM. thing that He had made, and behold ! it was very good/ 1 Add to this, that in the former text it was an act of reconciliation which God wrought with reference to Himself, 3 and to the revelation of His own holiness and wisdom and glory : here, by a change which our language is scarcely sufficiently delicate to express, it is a reconciliation tending and leading unto Him- self; 3 not only a reconciliation but a reconciled access, not merely a reconciliation regarded as ratified and solemnized, but one that brings the estranged ones to their Almighty Father's feet, and leads the lost sheep into the everlasting fold. Then again the holy medium by which it was brought about, which in the former text was noticed but not enlarged upon, is liere brought into view, in language most exact and expressive. The reconciliation was to be wrought by Him, by Him, the God-man, in whom all the ful- ness of the eternal Godhead was pleased to dwell. Yea more, and lest we might dream that it was s >me prior act contemporaneous with creation, or evolving itself from some former economics, lest we should thus doubt, lest we should join with the sophists of our own days, and find only self-denial in what was salvation, our present text assures us that it was by the blood of Jesus, the blood of the cross, the blood poured out on Calvary, that the 1 Gen. i. 31. 2 KaTaX\<'t$cu Hivrce notes in loc. IV.] RESTITUTION". 91 mighty working was brought about whereby God bindeth in harmony all things unto Himself. And last of all, what in the first text was described as the world, here receives the noticeable amplification, ' whether they be the things on earth or the things in heaven/ a definition so comprehensive, that I see not how we can dare to do less than regard it as embracing the sum of all things, the universal realm of creation. What limitations, if any, the analogy of Scripture and the express terms of our allied texts compel us to assign to the actual realization and enjoyment of this reconciliation, let us for the present leave un- noticed. Let us, however, meanwhile not fear to say, that the efficacy of the blood of our Lord and Master is limitless in its applications, that it knows no bounds in space, as it knows no bounds in time ; and that the issues of His atonement for us, in different mea- sures and degrees, extend unto all tilings, that the odour of that sweet-smelling savour tills every court and every chamber of the universal temple of (!od. \. And now, before we make any general deduc- tions, let us pass on to the third text, the farthest reaching and most profound of all. 'Hie passage to which I desire, in the last place, to call your atten- tion, forms part of the first chapter of the Kpistle to the Kphcsians ;' and the words, carefully rendered, are these : ' llanny ///(//>'// /////" /i* tin: iityxtcry <>J' 1 Vor. 9, 10, 11. 92 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. His will, according to the good pleasure which He pur- posed in Himself, in regard of the dispensation of the fulness of times, to sum up again (for Himself] all, things in Christ,, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth, eren in Him, in whom we were also chosenfor His inheritance.' 1 Now, on dwelling with attention on this most profound revelation, we cannot fail to observe that it leads to something beyond the furthest bound we have hitherto reached. The vast issues which are here disclosed to our view arc distinctly prospective and future. Their first commencements, indeed, may have already taken place ; the first motions of aggregation may have been already felt in the Church of God ; the attracting energies of omni- potence may even now be working through all the realms of the spiritual and material world, but, be- yond doubt, the main aspects of the revelation before us are all distinctly future. Reconciliation was the first stage ; reconciliation to a prior state of harmony, the second ; summation of all things to and into Christ, in a Avord, restitution in its fullest sense, the third, the final end and aim of the eternal counsels of God. And this restitution is to be boundless in its comprehensiveness. It is to extend, as the ex- pressive words again remind us, to ' all tilings, the things in the heavens, and the tilings upon the earth/ The uncircumscribcd nature of the terms again for- bids us to narrow what God has left broad, and 1 See note M. IV.] HKSTITUT10N. 93 solemnly suggests, that as the efficacies of Christ's priesthood were without bound, so His kingly power (which this text seems more especially to contemplate) shall be as limitless, extending beyond the bounds of His mediatorial session at God's right hand, and enduring onward into that infinity when God shall be all in all. 1 But further ; if this reunion shall be thus collec- tive, if the objects of it shall be thus countless and universal, yet let us not fail to observe with what force and pertinence our present passage re-echoes the vital words, which were also characteristic of the first text, even the vital words, ' in //////.' As our second text dwelt mainly on the ' hi/ Hint,' or the mediation of His blood, so this last text dwells, with most noticeable emphasis, on the ' /// ////// ' on in- corporation in Him, an emphasis which the repeti- tion of the words 'even in Him/ seems especially designed to enhance. Yea, it would not seem pre- sumptuous to say, that it is as if the design of the Holy Chost were to make us feel distinctly, that to what lies out of Him and (tjxirt from him, be it mortal or immortal, human or angelical, no eili- eaeies of consummating love can be properly con- ceived to extend. Surely there is an implied limita- tion in the very statement of the universality that cannot be gainsaid; surely the possibility remains that there' may be a wit/unit lln/i. Surely there may 1 Sue note N. 94 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [sERM. be manifold states of confirmed sinfulncss, frightful attitudes of enduring hostility against divine love, petrifactions of ingratitude, embodiments of sin against the Holy Ghost, to which the attractive energies that sum up all things in Christ may prove, owing to the dread mystery of the freedom of the will, wholly inoperative. There is the without; and the individuals that belong to the outer darkness of that fearful realm, must remain the subjects, indeed, of the power of the Eternal Son, but from their appalling antagonisms, the monuments of His omnipotent justice. Let us now, with all brevity, gather up into a few distinct allegations the results of our deductions from both Testaments, both from the historical notices of the Old, and the express doctrinal declara- tions of the New Covenant. And they would seem to be as follow : That a recognition of the true unity of our race is one of the fundamental requisites for properly understanding and realizing the doctrine of the restitution. That as all mankind are one in Adam, so are they, in a far higher degree, one in Christ ; still, that as there were originally distinct traces of sinful severances from the true unity of the race, so is it now. That there is, indeed, a present general reconciliation, even as there shall be here- after a universal restitution ; but that as the recon- ciliation was not only ly Christ, but hi Christ, so, even more distinctly, is it said, that the restitution shall be in Him, and only in Him. Consequently, IV.] RESTITUTION". 05 that all, which from the nature of things and the truceless opposition between light and darkness, between sin and holiness, cannot, without blasphemy, be conceived as /// Him and in union with Him, will in the end be only as the dross and scum that is purged oil' by the refining and sublimating flame. If it be urged against these allegations, that they really tend to do away with that very universality which they affect to assert, we fear not to answer, that it must be so ; that we cannot, and dare not, close our eyes to limitations, which the very terms of these profound revelations distinctly presuppose, and which the whole analogy of Scripture forbids us to deny. If, on the one hand, restitution is in Christ, and in Him alone; if, on the other hand, there be such a state as the second death, and one sin at I mix! for which there is to be n remission, then to assert that apostate angels in the abyss, and the seed of the serpent among men shall share in the blessings of the restitution, is practically to make a mock at the express declarations of the Word of (iod. In plain terms, is it not to avo\v a belief that what by its own ever increasing wilt'ulnrss and desperation has passed out of the sphere of attracting love, shall, by a violence that a wise lather of the Church has declared is hateful to (iod, 1 lie compelled to return to it, that the cursed, whom the Lord shall have bidden to depart from Him into 1 See note 0. 96 DESTINY OP THE CREATURE. [sERM. the realms of His wrath/ shall be yet forced back to the arms of His love, that the worm that clieth not shall die, and that forgiveness shall be meted out to that for which it has been solemnly declared there shall be no forgiveness, neither in this world nor in the world to come. From such denials of what is written may God deliver us. This much, however, w r e may dare to say, but no more than this, that all, that from its union with the Saviour is saveable, shall be saved ; all, that from being one with the Restorer is capable of restoration, shall be restored ; yea, all that distinctly evinces the continued and preponderating action of the true central force, shall be gathered up into the ever blessed centre of Life and Love. To say more than this, is to do violence to revelations that carry with them their own limitations, and to expose ourselves hereafter to the appalling charge of having dealt deceitfully with the most express declarations of the unchanging Word of God. Doth it not stand written, brethren, and that too on one of the most solemn pages of the Word of God, that if ' it come to pass when a man heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst, the Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and His jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses 1 Matth. ixv. 41 ; see note P. IV.] RESTITUTION. 97 that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.' 1 In the last place; how, and in what precise way, this restoring power of reconciling love shall work out its issues, has not been expressly revealed. With regard to ourselce*, a glance within at our state of inward discord and corruption affords us some elements for forming a conjectural judgment. . . . Shall not the will lose its contrariant force, and become one with the will of (!od? Shall not the spirit avow its heavenly origin and cleave un- changeably and indissolubly to the eternal Spirit of God ? Shall not the affections of the soul become elevated and purified? Shall not the future body be such a soul's and spirit's fitting tenement ; and excellent in strength, glorious in form, and expedite in celerity, approve itself to its Maker all, and more than all that it was before? And shall not the whole man, body, soul, and spirit completely realize that perfection of unity that shall render man creation's noblest image of the one (!od, the brightest mirror of His Maker's glories, and the loftiest exponent of His praise? With regard to the effect of the restituent powers of Christ on the two extremes of creation, the holy an .' Arc we united to Hun'.' Is 100 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SERM. our will with all its changes and contrarieties still mainly one with His? Do we love Him? Is His that face which when heaven and earth shall melt away we long to gaze upon for ever and for ever? If it indeed be so, let us be of good cheer : He will never forsake His own ; His reconciling power has had its effect on our hearts, His restoring powers will not eventually be withheld from us. If, however, the name of Christ is a name to us, and a name only ; if deadly and unrepentcd sin has been tending to remove us further and further from Him ; if there is that worldly stupor that usually merges into a com- plete insensibility to all the blessings of reconciling love, then let us beware. There is a without ; and to them who deliberately stand there, who have thus torn themselves from the stock of their humanity, who have wittingly withdrawn themselves from the sphere of their Master's love, and count His blood an unholy thing there cannot be, if they die as they live, any share in reunion or restitution. We may now positively shudder at the thought of ever being thus withdrawn from the attraction of divine love ; we may now count it well-nigh impos- sible ; we may yet feel a lingering gravitation within, which may seem to assure us that the effects of the central force are still perceptible, and we may trust it will be ever so. And we may trust to this last residuum of vital force to save us at the last. But will it be there then? As there are forces in the natural world which diminish with startling dispro- IV.] RESTITUTION*. 101 portion to the increasing distance, so it may be in the spiritual world. "NYith sin, on the one hand, deepen- ing, accumulating, intensifying, ever tending more and more into complete sinfulness, ever drawing ns by slow and silent action into that increasing aver- sion to what is holy and good, which has always been regarded by all deeper thinkers as the dread harbinger of final impenitence, 1 with such tendencies on the one hand, and, on the other, with a fast diminishing attraction toward the great Centre of life, who shall dare to trust that a future day shall find him in a sphere where reconciliation and restoration may still be possible and realizable ? It is idle, it is hopeless. 'Behold, iio/r is the accepted time; behold, nun- is the day of salvation.' 2 May (!o(l, then, of His mercy grant that His grace may work in our hearts with renewing and renewed energies. May the love of our Master become to us a more vital and attracting force than we have hitherto felt it. Amidst all hindrances and amidst all temptations, during all darker seasons of doubt- fulness and despondency, in the watches of the weary night, when unwonted forms seem walking the waters of our souls, may we ever hear the re- assuring voice of love and mercy, 'It is 1, he- not afraid. '* Borne up by that arm, who shall fear? reconciled l>y that love, who shall lie dismayed? Though worlds shall dissolve and the heavens pass 3 M.-ttt! 102 DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. [SEBM. IV. away, no soul that is truly draAvn towards Him shall he finally separated from His mercy and love ; no man or devil shall pluck us out of His hand : ' For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall he able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord/ 1 1 Rom. viii. 38, 39. 103 SERMON V. THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. And the rtry God of peace sanctify you u-hoUy: an/I I pnui God your whole spirit and soul and body be jwcrrid blameless unto tlir euiitui'j (if our Lorel Jesus Chrtnt. T'HK words, brethren, which I have just ivad, have a grave claim on our attcnti(/ii. From the days of Iremuus 1 down to our own, this text has been con- fidently appealed to as an emphatic statement of the elements and constituents of the nature of man. Though amidst much diversity of interpretation, and much variety of exegetieal detail, it has still ever been regarded by thoughtful men as a distinct and almost formal exposition of the mvstenous economy of our being : it has been deemed a clear and authori- tative statement of the triplieity in unity of human nature, and a witness that may not be gainsaid of the existence and association of three elements in man, body, soul, and spirit. 1 SfC llntc A. 104 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [sERM. On texts such as these it is at times wise to medi- tate. It is well for us, especially in the graver hours of a penitential season like that in which we now have entered, to seek out the more retired sources of Scripture truth, to court the keener but more bracing airs of doctrinal investigations, and, in the reverential contemplation of the higher mysteries of our faith, to forget for a while the wearisome subjectivities of that undemonstrative theology, which is alike the charac- teristic and the bane of our age. I make no apology for introducing this peculiar subject to your notice ; for though, at first sight, it may seem of a purely speculative nature, it will still be found, on a nearer survey, to be truly and essentially practical; it will often be found to throw a strangely and fearfully illustrative light on the more common forms of temptation which try our souls ; it will often give us some blessed glimpses of the operations of the eternal Spirit of God within us ; it will often add a deeper significance to the varying, and only too commonly unnoted phases of our inner life. I cannot, indeed, hope to dwell upon these power- ful applications, for I fear that the mere discussion of the text will occupy nearly all our time, but I shall still rejoice in the feeling that, in bringing such question before you, I am not asking you to meditate upon a mere sterile thesis, but on a subject whose seed is in itself, a subject which cannot fail to make us more conscious of the infinite mysteries of our being, and more sensitively alive to the tidings of that V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OE MAN. 105 sore strife, that fell and utter conflict of the Flesh and the Spirit, 1 of which the soul of every one of us in this church is the theatre and the battle-ground. Xay more, such a subject as the present has a pressing claim upon us, not only from its own im- portance, but from its vital connexion with some of those doctrines which, in our own day, we have seen brought into prominence, and which, full surely, another generation will recognise as its questions of most serious import, the doctrine of the Last things, eschatology, as it has been termed, and the doctrine of the Atonement. With these our present subject has the most intimate connexion ; and it would not be too much to say, that nine-tenths of the hasty assertions which we have seen put forth upon the>e doctrines would have been completely avoided, if a little more attention had been paid to the fundamental constitution of our common nature, and the true nature and interdependence of its three mysterious components, Body, Soul, ami Spirit. The ignorance of the scriptural aspects of this question, and the complete disregard which the whole subject of biblical psychology has experienced, is no less startling than demonstrable. In but few of our recent commentaries, or theological treatise-, is there any attempt to distinguish between the characteristics of our psychic and spiritual natures. Scriptural terms of such usuallv distinct significance as ' heart, soul 106 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [sERM. mind, understanding, inner man/ meet with the most varying interpretations ; nay, the only epithet which a common and popular assent has associated with one part of our common nature, ' immortal' soul, is either insufficient or of doubtful application ; insufficient, if the term soul be used as including our whole saveable nature ; l of doubtful application if it be used in its more precise and restricted signi- ficance. 2 But it is time that we approached the text itself. The words which I have chosen for our consideration form part of one of the concluding verses in the last chapter of St. Paul's ist Epistle to the Thcssaloiiiaiis, a chapter of an unusually grave tone, and marked in its latter portion by an emphatic brevity, and a striking solemnity of exhortation. The context does not supply anything to guide us clearly in our inter- pretation ; unless, perhaps, the momentous warning in the 1 9th verse, ' quench not the Spirit/ led the Apostle to pray fervently in the 23rd, that the temple in which that holy flame Avas burning might be pre- served in its integrity and blamclcssness until the coming of the Lord, that the spirit, and soul, and body, of his converts, each in its full measure and completed proportions (6AoicA oi>), might await the searching scrutiny of the final judgment. This con- nexion of the admonition in the 1 9th verse with the prayer of the text, will perhaps afford a hint when we 1 See note B. 2 Stc note C. V.] THHKKFOLD NATURE OF .MAN. 107 come to consider specifically the meaning of the term spirit ; but in the general survey the most important point is the recognition of the peculiar position and correct grammatical construction of the epithet whole, 1 and the preservation of its exact meaning. ' For observe, the position of the epithet shows that the prayer is not (as the ordinary reader of the Authorized Version, or the uncritical reader of the original might be led to imagine) that the fl/ole spirit, soul, and body, the three associated together, may be preserved, but, that each part may be pre- served iii i/-s coHijj/i'feiieft-t. Not mere associated pre- servation, but preservation in an individually com- plete state, is the burden of the Apostle's prayer. The prayer is, in fact, threefold; ftt'*f, that they may be sanctified by (iod, the (rod of peace for sanctiti- cation is the condition of outward and inward peace wholly (oAor jXtuj) , in their collective powers and constituents; //r./7, that each constituent may be preserved to our Lord's coming ; and AM-////, that each, so preserved, may be entire and complete in itself, not mutilated or disintegrated by sin ; that the body may retain its yet unetl'aeed image of (iod, and its unimpaired aptitude to lie a living sacrifice to its Maker; the appetiti\e soul, it> purer hopes and nobler aspirations; the spirit, its ever- blessed associate, the Holy anil eternal Spirit of God. 1 Sou ii,, tc \\ ' 2 Sou IK .tu K. 108 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [SERM. This analysis of the passage will be found of con- siderable use, when we have to attempt to decide between the different interpretations which the text has received; and still more so, when we further attempt to substantiate the differences and elucidate the distinctions between the three elements of our nature, of which this important text makes such a certain and significant disclosure. Resting on this analysis, let us proceed with our subject, which will here most naturally divide itself into two parts; First, an attempt to establish the asser- tion that Scripture generally, and this text in parti- cular, contemplate the nature of man as compounded of three principles, spirit, soul, and body : Secondly, an attempt to trace out the scriptural distinctions between the functions of each component part. And here, at the outset, let us observe, that we may somewhat simplify the subject by confining our- selves on the present occasion to the consideration of the two former principles, spirit and soul ; for to doubt that the hotly is an integral part of our nature, both here and hereafter, is to indulge in either a wild Maniclueism, or a still wilder Docetism, which deserves neither attention nor confutation. By thus confining ourselves simply to the consi- deration of the spirit and the soul, we gain this great advantage, that we may reduce our whole subject to two simple inquiries; Ft rut-, Does this text and Scripture generally recognise such a difference be- tween soul and spirit that each may be considered a V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 109 separate, or, to speak more cautiously, a separable element of our nature ? Stromlfy, if so, what mean- ing does Scripture assign to eaeh term, and what does it reveal of the nature of eaeh, and of the sphere of its operations ? I. With a text before us so plain, so emphatic, as that now under our consideration, it does seem hard indeed to be forced to pause in our answer to the first inquiry. AVe must not, however, ignore the fact that it has been asserted 1 that the text has simply a cumulative and rhetorical character, and that the Apostle in thus grouping spirit, soul, and body, meant only to imply, without any further distinction, the material and immaterial part of them for whom he prayed ; that spirit and soul, in fact, is a rhetorical tautology. 13ut is this tenable V Is this possible? Is this in any way consistent with our analysis of the text ? If the Apostle prays for the sanctifi cation of his converts in their collective powers and parts (oAori/\t7c), if he further prays with a studied emphasis and peculiar collocation of words, that three things may be indi- vidually preserved whole till the advent of the Lord, and if, of these three things, the two latter, soul and body, are confessedly constituent parts of that nature 4 for whose entire sanctification In- prays, does it not seem almost monstrous to doubt that the third, or 1 should rather say the first part, thus similarly 1 See note F. 110 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [sERM. connected, thus similarly enunciated, thus significant in its very precedence, is a constituent part as well ? Surely we do violence to the plainest principles ot perspicuity if we assign any other meaning to the text than this,- that the Apostle prayed for the con- servation of the spirit as well as the conservation of the soul of his hearers, and that in so praying he regarded them as in a certain degree distinct from one another. But is this a mere isolated text, on which it may be unsafe to base a system of psychology ? Can no other passages be fairly adduced in which the terms soul and spirit are placed in a juxtaposition that is neither cumulative nor rhetorical ? Does Scripture elsewhere preserve a studied silence ? By no means : though, as we might have easily imagined before- hand, the passages which involve a comparison of a material with an immaterial part are far more nume- rous than those in which the two immaterial parts are compared or contrasted, we nevertheless can still adduce several passages, which can be neither tho- roughly nor satisfactorily explained, unless we re- cognise a real and appreciable difference between the soul and the spirit of man. Let us here, however, be careful to follow the rules of an honest criticism. Let us make no use of such passages as have either a poetical character, or involve such a studied parallelism, as make it doubtful how far a real differ- ence of meaning was intended by the inspired writer. Let us then not press such passages as that of v.] TIIRKF.FOLD X ATI' UK (>!' MAX. Ill Isaiah, 1 ' \Vith my soul have I desired tlioe, with my spirit will I seek thee early ;' or again those familiar words of the Virgin's hymn, ' My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in (Jod my Saviour ;- though in this latter ease it is certainly worthy of notice, that it is the soul which magnifies, the spirit which rejoices. It is the soul, the true mediatrix between the body and spirit, which by means of the bodily organs gives outward expression to the joyful conceptions of the spirit. . . . Yet let us concede that these and such as these, are texts of a strain too elevated and too poetical to be safely subjected to ordinary criticism. Let us pass them by, and rather seek out passages of a more decided doctrinal aspect, and see in them how far this differ- ence between soul and spirit can be fairly maintained. Let us appeal to a profound verse in the fourth chap- ter of the Kpistle to the Hebrews, 3 where the word of (lod is said to pierce so as to divide soul and spirit (not soul //'"/// spirit, according to the ordinary gloss),* joints and marrow. Now in this diilieult verse, what- ever interpretation we may assign to the latter terms, whether we regard the meaning of joints and marrow as simple or metaphorical, we seem equally forced to recognise a distinction and a difference between the former terms, the spiritual regions through which the word of God pierces its way. \\ e seem empha- 1 ('Imp. xxvi. \). 3 Vcr. II. 112 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [sEllM. tically told in language of startling power, how that word penetrates, beyond the sphere of the affections or impulses of the soul, into the realm of the wakeful and watchful contemplations of the spirit, and there in the light of clearest day carries on the controversy of God, and forces man to his final, and it may be irrevocable decision for or against the Gospel. 1 We cannot utterly overlook such passages as that in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians, 2 where the Apostle expresses his hope that his con- verts are standing in one spirit, certainly not the Holy Spirit, with one mind (soul it should be trans- lated) striving together for the faith of the Gospel, 3 especially when in such a passage we further observe with what significance an expression of passivity is used in connexion with the serene spirit, and of ac- tivity with regard to the more impulsive soul. And to take a final instance ; when, in the fifteenth chap- ter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle declares that, ' it is sown a natural (literally psychic) body, and raised a spiritual body/ 4 what else does he mean than that it is sown in a state in which the soul sustains the principal, and the spirit the subor- dinate part, but that it is raised in a state where those conditions are exactly reversed. 5 What a light does this verse throw on the whole subject of our constitution both here and hereafter ! 1 See note H. - Ver. 27. 3 See notes in loc. 4 Ver. 44. B See note I. V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 113 But to leave special quotations, may we not appeal to other arguments of a more indirect character, but of no less force and cogency ? Is it not very notice- able that in the frequently recurring contrasts of our material and immaterial natures, contrasts which at first sight might be thought only to imply a twofold nature, the terms regularly opposed to each other are of such a kind as really to give to the assumption of a threefold nature a very high degree of plausibility. Observe, it is ever the flesh and the spirit, the soul and the body, which stand in respective opposition to each other ; and with the exception of a very few passages, in which, indeed, a most satisfactory reason can be assigned for the change, this law of antithesis is never violated. 1 Let us pause a moment to notice how instructive these oppositions are, especially when we remember the vast scriptural significance of the term.//''*// ; how it comprehends, not only the mere sensual desires, but all motions of worldliness ; how, in a word, the flesh might be defined as the active principle of the world, 2 and how consequently in these antitheses we find it perpetually contrasted with the spirit, whether the spirit of man, or the personal Holy Spirit of God. Then, again, when the nature of man is considered simply and by itself, apart from any higher principle, then the contrast is not body and spirit, but body and soul ; as when our Lord says, ' Fear not those who 1 Sve note J. * Sec note K. I 114 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. can kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.' * Ever the same contrast : when higher principle is balanced against higher principle, then flesh and spirit ; when only perishable part against imperish- able part, then body and soul. Can these contrasts be merely accidental ? Can they be ignored in such an argument ? Can they be satisfactorily explained on any other hypothesis than that of a threefold nature, which, when viewed under one aspect, sug- gests one contrast, and when viewed under another aspect suggests another? We might almost pause here, and take our stand upon the scripture evidence we have adduced. But in such deeper and more speculative subjects it is never well to close our ears to the voice of antiquity ; it is never either prudent or reverent to slight the testimony of the early Church, or to leave unnoticed the antecedent and contemporary opinions of that nation whose sons were the first heralds and preachers of Christianity. Let us adduce this subsidiary evidence with all brevity, but still not leave it wholly unnoticed. If we ask, first, whether the Jews recognised any difference between soul and spirit, shall we find any difficulty in answering unhesitatingly in the affirm- ative? Independent of direct evidence that might be adduced from the Hebrew Scriptures, AVC meet with traces of this belief in the very Septuagint 1 Mattb. x. 28. V.] THRKKFOLD NATURE OP MAN. 115 translation, in some passages of which the translators have not scrupled to obtrude it, even where in the original there is no direct reference to the subject. 1 \Ve find it, as we might have anticipated, in Philo, repeated in every variety of expression;- we find it again in Josephus, who, when he is describing the creation of man, fails not thus to paraphrase the original, ' And God formed man by taking dust out of the ground, and within him he put a soul and a spirit.' 3 We find it, lastly, in the Rabbinical writers, enforced in language of great dogmatical precision, and under modifications, viz., the addition of a third spiritual principle, the Xcshama, or Spirit of (lod, which, fairly considered, tend only still more to confirm the antiquity and prevalence of the original dogma. 1 Passing onward to the earlier writers in the Chris- tian Church, it is easy to show that we lind this belief in a tripartite nature, and especially in a dif- ference between soul and spirit, expressed in language of great distinctness and precision. In Ireiueus/' the existence and union of body, soul, and spirit is de- fined as the characteristic and criterion of the perfect man. Justin Martyr speaks of the body as the tenement of the soul, and the soul again as the tenement of the spirit. Clement of Alexandria, amidst much addititious Platouism, is no less definite. Origcn, in his conunentarv on St. John, makes the 1 S. c noli- I.. " >'. e note M. Stv imti> N. 5 I' or tin- "i i a ':n:il of this itml th>- !'"llo\\ in_- n'.Mt i -Z 116 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [SERM. express statement, that the soul is different from the spirit; and in his commentary on the Romans, in a passage quoted by Hammond with distinct approval, 1 he enlarges, not only on this threefold composition of man, but on the relations and interdependence of the component parts. His greatest pupil, Didymus of Alexandria, in his admirable treatise on the Holy Spirit, urges this very text on which we are dwelling as an irrefragable proof of the tripartite nature of man. Gregory of Nyssa, in his special work on man's creation, bases the same truth upon the same text ; and, last of all, Basil of Csesarea defines our imperishable part as soul and spirit, and designates the spirit as that part which bears the truest image of God. But we must here pause. It might only in con- clusion be asked how such a doctrine, thus apparently scriptural, thus supported by some of the profoundest thinkers in the early Church, ever became ignored or disregarded : and it may be answered thus. Two causes tended to its obscuration. First, the dan- gerous ratiocinations of Apollinaris, 2 and his perverted application of this doctrine, threw on it a shade of unmerited suspicion, and caused it to be regarded in the Oriental Church with growing disfavour. Secondly, the influence of Tertullian, who opposed it, 3 and still more that of Augustine, who, in his treatise on the 1 See Hammond on i Thcss. I. c. a See note Q. 3 See note R. V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 117 soul, even while he theoretically admits it, says that he considers it safer practically to ignore it, so effec- tually checked its progress in the West, that Genna- dius of Marseilles, at the end of the fifth century, conceived himself authorized to denounce the dis- tinction between soul and spirit as contrary to the doctrine of the Church. Its revival in later times is probably due, on the one hand, to the influence of our great English divines, by several of whom I may name Hammond, Jackson, and Bull ' it has been emphatically reasserted ; and, on the other hand, to some of the more recent and more candid investigations of the substance of apostolical teach- ing, which have led even those who afl'ect to speak doubtfully of the philosophical accuracy of the doctrine, frankly to admit its existence in the Apostolic writings, and its reception in the early days of the Gospel. II. But though we have been compelled to dwell mainly upon the first part of the subject, we cannot leave the second and more practical part wholly un- noticed. If Scripture recognises this distinction between POU! and spirit, we would fain ask what it reveals of the peculiar nature of each, what it tells us of their union with the body, and their still more mysterious union with the eternal Spirit of God. III. Let us recur to the text. \Ve there meet 1 See noto S. 118 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [sERM. with the terms body, soul, and spirit ; we have proved that they are the three component parts of man ; what further are their natures and relations ? Body we know ; but what is spirit ? what is soul ? Let us endeavour first to arrive at the general Scripture meaning of spirit, as from this we can readily deduce the general meaning of soul ; for as both together make up our incorporeal nature, those portions of it which are not included under the one, will necessarily appertain to the sphere and province of the other. Now are we, on the one hand, to un- derstand by spirit, as used in the text, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit as far as it dwells in man, the Neshama of the Rabbins, the divine afflatus, 1 or are we to understand it, on the other hand, as simply denoting the higher portion of our purely human nature, the realm of the powers of the mind, the seat of the conscience, the arbiter of choice, the medium of our cognizance of the divine, that portion, or, if that term be thought to imply too specifically a distinct and separate entity, that side of our imma- terial nature which alone admits of association with the Holy Spirit of God? In which of these two senses is it to be taken in the text ? Clearly not in the former : the ' spirit' of the text can never \>c per w the Holy Spirit; the Apostle can never pray that the Holy Spirit may be preserved in his converts in an entire state, preserved complete 1 See note T. V.] TIIREKl'OLD NATURE OF MAX. 119 in its proportions, and this, according to our pre- vious analysis, and according to all principles of scientific grammar, must be the meaning assigned to the words. Surely it is not too much to say, as Didymus said before on this text, that such an interpretation almost savours of unintentional blas- phemy. 1 An association with the eternal Spirit we may and must admit ; the prayer for the entirety of the spirit is but another expression of that great truth ; but the simple identity of the spirit men- tioned in the text with the Holy Spirit can surely never be maintained. The terms of the prayer would be incongruous, the special use of the pro- noun, 'your spirit' (\>[i<~>r TO irvivfia) would be inex- plicable, and the plain rule of homogeneity, that the first part should relate to the same subject as the similarly expressed remaining parts, would be dis- tinctly violated. I should scarcely have dwelt upon this opinion if it had not been maintained by so pro- found a divine as Bishop Hull, and had not been thought to derive some support from the comments of Ireiucus and Chrysostom.- The la iguage of the former seems certainly somewhat in its favour; but 1 venture to feel confident that, if we weigh well the few words of Chrysostom, we shall arrive at the con- viction that he is not speaking of the Holy Spirit alone, but that he is alluding to the union of our spirit with the Holy Spirit, and that he is but e.\- 1 Sw extract in note P. ' S. <> notu U. ]20 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [SERM. pressing this indisputable truth, that our spirit can only be, and only truly remain whole and complete, when the eternal Spirit dwells within it, and is the Shechinah of that innermost shrine. The spirit, then, mentioned in the text, must be, as it was ever deemed to be by Gregory of Nyssa, and the early Eastern Church, the human spirit, the higher side of our incorporeal nature, the mind, 1 as it is termed in Scripture, when contemplated under its intellectual aspects, the inner man,* as it is also denoted, when viewed in its purely the ologicalrela- tions, in a word, the moving, ruling, and animating principle of our nature. And by its completeness and integrity, that for which the Apostle so fervently prayed, what else can he mean than its permanent, enduring, yea, and indissoluble union with the eternal Spirit of God, without which the spirit of man becomes only a warring chaos of mere intel- lectual forces, a region of darkness and death ? If there is any one point of more practical im- portance than another in this mysterious subject, it is the recognition of this vital truth, that it is the spirit which is the medium of communication with the eternal Spirit, and that it is the spirit more especially, in which or with which the Holy Ghost has vouch- safed to dwell. I will confirm this by two texts. First, when St. Paul tells us, in his Epistle to the Romans, that 'the Spirit beareth witness to our 1 Eph. iv, 17 ; Tit. i. 15, al. a Horn. vii. 22 ; Eph. Hi. 16. V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 121 spirit that we are the sons of God/ 1 what other in- ference can we draw than this, that the spirit is that exalted portion of our nature which is the medium of our communication with the sanctifying Spirit of God ? And secondly, when the same Apostle, in his Epistle to the Ephcsians, exhorts his converts to be renewed ' by the Spirit of the mind' ~ for such is the accurate translation can we understand aright, or can we adequately explain these elliptical words, unless with Chrysostom, and I might here add Bishop Bull, we interpret them to mean the Holy Spirit, which is the inmate of the mind, the Holy Spirit, that dwells in the higher part of man, and makes man's spirit his taber- nacle ? 3 Thus, then, the spirit is the higher power within us, the medium of our communication with, and the very temple of the Holy Ghost ; and its completeness consists in its union with that blessed Spirit, both here and hereafter. A few words on the nature of the soul , its relation to the spirit, and its condition of integrity, and our imperfect investigation must conclude. As I before said, a knowledge of the term spirit almost implies that of soul. If the spirit be the higher and ruling side of our incorporeal nature, the soul must be the lower side, and the subject of the spirit's sway. But observe, brethren, we should 1 Ch. viii. 1 6. * Ch. iv. 73. 3 Sec notes and re IF. in loc. 122 THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [SERM. never exhaust the scriptural meaning of the term soul, if \ve failed to admit that Scripture often represents it to us as almost necessarily involving and including the spirit, as, in a word, being that which constitutes and makes up the true personality. It is thus that Scripture never speaks of the salvation of the spirit, but the salvation of the soul ; it is thus that the term soul becomes almost synonymous with that of heart, and points to that assemblage of feelings, movements, and impulses, of which the heart is the imaginary tabernacle. 1 It is thus that it is represented to us as poised, as it were, between the powers of the seen, and the powers of the unseen world, swayed to and fro between the flesh and the spirit, borne hither, borne thither, with the tide of their conflict, or standing the irresolute, yet not unmoved spectatress, of that fell and fearful strife. O well, indeed, might the Apostle, he who had felt all this within his own bosom, put up a prayer for every convert and saint of Thessalonica, that his soul, itself the very arena, as well as the prize of that fearful strife, might be preserved entire unto the coming of the Lord. And in what can that wholeness and entirety consist, save in its more complete union, by the medium of its higher congener, with the quickening spirit of God ; and, still more by its preservation, through Him who took flesh to save it, from all that works spiritual deterioration and decay, from the corrup- 1 See notes on i Tim. i. 5. V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAX. 123 tion of earth-born affections, the disintegrating powers of wilder passions, the disruptive force of lawless instincts, the gnawing tooth of baser cravings, the corrosion of lower cares, the fretting moth of earthliness, the rust of the world, and the canker of the flesh ? Even so does the wholeness and entirety of the body a profound and mysterious subject, to which we can now only thus briefly advert depend on the preservation of the outward fabric from the material corruption engendered by the lower appetites of the flesh, the physical depravations of self-indul- gence, intemperance, carnalities, and lust. AVe often speak lightly of such things, yet all tend to the untimely demolition of the outward taber- nacle ; all help to efface from the brow the image and lineaments of its Maker ; all help to stamp there- on the visible image of Satan, that image round which, traced as with the linger of death, for ever runs this legend and superscription, UK THAI' SOWKTH TO THK M.KSH, SHALL OK TilK KLKSII UKAl' COKUIT- T10N. 1 Finally then, to sum up hrine of the Holy ( i host. That the soul may be regarded more as the region of the feelings, affections, and 1 C:il. vi. S. THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. [SERM. impulses, of all that peculiarly individualizes and personifies. Lastly, that these three parts, especially the two incorporeal elements, are intimately asso- ciated and united, and form the media of communi- cation, both with each other, and with the higher and the lower elements. So that thus we may put before our thoughts these five things, the pheno- menal world, the body, the soul, the spirit, and the invisible kingdom of God, and may say, that as the body is the medium of communication between the soul and the phenomenal world, so the soul is the medium of communication between the body and the spirit, and the spirit the medium between the soul and the Holy Spirit of God. But let us not for one moment dream that subjects so deep, relations so mysterious, and interdependences so implicit, can be summed up in a single formula, or included in a single enunciation. In this hasty survey, we have left very many points of interest wholly unnoticed. We have discussed none of those passages in which soul and spirit are used with greater amplitude, and in which the one term is clearly understood to include the other ; we have not analysed their seeming interchanges, nor fully traced out their more than seeming distinctions. All we have done is to trace out a few outlines, and to lay down a few elementary definitions. Nevertheless, it is my humble conviction, that these outlines are not untruly drawn. !S T ay I would dare to say, that if any of you should feel induced to carry out these thoughts V.] THREEFOLD NATURE OF MAN. 125 for yourselves, and to supply what is deficient, you would perchance not only obtain a deeper insight into the peculiar language of Scripture, but also appreciate more fully the cssscntial character of those temptations that try alike body, soul, and spirit, that loosen the bands of the compound nature, and destroy the entirety of its constituent parts. May these feeble words have wrought in you an increased conviction, that deep indeed is the mystery of our humanity, and dreadful our responsibility, if, with such marvellous elements of our being, with principles thus fearfully and thus wonderfully com- bined, and a composite nature thus mysteriously perfect, we yield them to the service of their destroyers, the world, the flesh, and the devil, the threefold league against our threefold nature. May these words humbly serve to have quickened us all to dedicate all parts of our being, individually and collectively, to that triune God, who fashioned the body, who redeems the soul, and who sanctifies the spirit : that so, when the hour of earthly disunion takes place, when dust returns to dust, and soul and spirit depart unto God, we may, with a humble trustfulness and hope, commit ourselves to our Creator, and await the hour when the mortal shall put on immortality, and all shall be again united in holiness, purity, and incorruption. 126 SERMON VI. THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. REV. xiv. 13. And I heard a voice from heaven' saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth : Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours ; and their works do follow them. rpHIS, brethren, is the special day in our Academic -L year in which we are more particularly called upon by the service 1 in which we are about to share, to meditate upon lofty and elevating themes, and doctrines of grave and mysterious import. On this day, we, the living members of this ancient Uni- versity, commemorate the bounty of those wise, and good, and holy men who have helped to make us what we are, who have laid the foundation-stones of our institutions, and have built them up with their love, and their bounty, and their prayers. On such a day, it seems impossible to repress the yearn- ing of our spirits to realize in some measure the nature of our spiritual union with those whom we 1 The Commemoration of Benefactors. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 127 so gratefully and lovingly commemorate, it seems almost unnatural to cheek the desire to dwell upon the mystical bond that unites ns with the holy dead, and to meditate upon the more special applications of the doctrine of the communion of saints. On such a day, then, I make no apology for direct- ing your meditations to these more mysterious, yet most consolatory aspects of our faith ; nay, I should feel that I had failed to perform the duty allotted to me, if I were to pass over, with an unsynipatliizing reserve, the solemn subjects which the services of the day bring before us. Cold, indeed, would it be, on such an occasion, to make no allusion to doctrines that ever lie near the heart of every thinking man, and that in hours of sadder musings, in afflictions, and bereavement, and desolation, are perchance the only fountains of comfort, the only ministers of hope, when all around seems hopelessness and despair. I feel, indeed, that we are venturing upon grave topics round which many a cloud of uncertainty still lingers, 1 feel that we must pass over ground on which the dust of controversy is not yet laid, that we must consider doubtful questions, and endeavour to adjust mysterious relations; still we shall be wise to dare all, rather than lend ourselves to the melancholy realism of the present day, that never regards itself more judicious than when it prac- tically denies all the vital truths \\hich emanate from the doctrine of the communion of saints, and avows its indifference to the loftv consolations 128 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [sERM. that may be derived from the commemoration of the holy dead. It may be not wholly uninteresting or unprofitable to pause briefly to consider, to what tendencies, and to what developments of modern thought, we can reasonably ascribe this practical disregard of what is at the same time both so edifying and so consolatory. To what are we to ascribe the present open disregard of the doctrine of the communion of saints ? Appa- rently to the influence of two opposing forms of error, both of which root themselves in the modern views entertained in reference to death, and what lies beyond it. On the one hand, we have a melan- choly Sadduceeism, that seems to regard it almost a point of religious duty to dismiss all considerations respecting our brethren that sleep, a Sadduceeism that thrusts its dead hastily out of sight, that ignores their examples, that disoAvns association with them, that practically regards death as the end of all things, and the grave a chasm between the visible and invisible Church too wide to allow even thought to overleap. On the other hand, we may everywhere recognise a buoyant and ardent theosophy, that sees in the future only a purer and sublimated present, a future in which activities will be more persistent, energies more concentrated, fields of labour and duty more inviting and more expanded ; that regards life as an antepast, death a natural process of purifica- tion, a prescribed mode of riddance from earthly and material elements, and the grave a meet place wherein I.J COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 159 to deposit the cast-off weeds of an obstructive and cumbersome humanity. 1 Now I shall not on the present occasion attempt a confutation of either of these views, I will not even pause to show how they involve the gravest miscon- ceptions of the cardinal doctrines of Christianity ; how the tendency of the one is to a dreary isolation and materialism, of the other to an almost more repulsive spirituality : I allude to them only as both truly existing in the present day, and as both so seriously at variance with the consolations that flow from the doctrine of the communion of saints, as to cause it, if not at present to be openly denied, yet to be practically disregarded. With the one of these views, the communion of saints, if it mean anything at all, is either wholly removed to another sphere of existence, or is deemed little more than a community in religious prejudice, an acknowledgment of a partial and sectarian union. With the other, it implies little more than the belief in a future 1 reunion of persons and interests under more auspicious circumstances, and with fewer elements of impediment and change than in the present state of things. The one, in fact, is the creed of a selfish and often hopeless Christianity, the other the creed of an aspiring and hop:Tul paganism. Both diller gravely, in all iheir ultimate tendencies, from the truth, and from one another ; both, however, have some points of union, 1 Seu Scrim in IV. ji = :. K 130 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. both some common forms of opposition to catholic truth. These points of union may, perhaps, ulti- mately be reduced to two, a direct or practical denial of the existence of any intermediate state, and, as a consequence of it, the denial of any real existing relations between us who linger here and our brethren who have passed within the vail. And here two lines of argument present themselves : either we may endeavour to substantiate the existence of an intermediate state, and then deduce the rela- tions that subsist between the living and the departed, or, on the other hand, we may endeavour to show that there are real and true relations between the members of the visible and invisible Church, and leave the considerations of the exact state to follow in the way of natural consequence. The latter course of argument is perhaps most edifying, and most in harmony with the present occasion. Let us endeavour, then, to take up that portion of the doctrine of the communion of saints which treats more especially of the actual relations between the faithful who are on earth, and the faithful who have departed, that portion of the subject which has been somewhat briefly dismissed by Bishop Pearson, 1 as involving perplexing relations, but which, I still ven- ture to think, iu these latter days of materialism and incredulity, is of the highest practical importance. 1 See note A. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 131 Let us investigate these relations calmly and dispas- sionately, and, proceeding from more obvious and general conditions of communion, prepare ourselves brieHy to consider the more specific relations which the services of the day suggest, and in which the chief interest of these speculations has always ap- peared to reside. To begin, then ; there is, in the first place, clearly a communion between the saints on earth and the saints that have entered their rest, based on the rela- tion of Lore. This was the foundation of all the touching commemorations that we find in the ancient Liturgies. 1 In those days of a more real and stirring devotion, the dead in Christ were not forgotten, the unity of the Church was a living and vital truth. Those who were still tarrying on earth for their Lord's coming would not, and could not believe them- selves separated from those whom they had loved on earth, who had joined in the same prayers, who had knelt at the same altar, who had broken the same bread, who had become members of the same mysti- cal body. \\ here were t/n-i/ now whom thev had so loved and so reverenced'' the holy, and the just, and tin' true; they who had been bound to them !>v such hallowed ties; who with them had so earnestlv and so longingly awaited the Lord's coming, who had spread abroad His word, who had shared 1 1 is cross, \\lio had so eagerly sought to till up the mvstical 1 Scr n.. tv 11. K >, 132 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [sERM. measure of His sufferings/ and who had fallen on sleep before all was accomplished. Where were they now? Were they lying in dull unbroken slumber, wrapt in unconsciousness, and darkness, and oblivion ? 2 Or were they far, far distant, in un- known realms, pursuing with all the energy and in- tensity of purely spiritual natures mysterious missions, which were ever carrying them farther and farther from those with whom they once had so bravely toiled and suffered, and with whom they had borne the heat and burden of the outworn day ? Ah ! no ; the heart revolted against such an unsympathizing theology ; the spirit within bare witness against it. The ancient Church felt and knew that its true members were all united, whether in life or death, inseparable, whether on earth or in Paradise, all one. It could not, and would not, forget them. It felt that, though absent in flesh, they were nigh, very nigh in spirit, praising with them the same Lord, praying with them for the hastening of His kingdom. Verily Love was the corner-stone of the doctrine of the communion of the Saints. Again, the communion between the holy living and the holy dead exists in the common relation of Faith. Could they, Avho had been sharers in that vital ele- ment, who together had realized that substance of things hoped for, 3 that evidence of things not seen, be dissociated cither in life or in deatli ? What is 1 Col. i. 24. 2 See note C. 3 Heh. xi. i. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 133 there in the deposition and divestiture of these earthly elements that can affect a union based on the partici- pation in a common spiritual principle, which the everlasting word of God teaches us is the sole con- dition of vitality, which an Apostle has declared, out of the depth of his own personal experiences, as the sole instrument and medium of all true life, whether in the flesh or in the spirit ? Relations may be changed, degrees altered ; the faith of the pilgrim in the flesh may be less constant and vivid than in the unclothed spirit, that sees with an inward eye along a blighter perspective, where earthborn mist and vapour can neither becloud nor obscure. AY hat now appears indistinct and incoherent may then be found clear in outline, and faultless in symmetry ; what seems now but as the mirage, may then be descried as the solid towers and battlements of the city of (!od. The very passage from the world of sense to the world of spirits may involve heightened conditions of belief, a purer and more sublimated faith. Changes there may be ; development we may expect ; but till faith cease in the fulness of fruition, till we all be for ever and for ever with Him, in whom we have hoped and believed, faith will not cease to be an ever-living bond that connects the holy living and the holy dead, a bond that time cannot weaken, or death destroy, but that remains vital, energizing, and indissoluble. Scarcely one of the ancient liturgies leaves this holy bond unnoticed, or i'ails, directly or indirectly, 134 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [SERM. to ground its commemoration of the departed on this common principle of union and life. Thus it is that, in the venerable Oriental liturgy that tradition has ascribed to St. Basil, 1 the Church militant calls upon God to be mindful of the departed, who have pro- fessed the right word of faith. Thus it is that, in the ancient liturgy of Constantinople, the early Chris- tians specially offered unto God their reasonable service for those who rested in faith. In faith all were united, all of the same fraternal band ; living servants of the same living Lord, members of the same body, branches of the same vine. Thirdly, there is the blessed union of Hojie. In this the waiting and longing servant of the Lord was one with those who had approached to realization, but who had not yet received the crown. In hope, the Church on earth was tarrying and praying ; in hope, the Church in Paradise was awaiting its consumma- tion of bliss. Hope bound both together in a living unity ; in hope was the salvation of the living ; in hope the blessedness of the dead. Hope and Faith were the notes of the Church of the first-born. Nor is.it without a deep significance, that the Apostle St. tkhn has put most prominently forward amid those who were bound together in the mournful com- panionship of woe and perdition, those in whom these vital principles had no place. To the fearful and to the unbelieving, no less than to the murderer and 1 See note D. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 135 the sorcerer, is meted out the bitter portion of the burning lake, and the dread issues of the irreversible sentence. 1 But may we proceed further? Have we any scriptural grounds for asserting a yet more intimate communion, a communion not merely consisting in the participation in common elements of life, but in common acts of adoration ? Is there any trace of a yet more mysterious bond, the bond of united sup- plication, thanksgiving, and prayer ? Let us be cautious ; let us be circumspect ; let us beware of intruding with a fleshly mind into what we see not. Yet let us not from a false timidity or polemical scrupulosity, be too ready to give up all the adorable consolations which the word of God and the services of our Church seem so fully to minister. Prayer, in its most inclusive form, has three prin- cipal aspects. It is euc/iaristtc, in which we may include the service of praise ; it is ftupplicatory ; it is intercessory. Have we communion in all, or in any of these, with the faithful departed ? When our blended voices rise up to God, are there portions of our prayers in which those who oucc joined with us may be united with us still ; or is it true, in the most sternly literal sense of the words, that the living, the living alone, can praise and glorify the living God? 2 Let us consider briefly the service of Praixe. Can 1 Key. xxi. S. 2 Jsuiah xxxviii. 19. 136 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [SEKM. we doubt that in this there must still be a union of a very real and vital nature ? When, in that noble hymn in our morning service, alike laudatory and commemorative, we declare that the glorious com- pany of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world, praise the Lord, are we uttering mere unmeaning words ? Are we using language merely figurative and symbolical ? If we know that in some portions of our service of praise we use words with which angels glorify their Creator, yea, if we are sure that we are permitted to utter accents that day and night are sounding in the courts of heaven, which the most transcendent order of created beings, the mystic Four that surround the eternal throne, are pouring forth in ceaseless ado- ration ; if we are one with angels, and archangels, and all the company of heaven, in ascribing praise and honour to Him that was, and is, and is to come, 1 can the holy dead be silent in that universal hymn ? Amid those prayers that mingled with the incense before the throne, those prayers that the rapt Evangelist was specially moved to record as the prayers of all saints } z are the praises and prayers of the saintly departed alone wanting ? Is the sting of death so sharp, has the grave such victory ? It can- not be. Though we may not define in what measure, in Avhat place, or with what precise circumstances of 1 Rev. iv. 8. a Rev. viii. 3. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 137 union, yet it surely docs not seem a rash dream to imagine that when our voices rise up to God in united praise and adoration, there may be other voices that we hear not rising to heaven simul- taneously with ours, there may be others that we see not bowing down in not unlike homage before the Lord of Sabaoth, and adoring the Uni- versal King. 1 May we advance a step further? Can there be any union in worship in its supplicatory form ? Are there any prayers in which we and those who have departed can have any participation ? Is there a communion so close and living as this ? "VVe do not seem justified in speaking with confidence. Yet there are mysterious notices in the last revelation of God to man, that would lead us to believe that there are prayers and aspirations that are and must be common to the universal Church of Christ. AVhcn we stand by the grave of a departed brother, and pray the Lord that He would shortly accomplish the number of His elect, and hasten His kingdom, when in our daih services we use our Master's words, and pray that 7//.v kingdom may conn', are there no echoes of any sympathizing prayer from those who ha\e ceased to belong to the Church on earth ? \Yas there not one at least who was permitted to hear the passionate tone's of a strangely accordant supplication? 'And 1 sa\v under the altar the souls of them that wero 1 See n.. to K. 138 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [SERM. slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held : and they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth ?' l Though it can never be wise to press unduly such mysterious revelations, yet surely it is not presump- tuous to entertain the belief that there are prayers which so wholly transcend all earthly conditions, all relations of the visible and material, prayers so mysteriously comprehensive, that in them both the visible and invisible Church may join in one mingled voice of supplication. And that voice shall not die out into silence till all be fulfilled, and until He that Cometh hath come, and no more doth tarry. Are we justified in taking one step yet further ? We have seen that it is probable that there is a com- munion of praise between the visible and invisible Church. We have seen that it is not improbable that there may be certain forms of supplication in which both may share. Have we scriptural authority for asserting, or just grounds for believing, that in the third form of prayer, the intercessory, both may still further be participators ; that they may pray for us who are still fighting the good fight, and we for them who have fought it out to the end, but to whom the last day has not yet brought its crown and its consummated felicities ? Let us spend a few closing 1 Rev. vi. 9, 10. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 139 thoughts on the probabilities or possibilities of such a supposition. First, have we reasons from Scripture for thinking that the holy dead pray for us ; and, if Scripture is silent, docs such a supposition prepare the way for deductions inconsistent with any of the fundamental principles of our Faith ? The answer is short : Scripture does not supply us with any just and certain grounds for concluding that the holy dead pray for the living. Scripture hints, indeed, more than once, as in the case of the rich man in the parable and his surviving brethren, 1 at the existence of an enduring sympathy between the living and the dead. It leaves us indeed, not without the deep consciousness that the faithful departed who loved us on earth, love us still love us ever ; yea, I know not that it condemns the thought that their love may in some way evince itself in actions; that gentle footsteps may be near us waiting with unseen ministries; that loved faces, cleansed from the dishonours of the grave, may be gazing on us with an immortal sympathy which may reach into the inner depths of our spiritual nature, and console, and strengthen, and quicken. 2 But farther than these irrepressible suggestions of love we know not; and we may fervently bless (!od for the veil he has so mercifully interposed. \Ve may adore 1 1 is mercy, that He has saved us from the in- evitable snare that would have attended the actual 1 Luku xvi. i~, 28. 1 Sou note F. 140 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [SERM. knowledge of any intercessory functions on the part of the members of the invisible Church. It would be almost impossible to resist aspirations that these purer prayers might ascend to God for us. And aspirations would lead to entreaties, and entreaties to prayers ; and at last we should find ourselves on the brink of that frightful form of error, that dares to multiply mediators, that debases itself lower than the angel-worshippers of Colossse, that wearies the holy dead with invocations which startle their very repose in Paradise, yea, that only fill them with a still more passionate longing for the hour, when all that tends to derogate from their Master's glories and from the efficacy of His all-sufficient sacrifice, all tJtat lovetli and maketli a lie 1 shall be judged with the judgment of the second death. Again, on the other side, can we pray for them ? Does Scripture suggest or authorize such a fervent expression of the intensity of our hope and our love ? Can we on the one hand dare to say confidently, yen ? Are we prepared, on the other, to say that those most ancient prayers for the refreshment of the saints that sleep, their merciful judgment, and their consumma- tion of felicity, prayers that have found a place in every early liturgy of the world, and are to some ex- tent echoed in our prayer for the Church militant, are fondly and vainly devised? Are we so hasty as to denounce the guarded expression of prayerful 1 llev. xxii. i ;. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 141 hope that will form a part of this day's service ? I trust not. Let us treat the question calmly and dis- passionately. Scripture is for the most part silent. It certainly does not enjoin it preceptively, for in the passage that bids us pray for all men, 1 the speci- fications which follow peculiarly limit the interces- sions to the cases of the lir'niy. Nor can we confidently say that it suggests it by way of ex- ample ; for though St. Paul's prayer for Oncsiphorus does not unnaturally bear that construction,- yet to found positively a doctrine, on the supposition that the preceding words ' the household of Onesiphorus ' imply that the master of it was no more, seems in the highest degree unwise and precarious. Scrip- ture is silent ; yet antiquity plainly speaks. How then are we to decide? What opinion are we to form on this immemorial practice of the ancient Church ? Perhaps the following observations will lead us to some sort of general decision. First, no calm student of antiquity can fail to observe, that the practice of praying for the dead had ever a distinct tendency to dangerous progres- sions and developments. We first meet with com- memorations in which communion 'in _/ed and salu- tary teaching of example the (Mid mainly proposed. We next meet with distinct intercessory prayers, yet 1 I Tim. ii. i. a t-cc- note ('. 142 COMMUNION OF SAINTS. [SERM. only for the holy dead, and in language of restrained and edifying simplicity. A step onward leads us to compassionate extensions of prayer for those whose state is doubtful ; a step further, and we observe a lapse into prayers even for the reprobate, and we begin to meet with melancholy ideas of short-lived consolations that it was possible to supply to those in anticipatory torment. 1 We soon hear the not un- reasonable protests of Aerius ; 3 and we find our- selves, amid doubtful language even from Catholic Fathers, drifting into morbid hopes and self-in- terested superstitions ; and at last silently, yet surely, borne onward into the resuscitated paganism of Purgatory, and into all the frightful abuses which that perverted doctrine imported into the Church of Christ. Secondly, we cannot fail to observe, that prayers for the dead lose much of their propriety, if not their efficacy, from our ignorance of the exact state of the departed. Though we may wisely adopt the ancient and Catholic belief, that the holy dead are in a place of great peace and blessedness, hopefully awaiting their final consummation of bliss, and their portion in the first resurrection ; and that the unholy dead, in some silent abodes of misery and darkness, are despairingly awaiting the issues of the judgment, and the accomplishment of the final sentence ; though we may adopt such a belief with some degree 1 See note H. 2 See note I. VI.] COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 113 of confidence, yet still, even thus, our knowledge is far too limited to allow us in our public services to adopt any other language than that of the most generic supplication, and the most cautious and guarded prayer. To approach the throne of grace with supplications in behalf of what is unknown, uncertain, or irreversible, is fearfully to offend the eternal majesty of God, and to do daring violence to the true nature and essence of prayer. These two considerations, first, the tendency of reciprocal intercession to develop itself into two fatal and destructive forms of error, worship of the creature on this side, and purgatory or universalism on that ; and secondly, our real ignorance of the state of those for whom we would fain pray, may lead us finally to the conclusion, that the reformed Church of Eng- land, in its second Prayer-book, showed its wisdom in silently removing from its regular and general services prayers, that, by no necessary connexion, but by the gradual corruption of the times, had become associated with perilous error. 1 And yet again, the antiquity and universality of such prayers may lead us also consistently to acknowledge, that our Church further shoAvcd its wisdom in not specifi- cally cona.VTiKWTpov jEvicrQai TOV \6yov mi TrpoerwTroTroieT TOV t:6rr/j.or inravra TOVTOV', in p. 643, we find the KTIGIQ further defined as dta ni [ctj'^pwTroj'J irarra "yti'oplt'T}, and distinguished from man as devoid of reason, il -yap ?/ KTlfTtQ TOVTO 7TO(f7, TToXXw flO.\\OV fji OlKatOV TOVTO tTTl^ElKvilffQai TOV Xoyw Tf-ipipli'ov ] Theodoret, in loc., Vol. iii. p. 88 (ed. Schulze), cicdfTKEi ci, we irami ?/ K~imc ?/ 6 p u> p, I v rf, 6i'i]r>}y iXa^e ipvtriv ', Cyrill. in Cramer, Caten. p. 134, 246, /,-at aur// TTCIJTWC '/ K-inic jjL^dpi^oaOiitrerai Trpoc ~o CL/JLEIVOV, T>]V Trpe- Trovcrav role TOTE Kiupolc av^ovrra mruorarru'. Kot Trpoc ye TOVTO j'/jUUf,' O OtCTTrtlTtOC IlfVpOC EVCOld^ElV OVK Ea, EI7TU)l' OTi ovpai'ovc KCU KCLLVIIV jfji 1 caret ~a eTrayye'X/zara CIVTOV Origen, m loc. (Vol. vii. p. 98, ed. Lomm), and more decidedly, de Princip. i. 7 (Vol. xxi. p. 120, ed. NOTES TO SERMON I. 149 Lomm), seems to refer the KT'KTIQ to what has been in- vested with a matt-rial and corruptible bodily substance ; but the interpretation is evidently somewhat subordinated to preconceived speculations on the corruptibility of the corporeal; comp. Tertull. adv. Hermog. cap. ir. The list of patristic references could be much increased, but enough perhaps has been adduced generally to justify the assertion to which the note refers. NOTE C, p. 4. By the term ' widest application' I do not intend to imply one so wide as that urged by Olshausen (see note A), but, merely the widest that is in any way compatible with the terms of the revelation. For the substantially accordant views of the Greek Fathers on K-i have been less \iuiform in their interpretation. With the opinion of Augustine cited below, contrast that of Ambrose (fyiiyt. xxxiv. Vol. iii. p. 1076, ed. Migne), who appears to extend the reference of kTi<7if to the heavenly bodies, and that of Gregory (Mora/, in Job, xxxiv. 1 8, Vol. i. p. 675, ed. Migne), who appears to re- strict it to mankind. It is, however, not always easy to elicit the exact and definite opinion of the patristic writers on special texts, except in their commentaries ; as they not uncommonly, in their general treatises, refer to pas- sages as illustrating, without necessarily precisely coincid- ing with, the opinions they are at the time advancing. Of modern writers, liishop Jeremv Taylor is often simi- larly varied in his application of the same texts : in one treatise, for example, we may find one view taken of a debated passage, elearlv and decidedly : in another treatise we mav lind a very different view, and without any hint of a change ol opinion. 150 NOTES TO SERMON I. NOTE D, p. 4. The exact words of Augustine are as follows : ' Quod autem ait, Nam expectatio creatures, etc., usque ad id quod ait, et %pse, etc., sic intelligendum est, ut neque sensuni dolendi et gemendi opinemur esse in arboribus et oleribus et lapidibus, et caeteris hujuscemodi creaturis ; hie enim error Manichceorum est: neque Angelos sanctos vanitati subjectos esse arbitremur, et de his existimemus quod liberabuntur a servitute interitas, cum interituri utique non sint ; sed omnem creaturam in ipso homine sine ulla calumnia cogitemus.' Prop, ex Ep. ad Rom., 53, Vol. iii. p. 2074 (ed. Migne). NOTE E, p. 4. The Greek Fathers, e. g. Chrysostom, in loc., and Gre- gory, cited by Cramer (Caten. in Rom. p. 246), appear to have felt no difficulty in the prosopopoeia. The words of the former are very much to the point ; ware ce i/jLavTt- k'wrepov yEviadcu rov \oyov KCU TrpoawTroTroiel TOY TOllTOf' (ITTEp K'ftl Ol 7TpO0J/~at TTOlOlimt', TT /cat ra ra' ov^ ra ravra if.i\v^ci etrai ro/.irrwpf.i', ov "iva \oyLcr HOY riva cH>/-iei' flo\)}v /^aOio/JLev T&V uya6a', we KCU rwi' arafcrO/'/rwr avrwv mOtx- vovpivr]v. Modern poetry has expressed itself in terms still more decided : Es geht ein ullgeineines \Veiuen, So weit die stille Sterne scheineu, Durch alle Adern der Natur ; Es riugt und seufzt nach der Verkliirung, Entu'egenschmachtend der Gewiihrung In Liebesaugst die Creatur. Fr. -von Scldi ieL NOTES TO SERMON I. 151 NOTE F, p. 6. * Dicitur Deus b i/7roraac suramus omnium rerutn mo- derator (Rom. xi. 36), et quern terrain exsecratum esse Genesis diserte testetur, iii. 17, v. 29,' Fritzsche in loc.; so also De Wette and Meyer. The early Greek commen- tators are not coincident in their views ; Chrysostom refers it generally to man (eta ere. ruv &vdpwTrov), Theodo- ret, more correctly, to the opoi> rov c^ioi/py/jffajroc : so also (of the Latin writers) Ambrose, who (Epist. xxxiv.) dis- tinctly refers it to the ' divinum arbitrium.' NOTE G, p. 7. The derivation of yimraiorrje is n t perfectly certain. The most probable opinion, however, is that the word stands in philological affinity with MAU, p.arevu) ; couip. Pott, Ely in. Forsch, Vol. i. p. 242, but see also p. 8. NOTE H, p. 8. It is to be lamented that a man so favourably known to the scientific world as the late Professor Oersted should have expressed almost undisguised contempt for opinions which, as he himself admits, were conceived to rest on the authority of St. Paul : ' Neither Christ nor any of the biblical writers who benefited by his oral instruction [had St. Paul no special and personal revelations, 2 Cor. xii. 7 }\ have mentioned the corruption of nature by the fall. When we therefore refer to the Bible we must rely on St. Paul alone. I will leave it to theologians to determine the right interpretation of his expressions ; it appears to me that he only intended the abuse of nature, on man's part, and the great improvement in our nature which must follow from the improvement of the human race. . . . The whole world was always limit- ; and no one ever be- lieved that it first became so by man's .sin ; but all finite 152 NOTES TO SERMON I. existence is by its nature imperfect. Every finite object is limited and transitory, and when viewed separate from its connexion with, the whole of which it is a part, we have sufficient cause to lament over the imperfection of the finite ; but if we do not only regard the individual objects merely apart from the whole, and if I may so express it as if it were their duty to be independent, we shall be led to another mode of contemplation. The more an object constitutes an exclusive whole, the more we see in it the revelation of eternity. In the totality of the finite we first see the revelation of its eternal origin, so far, of course, as it is possible to see it from our point of view.' The Soulin Nature, p. 189 (Bohn). The panthe- istic bias of these statements seems mournfully apparent. NOTE I, p. 8. 'The carnivora, organized to enjoy a life of rapine at the expense of the vegetable-feeders, to restrain their undue increase, and abridge the pangs of the maimed and the sickly, were duly adjusted in numbers, size, and ferocity to the fell task assigned to them in the organic economy of the pre-Adamite world. Beside a British tiger of larger size, and with proportionally larger paws than that of Bengal, there existed a stronger Feline animal (Macliairodus} of equal size, which, from the great length and sharpness of its sabre-shaped canines, was probably the most ferocious and destructive of its peculiarly carnivorous family.' Owen, Hist, of British Fossil Mammals, p. xxiv. Compare also Mantell, Wonders of Geology, Vol. i. p. 182 (Bohn). NOTE J, p. 14. It is slightly doubtful whether on is to be translated, as in the Vulgate, Claromontane, and our own Authorized Version, ' because? or 'that? as apparently in the Syviae NOTES TO SERMON I. 153 version, and as adopted by Fritzsclie, De \Vette, Meyer, and most recent commentators. The immediate con- nexion with i\irict in the latter sense seems so natural and direct (comp. Phil. i. 20), and the only counter-argument, that the nominative tti/r*) // Krlmg would thus scarcely be repeated, is of so very little weight (for is there not a special and studied emphasis in the repetition?), that we may perhaps with confidence adopt the proposed trans- lation. So apparently, Chrysostom, text, o), KUI iniiq. \7rici ; iiTi ml avn] // Krlffic iXtvdepcdOt'jffercn. W hether we connect ITT t\-ict with the finite verb V7rmiy/j (De Wette, Meyer), or with the participle i/n-ort'-a (Chrys.), is perhaps of less consequence : the former con- struction, however, is to be preferred, as bringing tT* t\Trici into more distinct prominence, and as supplying an additional confirmation of the uTroKapucoria of the creature. XOTK K, p. 1 6. Some interesting remarks on this subject will be found in Professor Schouw's work, The .Earth, Plant*, and Man, ]>. 228 sq. (liolni), in which the action of man on nature, and the destruction that follows in the train of eivilix ition, are calmly and fairly considered. On the whole, the opinion arrived at by Professor Schouw, though, perhaps, somewhat over-stated, seems approximately just, 'that in every case civilization richly recompenses the calamities that follow from it' (p. 23*)); still, considering the subject theologically, the fact of these <-a/:t and often reckless destructions of vegetable life remains, and we have to consider how far the permissive H'-l'^D ((Jen. i. 2S) can in all eases be pleaded in justification. At any rate, and that is all with which we are now concerned, the violence done to nature is an acknowledged fact. \\ ith regard to the sort of natural ri-trUmtlun which follows on 154 NOTES TO SERMON IT. the reckless destruction of forests, the following remarks of Humboldt deserve consideration : ' When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with imprudent precipitancy, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents whenever great rains fall on the heights. As the sward and moss disappear with the brushwood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course ; and instead of slowly augmenting the level of rivers by progressive nitrations, they furrow, during heavy showers, the sides of the hills, bearing down the loosened soil, and forming sudden and destructive inundations. Hence it results that the clearing of forests, the want of permanent springs, and the existence of torrents, are three phenomena closely connected together.' Humboldt, Travels in America, Vol. ii. p. 9 (Bohu). SERMON II. NOTE A, p. 28. Some curious thoughts on the creation of destructive animals will be found in an essay by Von Meyer, Blatter fur Holiere Wahrheit, Vol. i. p. 342 ; comp. also Schlegel, Philos. of Life, p. 120 sq. (Bolm), who, however, has only superficially touched the subject, and on premises appa- rently not scientifically tenable. The statement of Ivirby, Bridgewater Treatise, Vol. i. p. 6 1 (Bolm), ' that they [predaceous animals] must originally have eaten grass or straw, like the ox, and neither injured nor destroyed their fellow-beasts of a more harmless character,' cannot be maintained in the face of modern ecological NOTES TO SERMON II. 155 discoveries. All, perhaps, on which we can safely insist is the really wide difference between a personal and pro- gressive being like man and the non-personal and circum- scribed individual of a genus ; see Miiller, Lehre von d. Sunde, Vol. ii. p. 389. Pain and suffering to us, and pain and suffering to them, seem, even at a first glance, to involve so many elements of difference, that we may as well take into consideration our own real ignorance, before we venture to question the fatherly beneficence of God. Arguments derived from the existence of various appliances on the part of the predatory animals, to shorten pain (Livingstone, Travels, p. 12), deserve consideration, but really make but a slight contribution towards even a partial solution of this profound and difficult question. NOTE B, p. 29. Though the early writers are not agreed as to the exact time when angels were created (see Augustine, de Civ. Dei, xi. 9), still the opinion that they existed before the world was created is very general (Ambrose, Hexatn. I. 5. 19) ; nor are we without some truces of a supposed connexion between their fall, and, if not the creation, yet the final glorification of Man. Thus Augustine (n- ckirid., xxxix., comp. de Civ. Dei. xxii. i) speaks of the ' partem hominum reparatam' as designed to supply the place of the lapsed angels. The exact opinion, however, here alluded to, is chielly maintained in the works of the mystics of the seventeenth century ; partially l>y Corn. Agrippa, de Occult. Philus., but very distinctly by Belimen, who appears tu have considered the creation of the world a sort of sequel on the fall of Lucifer: ' A uff dieses ist nun Kiinig Lucifer aus seinem koniglichen Loco oder stuhl gestossen worden, welchen er an Jem ortlie hatte, wo erst der erschaffene Himmel ist, und ist alda bald die Scliopfung dicker Welt drauff gefolget,' Aurui-, eh. ix. 44, 156 NOTES TO SERMON II. comp. xviii. 10 sq. (Amst. 1682). Something similar appears to have been in the mind of Schlegel, when, in his fifth Lecture on the Philosophy of Life, he writes as follows : 'As then, by the death of the first man, who was not created for, nor originally designed for death, death has passed upon the whole human race ; so by the earlier fall of him, who had been the first and most glorious of created spirits, death passed upon the universe, that eternal death whose fire is unquenchable,' p. 90 (Bolin), NOTE C, p. 30. This statement must rely for its proof on the arguments of the first Sermon. It is satisfactory to observe that substantially the same view is maintained by one of the more able of the recent commentators on the Book of Genesis, Fr. Delitzsch, and by the able historian of the Old Testament, I. H. Kurtz. The words of this latter writer, as cited by Delitzsch, are remarkable, and worthy of citation : ' Die ISTatur bietet uns nicht mehr die reiue Handschrift Gottes, sie ist in manchen Partieu ein Palimpsest, em Codex rescnptus ; eine Feindeshand ist dariiber gerathen.' Delitzsch, Genesis Auwjel. p. 135. The question is discussed by Pye Smith (Scripture and Science, Lect. vii. 2), but apparently much embarrassed by regarding Vanity and Death as substantially identical. From the admirers of the ' Positive Philosophy,' as it is termed, I can expect but little sympathy ; I observe with sorrow, though not with surprise, that even the ' dogma of the condemnation of mankind through Adam,' is denounced by Comte, as 'morally more revolting than the dogma of exclusive salvation,' Positive Philosophy, Part vi. 9, Vol. ii. p. 276. (Translation by Martiueau). NOTES TO SERMON II. 157 NOTE D, p. 33. Some intei-esting remarks on the subject of Shcol will be found in Delitzsch, System der BlbL Psychol. vi. 3, p. 353 sq., and in Hofmanu, der Schri/lbeweia, Vol. i. p. 499 sq. Several separate treatises on the state after death, as revealed in the Old Testament, have recently appeared in Germany. Of these may be specified Oehler, Vet. Test. Sententia, &c. (1846), and Bb'tticher, de Infer is rebutqne post mortem futur is, &c. Dresden, 1846. To state, with great brevity, the distinction between the T)N$ of the Old, and $crjc of the New Testament, we may perhaps say, that the latter does not seem to have been regarded as other than universal and all-embracing; where- as ]Q proper, for the souls of the wicked. NOTE E, p. 35. See Gesenius, Lexicon, s. v. 13^ p. DCXLIII. ed. Tregelles (London, 1847). NOTE F, p. 33. There seems clearly a close philological affinity between lIAo- and IIKNO-. The principle on which this atlinity depends has been termed the ' Evanescence of the nasal Liquid,' and has been well discussed by the late Dr. Donaldson, in a paper read before the Philological Society ; 1'ransactiuns, 1854, No. 14 ; see esp. p. jSy. NOTE G, p. 41. For a fuller investigation of this difficult passage, see 158 NOTES TO SERMON II. Commentary on Phil, and Col. p. 139 (ed. 2), where the present view is investigated and explained at some length. The above interpretation has the authority of Augustine ; and is maintained with only slight differences in detail, by Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, and Beza. The Romanist Church, on the contrary, as we might have anticipated, strongly presses the text as supporting the doctrine of the merits of the Saints, and their accumulated store of good works. NOTE H. p. 48. Though this seems to be a principle of the Divine government which, probably, few graver thinkers have not observed and verified, I do not remember to have seen it brought forward with such distinctness as it seems to deserve. It is noticed by Charnock in the following ob- servations, which, though not by any means critically exact, will still bear citation : ' God proportions punish- ment to sin, and writes the cause of the judgment in the forehead of the judgment itself. Sodom burned in lust, and was consumed by fire from heaven. The Jews sold Christ for thirty pence, and, at the taking of Jerusalem, thirty of them were sold for a penny. So Adonibezek cut off the thumbs and great toes of others, and he is served in the same kind (Judges i. 7). The Babel-builders designed an indissoluble union, and God brings upon them unintelligible confusion. And in Exodus ix. 9, the ashes of the furnace, where the Israelites burnt the Egyptian bricks, sprinkled towards heaven, brought boils upon the Egyptians' bodies, that they might feel in their own what pain they had caused in the Israelites' flesh ; and find, by the smart of the inflamed scab, what they had made the Israelites endure. The waters of the river Nile are turned into blood, wherein they had stifled the breath of the Israelites' infants ; and at last the prince, NOTES TO SERMON III. 159 t and the flower of their nobility, are drowned in the Red Sea.' Tlie Wisdom of God, Part v. Vol. ii. p. 226 (ed. Parsons). Lond. 1815. SERMON III. NOTE A, p. 51. The Scriptural aspects of the subject of death have been very ably noticed by Julius Miiller, in his Lehre von der Siiude, Vol. ii. p. 388 sq. ; to which excellent work I am indebted for several thoughts and suggestions that appear in this sermon. Of the more recent treatises on the subject, I may specify Krabbe, Lehre von der Silnde und vom Tode, Hamburg, 1836; Man, vom Tode dem tiolde der 8 linden, Kiel, 1841 ; an article by Weisse on Eschatology, in the htudien u. Kritiken, for 1836, Part ii. p. 271 sq. ; and a good sermon preached by the late Dean Buckland before the University of Oxford (Murray, 1839). For the more strictly psychological phenomena of death, see Schubert, Geschichte der tieclc, Vol. ii. p. 434 sq. : and the treatise of Delitzsch, Blbl. Psychologic, vi. i, p. 345 sq. ; and finally, for the more purely scientific aspects of the subject of life generally, \Vhe well, Pliilos. of In- ductive Sciences, Book ix., more esp. chap. ii. 5. NOTE B, p. 53. See the comments of Weisse in Studien 11. Krit. 1836, p. 282 294, esp. 2<)2 sq., by whom this and similar views are briefly discussed. NOTE C, p. 54. The opinions here summed up in a single paragraph NOTES TO SERMON 111. t> will be found masqued in various disguises in the writings of most of those who belong to what is called the ' Pro- gressive School' of thinkers. Sometimes these opinions will be found in combination with those noticed on page 53, sometimes alone. I make a single illustrative quota- tion from a sermon of Dr. Greenwood's, published in the ' Catholic Series' (Chapman, London), in which death is emphatically specified as an appointment : ' Our faculties themselves have their limits, beyond which there is no increase for them ; just as the body, when arrived at its full strength, grows no stronger. Here are indications of sufficient distinctness to show that there is only so much to be done in this life, so much to be known, so much to be experienced, and no more. And yet, together with these indications, there is an irrepressible desire in the bosom of man, who is thus limited arid hemmed in, for the further expansion and progress which the terms of his present being deny to him. Death is appointed to fulfil this desire by removing the limits and restrictions which the initiatory state of existence imposes.' Greenwood, Sermons of Consolation, p. 57, 58. If the reader has any interest in tracing out the lamentable hallucinations of modern thought, he will find the summary of clairvoyant opinions on natural death on page 413 of a large work, entitled the Principles of Nature, by Andrew Davis, ' the Poughkeepsie Seer,' a work which it is unnecessary to characterize, but which, I sincerely regret to observe, has found an English publisher. NOTE D, p 55. See Miiller, Lehre von der >Siinde,'Vo\. ii. p. 391 ; and compare the argument between Augustine and Julian, contra Jul. iii. 156 sq. Vol. x. p. 1312 (Migue). NOTES TO SERMON III. 161 NOTE E, p. 56. It is with great regret that I observe that even a writer so favourably known to the world as Dr. Liicke, the able editor of the Gospel, Epistles, and Revelation of St. John, should have lent the weight of his name to this most questionable, and I must add, most dangerous mode of interpretation ; see the quotation in Usteri, Paulln. Lehrb. p. 362. NOTE F, p. 59. ' When they were brought into existence, the word was ' Let the waters briny forth Let the earth briny forth? from which it would seem that God did not act immediately in their creation, except by His agency on those powers that He had established as rulers in nature, and by which He ordinarily taketh hold, a-s it were, of the material universe.' Kirby, Bridgewater Treatise, Vol. i. p. 59, 60 (Bohn). The same appears to have been the opinion of Ambrose : ' Terra quoque semina resolvens, universa vivificat ; et maxime tune prinimn verbo Dei jussa viridescere, vivificationis sua: munere pullulabat,' Hexameroit, Book v. i ; .so, also, Augustine, Confess, xiii. 12, Basil, Ilexaiu. viii. iuit. : comp. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, iv. 3, p. 172 (Bohn). For a brief notice of the Rabbinical opinions on this subject, see Coniient. 4, and compare the remarks of Dditzsch, do tests Ausyeleyi, p. 74. NOTE G, p. 59. The likeness of man to his Maker is treated, though not very satisfactorily, by Ambrose, Hen'aiiieroii, \\. ~. 8. How admirable are the words of Augustine : ' Sicut eiiiru in uumnio imago imperatoris aliter e.>t, aliter in lilio : XL 162 NOTES TO SERMON III. nam imago et imago est ; sed aliter impressa e.st in nnmmo, aliter in filio, aliter in solido aureo imago imperatoris : sic et tu numimis Dei es, ex hoc melior, quia cum intellectu et cum quadam vita nummus Dei es, ut scias etiam cxijus imaginem geras, et ad cujtis imaginem factus sis.' Serin. ix. 8, Yol. v. p. 82 (ed. Migne). NOTE H, p. 60. See the admirable treatise On the State of Man before the Fall, Yol. ii. p. 70 (ed. Bui-ton). NOTE I, p. 60. M.TdrjK SE avrov ['ASa/i] 6 Qsoc t/c r7)s yj/e, ts >}c iysyovei, EIQ TOV TTUpClCtlCrOV, ClCOVQ aVTW CKJMpfJ.)]!' TTpO/COTTJ/C, OTTWC, ai>t,arii)i' cat rtAstofi ytvo^sroc, irt ct /cat BKOQ ava^ef^dfis, oi>TW ml tte TUV ovpavov di'dpr), Theoph. ad Autolyc. cap. 24. This opinion, which seem* to have been the tradi- tional belief of the early Church, and which is nowhere better stated and expanded than in the i3th Book of Augustine de Civitate Dei (Yol. vii. p. 377-404, ed. Migne), is maintained by most of the more sober modern writers; comp. Buckland, Sermon on Deatli, p. 24; Holden, on the Fall of Jfan, p. 240 (Lond. 1823) ; Pye Smith, Scripture and Geology, Lect. vn. 2, p. 263 (Bohn). NOTE J, p. 6 1. The following words of Augustine are particularly clear and pertinent : ' Aliud est non posse mori, sicut quasdam naturas immortales creavit Deus ; aliud est autem posse non mori, secundum quern modum primus creatus est homo itnmortalis ; quod ei pra?stabatur de ligno vitre, non du constitution naturre ; a quo ligno sepai-atus est cum peccasset, ut posset mori ; qui nisi peccasset, posset non NOTES TO SERMON III. 163 mori.' de Genesi ad Litcram, vi. 25, Vol. iii. p. 354 (ed. Migne) ; see also de Civit. Dei, xiii. 20. NOTE K, p. 62. See MUller, Lehre von der Siinde, Yol. ii. p. 394 : com- pare also Buckland, Sirrn. on D/ rov O.QTOV aov, tw NOTE M, p. 64. See Mau, vom Tode, p. 101, who ajipears to rest his affirmation on the supposed universality of the declara- tion in i Cor. xv. 22. Let us rather hear Augustine : 'Non erat Illi undo haberet mortem ; nou habebamus nos uude haberemus vitam : accepit Ille mortem de nostro, ut daret nobis vitam de suo.' /Scrm. cc.xxxn. 5, Vol. v. p. 1 1 10 (ed. Migne). NOTE N, p. 66. The objects of the Transfiguration were perhaps three- fold : First, it might have been mercifully designed to M ^ 164 NOTES TO SERMON IV. convince the disciples of their Master's divinity, and to prepare them for bearing up against the sad scenes of His passion which so soon followed. Secondly, it appears to have had what may be termed a ' dispensational ' aspect ; i.e. it was in accordance with the eternal counsels of God, that there was to be a formal, and as it were, visible in- corporation of the Law and the Prophets in the Gospel. Thirdly, there may have been involved in it some deeper mysteries, similar, or analogous to what is here alluded to. That it was an act of divine intercourse to prepare our Lord for His sufferings, as maintained by Bp. Thompson (Sermon, 1850), appears somewhat doubtful. 0, p. 67. A clear discussion of the three opinions commonly maintained on this very deep and mysterious subject will be found in an article by Dr. Edward Robinson in the Bibliotheca tiacra for 1835, p. 292 312. See also Lectures on the Life of our Lord, p. 369, note, p. 395, note. SERMON IV. NOTE A, p. 78. Several good articles on modern poetry, and specifica- tions of some of its objectionable theories in respect to the doctrines of the Last Things, will be found in the Chris- tian Remembrancer : see especially Vol. xxi. p. 389 sq., Vol. xxiv. p. 319 sq. Of the general tendencies, in this respect, of some of the most popular of our modern novels, it is scai^cely necessary to add proofs. I may, however, here mention, and venture to express my regret, that the author of so manly and Christian a work as Tout, Brown's School-day*, should have so far yielded to the current of NOTES TO SERMON IV. 105 popular persuasions as to have sketched out, in the dream that Arthur relates (p. 353), a final adjustment which, to say the least, is not theologically demonstrable. NOTE B, p. 79. It is unnecessary to say that I am here alluding to the concluding essay appended to Mr. Maurice's Theological Essays, and published separately (Cambr. 1854). It is easy to understand how a writer, whose heart is so truly wide, and whose sympathies are so noble and generous, should have been led into unguarded statements upon this momentous subject. Such statements are, however, not the less to be deplored. In a feeling sermon on Death and Life, preached in Lincoln's Inn (Jhapel, in March, 1855, I much regret to observe the following words : ' I know well that whi'ii we see a fellow-creature plunging down deeper and deeper into the abyss, when we think he has taken the final plunge, and when then, just then, the voice is heard saying to him, ' Thy soul shall be required of tliee,' and when in our dimness and horror of mind, there seems no reason why we should not have been why we may not be like him, it appears for a moment as if the case for him and for us had been made more terrible by Christ's death and resurrection, because they tell of a love slighted and n-.s/x^c/, which no other acts could tell us of. But when the waters have almost overwhelmed us, when we have come to the deep mire where no standing is, we discover, 1 believe, that /'.": are blaspheming (lixl by such thoughts ; that, after all, the faith that Christ died and rose again gives us a hope for ourselves and Jar (he inn rural.', which, without this, we must soon lose alto- gether ; that, while we believe this, though we must be believing in the eternal union uf sin and misery, we become absolutely unable to determine by our measures what vieLury may yet remain for love over sin ; whether 166 NOTES TO SERMON IV. the rebellious spirit may not have been stopped in a career where all persons and circumstances were probably abetting its ruin, on purpose that it might be subjected to other methods of cure,' p. 15. Though there is a depth of feeling in all tins which no one ought lightly to esteem, yet can it be doubted that these statements involve serious error 1 If I rightly understand a sentence some- what long and embarrassed, the summary seems to be, that a resister of Christ here on earth may be removed for final cure to another sphere. But for this have we any authority in Scripture whatever? Does not this seriously militate against the declaration of an Apostle, Kara e Tt}v (FK\r)p6rrira ~JQ 0or7?roe is to be regarded as the supplement to TO irav 7rX?/|>w/.ut, and the whole regarded, as an abstract and sublime designation of the Deity, seems to commend itself from its simplicity. At any rate, whatever construction is adopted, the main declarations of this solemn text remain the same. NOTE M, p. 92. Here again I must refer to my Commentary for details. My friend, Deari Alford, appears to dissent from my interpretation of the preposition ard, in the compound uvak-c(j)a\aiwc>a(j6at. Up to the present time, I have seen no reason to modify my views : ara, both here and Rom. xiii. 9 (see Meyer), appears to imply more than mere summation upward of a list of items. Would not Kt'r, not only to the modificated eternity of His mediatorship, so long as there shall be need of regal power to subdue the enemies of God's elect ; but also to the complete eternity of the duration of His humanity, which for the future is co-eternal to His divinity,' p. 283 (ed. 1701). NOTE O, p. 95. The remark, attributed to Clement of Alexandria, Bm i%6f>oi' Ofw is one that should never be forgotten in our attempts to reason on the counsels and providences of God. Compare ti^ist. culDiogn. cap. 7* B' <>v Tr^offeort T(i) OtW. NOTE P, p. 96. Some of the opinions here alluded to arc commonly connected with the name of Origen, and apparently with justice : see esp. iln I'rtncljtits, Book ). eli. 6, where he fully discusses the subject of the Consummation of all thing.-,, in sec. (>, he speaks definitely of the possible restitution of evil men and angels, ' ut alii in primis, alii in secundi.->, nonniilli etiam in ulliinis temporiini.s, et per majora ac graviora siipplieia, nee noli et diuturna ac mnltis, ul, ita dieam, sieculis tulerata, aspcrioribus eme-ndationibus reparati, et restituli eruditi. ill (ed. l.oiniii.). See a summary of these views in Jerome, hjnxt. xciv. (;id Avitum). It sliould lie remem- bered, ln\\ e\'er, that this giv;tt and able writer nut only 172 NOTES TO SERMON V. acknowledged that such teaching was dangerous for the unconverted (contra Celsum, vi. 27), but in some of his works uses very definite language in favour of a popular reception of the Catholic doctrine ; see for example the somewhat curious fluctuation of opinion pervading Horn, xix. in Jerem. The real basis of Origen's opinions seems to have been a general persuasion that what was incom- plete in this world would be adjusted and completed in the next ; and with that belief modern thought has much, in common. On the somewhat liberal opinions of some even of the orthodox Fathers, see Hagenbach, Hist, of Doctrines, 142, Vol. i. p. 383 sq. (Clark). NOTE Q, p. 1 01. On this subject see the profound remarks of Muller, Lehre von tier tiilnde, Book v. His comments on the development of sin in our race as bound to the law of gradation, deserve great consideration ; see esp. Vol. ii. ]). 570 sq., where the persistence and progress in evil is sketched out with striking and tragic power. S E R M N V. NOTE A, p. 103. The passage referred to is in Book v. ch. 6. p. 300 (ed. Mass.), where the subject of man's constitution is treated at some length. The following extract may be made: 'Neque enini plasmatio carnis ipsa secundum se homo perfectus est ; sed corpus homiuis, et pars hominis. Neque enimetanima ipsa secundum se homo ; sed anirna hominis, et pars hominis. Neque Spiritus homo. Spiritus enim, et non homo vocatur. Commix tio autem etuuitio horum omnium, perfect um hominem eflicit.' Then follows a NOTES TO SERMON V. 173 distinct reference to, and an explanation of our present text. The whole chapter in Irenreus should be read in extenso. NOTE B, p. 1 06. 4 Mortal body and immortal soul are [in our popular pulpit language] so pointedly and continually set in mutual contrast, and assigned to different Jots, that all view of the future life of the former seems to be absorbed in the exclusive notion of the eternal state of the latter. How strange does such omission appear, when we turn round from such preaching, and hear our Lord warning us, that not only our body, but our soul also [Matth. x. 28], may be destroyed in hell.' Evans, Ministry of the Body, p. 7. NOTE C, p. 1 06. By ' doubtful application ' I mean that if we desire to use strict language, we must rather speak of the immor- tality of the ' spirit.' It is to the union of the latter with the former that most modern psychologists ascribe the true immortality of the soul ; comp. Uelitxsch, fiibL Psyhol. vi. 2, p. 3 t -,o. An admirable article on the "rounds on which some of the ante-Nicene Fathers spoke O * of the soul as mortal, will be found in Olshauseu, O^n.s- cula, p. 167 sq. ; see esp. p. 174. NOTE D, p. 107. The epithet (>\(>K\>IJ,(' occupies the position of ;i secondary prediction, and would be technically termed by modern grammarians a 'secondary predicate:' see esp. Donaldson, ^V< // ('rut. ,502, who has justly the credit of first bringing the subject of 'secondary' and 'tertiary' predicates clearly and distinctly before the English 174 NOTES TO SERMON V. reader. Some further statements will be found in Miiller, Kleine Schri/'ten, Vol. i. p. 310 ; comp. notes on Coloss. ii. 3. NOTE E, p. 107. On the meaning of this word, and its distinction from r\toc, see the good remarks of Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, xxii. NOTE F, p. 109. The remarks of De Wette on this text are rather suicidal. ' In TO Trrevpa KCU >; ^i>x'/ ^ ^ie richtige psychologische Unterscheidung des Animalischen (an die sinnliche Erregung Gekniipften) und des Geistigen (Vernlinftigen) in der iimern Natur des Menschen, wie sie auch Hebr. iv. 12, bei Philo und Plato vorkommt nicht zu verkennen , . . Jedoch hat sie bier bloss rheto- rische JZedevitvmg,' Itr&larung/ d. Brief e an die Thess. p. 126. NOTE G, p. in. On this very difficult text see the comments of Ebrard, Liinemann, and of the recent and able editor, Delitzsch. NOTE H, p. 112. See especially the excellent remarks of Ebrard on the first and superficial effect of the Gospel on the ^v^i'i, and then its deeper and move penetrating character when it enters into ' the watchfully conscious life of the thoughts,' and obtains a place for itself in the ' sphere of the con- scious will and voluntary thought.' The passage is some- what too long for citation, but well deserves perusal. NOTE I, p. 112. See Meyer in loc., who has briefly, but clearly, explained the full meaning and force of this passage. How coarse NOTES TO SERMON V. 175 and inexact is the language we meet with in some of the commentaries on this noble Epistle, which find reception with a certain class of thinkers : ' The natural Body is an organism fitted for the development and action of the animal man ; the spiritual Body is an organism fitted for the development and action of the spiritual nature ; and the spiritual Body holds to the natural Body a relation which is emblemed by that which the most glorious of Nature's forms bears to the seed from which it springs.' Thorn, ontJie Corinthians, p. 239 (London. 1051). NOTE J, p. 113. This is very clearly stated by Olshauseu in his excellent article, ' De natural human te trichotomia N. T. scriptori- bus recepta,' (Oj>tmcula, p. 157), an article to which I have been greatly indebted in the composition of this sermon. The only fault is that it is too short, and does not define with quite sufficient accuracy the lines of demarcation between the usages of irrtvpn and rove, ft^d between \^v\>} and some of the terms (p. 160), which stand in most com- mon connexion with it. For these points the student is referred to Beck, tieeleiilc/tre. (a short, but good treatise), Delitzsch, Kill. Psycholuyie, and the large general work of Schubert, Geschichte tier Sccle, Vol. ii. p. 498, sq. NOTE K, p. 113. For a A r ery able discussion on the meaning of the term ff('f)5, in which the views of Miiller, who perhaps too rigorously excludes all ideas of sensationalism, are mainly substantiated, but, in some rases, apparently beneficially expanded. See also notes uii CulutiS. ii. 11. 176 NOTES TO SERMON V. NOTE L, p. 115. See Job vii. 15, airaXXaaa-fiG e)e CITTO Tri'sv/j.aToc TIJV p.ov, airo ce dardrov TCI otrrd pov ; where the Hebrew is rupjQfl? JITS V ^SD pDns "ram. On the punctuation and meaning of this somewhat difficult verse, see Hirzel in the Handbuch zum Alien Test., Part ii. p. 48. NOTE M, p. 115. In Philo a similar distinction is maintained, but under somewhat different terms and divisions. The following passage may be adduced as one of the most distinct : yap ptpi] ^ U X J ^> Tup? 1 ' vpeirftKoVyTOOfalffdijTiKOVfTO Ct TOV }JLf.v ovv XoyiKOV TO $t~iov rryfu/JLa overia, /caret TO S'f ]c- TOV Et alff6f)TiKOV Kai ZMTIKOV TO aipa ovaia. Atyi yap iv tTtpoic;, OTI t/'i'X') ifo&QQ ffapxoc aipa etrnr' KUI Kvpiwrara ^ivyjiv ffapmg al/ia e'ipj]K, Fragmenta, Vol. ii. p. 668 (ed. Mang.) ; see also Leg. Alleg. i. Yol. i. p. 57 (ed. Mang). According to Philo we should perhaps have to number four principles, the body, and the three principles above enuniei'ated ; see Bull, State of Man, &c. Vol. ii. p. 91 sq. (ed. Burton). NOTE N, p. 115. The words of the original are, "ETrXaor v o 9eoc TOV ur- \ovv a~o r>/e y>/c Archoeol. i. i. 2. NOTE 0, p. 115. A large collection of passages from Rabbinical writers will be found in that laborious work, which we owe to the liberality of a former King of Prussia, the Enldecktes Jv.~ dentham of Eisenmenger, Vol. i. p. 887 sq. On the nature NOTES TO SERMON V. 177 of the Neshama (H^tiO), and the meaning assigned to it by the earlier and later Rabbinical writers, see Bishop Bull, State of Man before the Fall, Vol. ii. p. 93 (ed. Burton). NOTE P, p. 1 1 5. A pertinent quotation from Irenseus will be found in Note A, but the whole chapter (Book v. ch. 6) should be carefully read as being peculiarly clear and explicit. The fol- lowing is the passage alluded to from Justin Martyr ; IV ObtfldTl EOTtV, OV // ? VLI^V^OV. W^d \^V^>JC t'nro OVK EOTIV. OtKoc yap ru ffdi/za ^O/^TJC' Tryfiymroe ct 4 /v X'l Fraymenta, p. 1589 (ed. Migne). Out of many passages from Clement of Alexandria we may quote as follows : IK yijr p.iv TO awf.ia CtairXaTTEffdai Xtyu 6 Mwi/o'%, o yijtvov fyijtriy it ll/\i(7}v f e Ttiv Xoyto/r awdsv ifj.TrvVffdijvai VTTO rov Ofov tic; Trpoodtirov. ti'~uvOa yap TU ^ytp.oviKi>v topvff- Out Xtyovai riii' eta ruty aladrjTripitttv tTreiffodiov rf]G yv\ij<; ivl rou TrpwTOirXatTTOv IKTOCOV tpfirjvfvorrtc, Strom, vi. 14. 94. Origeii writes as follows : ' Frequenter in Scripturis in- veuirnus, et a nobis siepe dissertum est, quod homo spiri- tus, et corpus, et anima esse dicatur. Verum cum dicitur quia ' caro concupiscit adversus spiritum, spiritus autem adversus carnem,' media proculdubio ponitur anima, qua; vel desideriis spiritus acquiescat, vel ad carnis concupis- centias inclinetur,' Comment, in Rom. i. 18, Vol. vi. p. 56 (ed. Lomrn.). Tlie passage further alluded to as quoted by Hammond, and of which the thoughts on p. 117 are a reminiscence, is longer, and will be found in his note on this text. The words of this great writer are perhaps still more explicit in his Comment. In Jonnnem, wherehe thus writes : MU ravra ^iirtli' iruXfj.r]tTa ''/>' ('iptrt)i' K' 7<( yap KaXXinrtt xupTroi \tyvv~ai tirut TOV N ]78 NOTES TO SERMON V. rtc TOV ayiov, nAAa TOV , xxxii. ii. vol. ii. p. 433 (ed. Lomrn.). The last remark, however, that the human nvtv^a. is avtirilttTov TUV %ip6i>wi>, may be decidedly questioned. To hazard a passing remark on a most profound subject, does not sin against the Holy Ghost involve some such awful condition as this, that the human Trvtvfjia. so far loses, so to say, the very characteristics of its true nature, as to array itself in fearful antagonism against the Holy Spirit ? Compare some thoughts of Miiller, Lehre von der Siinde, Vol. ii. p. 592. Some remarks on the psychological views of Origen will be found in Neauder, Church History, Vol. ii. p. 397 (Clark). The following are the words of Didymus on our text ; ' Ad Thessalonicenses quoque : integer inquit, spiri- tus vester, et anima, et corpus. Sicut etiam alia est anima, et corpus aliud : sic et aliud est spiritus ab anima quae suo loco specialiter appellatur. De quo et oravit, ut integer cum anima servetur et corpore, quia incredibile est et blasphemum, orare Apostolum, ut Spiritus sanctus integer servetur, qui nee imminutionem potest recipere nee profectum. De humano ergo, ut diximus, spiritu in hoc Apostoli sermo testatus est,' de Spir. Sancto, 55, translated by Jerome, Vol. ii. p. 148 (ed. Migne). Gre- gory of Nyssa, after stating that man is composed of three parts, thus justifies his assertion ; Kadug KCU trapa TOV TO TOIOVTOV ZpadopEV, tV 0( TTpOQ TOVQ ' TT\ Trapovari(f TOV Kvptov (f>vXa-^6r)i'ai, de Ilominis Opif. vii. p. 60 (Paris, 1615). The remark of Basil will be found in JZpist. ccxxxiii. (ed. Bened. 1839). NOTE Q, p. 1 1 6. The exact heresy of Apollinaris is so often incorrectly stated, as if it consisted in denying that our Lord had any NOTES TO SERMON V. 179 human soul, that it may be as well to subjoin the follow- ing specific statement from Theodoret ; ffnpKwtirii'ai TOV Qtov ifytjat Aoyor, ffwf.m Kctl ^v)(tjv ai'CtXr/^iorn, ov -j)j/ Xoyucffv, aXXa rijv a\oyov, fjr fyvaiKijv rfyovv (WTIKIIV Tivtc ^ovffi' TO i' ct rovv u\Xo TI Trap a Tip' ^v\ffv \fyutv, OVK t tic TO irXrjpwaai TOV vov n/i' ^>ttar, Hceret. Fab. iv. 8. This very definite statement seems distinctly to justify the opinion advanced, p. 112. Apollinaris pressed the generally received doctrine of the trichotomy in our nature, that he might define more precisely his views of our Lord's spiritual nature and of the exact way in which it differed from our own. In a word, he ac- knowledged that our Lord had a ow/ia and \Lv%i'i, but he denied His having a human Tri'tupa ; this part according to his views being occupied by ro Hrt^ui. Apollinaris was rightly condemned by the council of Constantinople, A.D. 381 ; but it may be well to remember that his error arose from a desire to do greater honour to the Eternal Son, not to detract from it, like Arius and his followers. On the heresy of Apollinaris, see Hagenbach, J/ist. of Doctrine*, 99, Vol. i. p. 270 (Clark), and Bishop Pearson, Creed, Art. iii. p. 159 (ed. 1669) ; and on the doctrine of the trichotomy in 1'eference to our Lord's nature, as main- tained by some of the earlier writers, see Neander, Church History, Vol. ii. p. 401 sq. (Clark). NOTE E, p. 1 1 6. In his treatise on the Xoul Tertullian very emphatically opposes the idea of any absolute division between the soul and spirit : ' Denique si separas spiritum et animani, separa et opera; agant in discrete aliquid ambo, seorsum anima, seorsum spiritus : anima sine spiritu vivat, spiritus sine anima spiret ; alter um relinquat corpora, alterum re- N 2 180 NOTES TO SERMON V. maneat, mors et vita conveniant. Si enim duo sunt anima et spirifrns, dividi possunt, xit divisione eorum, alterius discedentis, alterius iramanentis mortis et vitse concursus eveniat,' de Anima. cap. x. Vol. ii. p. 663 (ed. Migne). The italicized words, however, and the general current of the treatise (see esp. cap. xiii.), show what Tertullian was particularly condemning. A distinction between the united parts he might, under limitations, have admitted ; the idea of an actual separation and division he opposed and denied. The remarks of Augus- tine, alluded to in the text, will be found in his treatise de Anima, iv. 32, Vol. x. p. 544 (ed. Migne). NOTE S, p. 1 17. The opinion of Hammond will be found in his Com- mentary on this passage ; that of Bishop Bull, in his treatise above alluded to, The State of Man before the Fall, Vol. ii. p. 93 sq. ; that of Jackson, in his admirable work on the Creed, Vol. ix. p. 236 (Oxf. 1844). NOTE T, p. 1 1 8. On the Neshama of the Rabbins, .see above, note O. For the readers of Rabbinical Hebrew, I make the fol- lowing extract from Buxtorf Lex. Chald. et Jt'alb., s. v. p. 1403, ' de differentia IJ32 auimce, JTn ' spiritus,' et vide Aben Esrain. EccL vii. 5.' NOTE U, p. 119. The arguments of Bishop Bull will be found in his State of Man, ([(., Vol. ii. p. 96 sq., where he opposes Didymus, but, I venture to think, with but little .success. Bull's theory is, in fact, really a ' tetrachotomy' body, soul, spirit, and Holy Spirit. The words of Irenajus, which. NOTES TO SERMON VI. 181 taken apart from the context and current of the chapter, seem certainly in his favour, are as follows : ' Anima antem et Spiritus pars hominis esse possunt, homo autem nequaquam : perfectua autnm homo commixtio et aduuitio est aninuo assumentis Spiritum Patris, et admixta ei carni, quse est plasmata secnndum im iginem Dei,' contr. Ilcer. v. 6. As, however, has before been said, the whole chap- ter ought to be carefully perused to arrive exactly at the views of this ancient writer. Chrysostom in loc., thus writes : TO nrfvpa TI (f)j)iriy evravda ', TO ^afmrpa. av ^tv yctti tyoi'TtQ \apnpciQ rac Xa^naCdc antXOiofif i'. firri\vrr6ptda (ic rot 1 .t'Vfi(j>u>t'(i' >' ct. fffp(T/j.ti'ac,ovKiTt. Am TOVTO fyijmr, '(J\OK\ripov l[.iw>' TO TrreDyuct' EKfivov ~y(if> (.livovruc dxtpaiov, >Cal TOVTO f^lfl'tl. S E R M N VI. NOTK A, p. i ^o. The ]>a^sage referred to is towards the close of the article on the Communion of Saints, where l.ishop Pear- son thus writes : This communion of saints in heaven and earth, upon tin- mystical union of Christ their Head, being fundamental ami internal, what acts or external operations it; produceth, is not so certain. That we communicate with them in hope of that happiness which they actually enjoy, is evident; that we have the Spirit of Cod given us as an earnest, and so a part of their frlieity, is certain. Hut what thev do m heaven in relation to us on earth, particularly considered, or what we ought to perform in reference to them in heaven, beside a reverential respect and studv of mutation, is not revealed to us in the Scriptures, nor can be concluded l>y necessarv deduc- tion from anv principles of Christianity.' p. .}-,- (cd. 1660). 182 NOTES TO SERMON VI. NOTE B, p. 131. For a verification of this statement, see Bingham, Anti- quities, Book xv. chap. iii. 15 ; and especially Usher, Answer to a Jesuit, Vol. iii. p. 201 sq. (ed. Elrington), where examples are given at length. See also Palmer, Origines Liturgicce, chap. iv. 10, Vol. ii. p. 94 sq., and Boua, Res Liturgicce, Book n. xiv. p. 450. NOTE C, p. 132. The theory of a Travvv-^ia of the soul, as it was termed, was rejected by all the more earnest thinkers of antiquity. On this theory see esp. Delitzsch, Bill. Psych* >l. p. 360 sq., West, fStudien u. Kritiken, for the current year, p. 278 sq., and also the elaborate note of Koch, on i Tkess. iv. 13. NOTE D, p. 134. The words as translated from the Coptic in the large work of Renaudot are, ' Memento Domine patrum fra- trumque nostrorum, qui obdormierunt, quieveruntque in fide orthodoxa.' Llturg. Orient, p. 9. A longer and less restricted form for those 'qui dormierunt et quieverunt in Sacerdotio et oitmi ordine laicorum ' will be found on p. 1 8. In the Liturgy of the Church of Constantinople the words are simply en jrpoo^e'jOtyztV omr//r Xoytio/i' TUVTJJV \UTj)tia)' virtp T&V iv Trirrrtt (U'UTruvffUfiti'Mr Trpmrarlpw, Trarlfiwi', TTctTjjLixi^)', K. T. \. , Uslicr p. 2O2. For an account of this ancient liturgy, the text of which has been pro- nounced to be doubtful and uncertain, though, appa- rently, without sufficient reason, see Palmer, Oriyines Litxryica;, Sect. iii. Vol. i. p. 73. The best edition is that in Goar, Ritucde G'rcccum, p. 70 -84 (Paris, 1647). NOTES TO SERMON VI. 183 NOTE E, p. 737. Echoes of this thought will be found in many of the patristic writers. Evodius, in a letter to Augustine, mentions a story told him by a ' vir quidam sanctus presbyter,' who reported that he had seen ' multitudinem talium de baptisterio exeuntium in corporibus lucidis et postea in medio ipsius ecclesise oratioues adverterit,' and notices it as a prevailing belief ' in locis in quibus humata corpora sunt, et maxime in basilicis, fieri tumultua et oratioues,' Epist. clviii. 8, Vol. ii. p. 696. The story of the vision of the ancient man related by Chrysostom in his treatise ih tiacerdut. (vi. 4) will, I dare s;iy, be remem- bered by many. To press such statements would obviously be the height of folly ; but that such sentiments have been privately entertained by many grave thinkers iu the early Church, cannot be denied. NOTK F, p. 139. Statements such as that in the text must be accepted only n .s the expressions of an opinion that seems connected with some of the purest and most indestructible sympathies of our nature. I cannot forbear quoting the following words from Augustine : ' Numquid etiam de his qua,* in suis post mortem cujusque contingunt ullus mortues tangit dolor? Aut hrcc saltern scire putandi sunt, quorum sensus alibi est pro meritis sen bene sen male / Cui respondeo magnam quidem esse quaestionem, nee in prawn tia disserendum quod sid uperis prolixioris, utrum, vel quatenus, vel quomodo ea qua- circa nos aguntur, nf>verint spiritus mortuorum. V T erumtamen, quod breviter die! potest, si nulla illis esset, eura de nobis, nou diceret Dominus dixisse ilium divitem qui tormeiita apud inferos 184 NOTES TO SERMON VI. patiebatur ; Habeo ibi quinque fratres ne et ipsi veniant in locum hunc tormentorum.' Enarr. in Psalm cviii. 17, "Vol. iv. p. 1437 (ed. Migne). I hope my more sympa- thizing readers have not forgotten Dr. Johnson's Prayer (Life, A.D. 1752) nor the exquisite ballad by Longfellow, entitled, Footsteps of Angels, NOTE G, p. 141. For a brief consideration of the text here alluded to, see Commentary in loc. The majority of modern inter- preters seem to incline to the view noticed in the text. To found doctrines, however, on such very doubtful pas- sages, cannot be too emphatically condemned. NOTE H, p. 142. For examples of prayers of the unauthorized and perilous kind here alluded to, see Usher, Answer to a Jesuit, Vol. iii. p. 215 sq. (ed. Elrington). The general question ' An mortuis prosit oblatio' is discussed by Augustine, and thus decided : ' Nou omnibus prosuut, et quare nou omnibus prosuut, nisi propter differentiam vita? quam quisque gessit in corpore V de Didclt. Qncest. qu. ii. Vol. vi. p. 157. NOTE I, p. 142. The objections of Aerius will be found in Usher, p. 258. Though Aerius was undoubtedly right in many of his views respecting prayers for the dead, he was still a man in favour of whom but little can be said. His beha- viour to his friend Eustathius, afterwards Bishop of Sebaste, is apparently indefensible ; and it may be, per- haps, not wholly uncharitable to say, that much of the bitterness of his attack on the I'eceived ceremonies and NOTES TO SERMON VI. 185 discipline of the Church was owing to diappointed ambi- tiou ; see Epiphanius, adv. llcer. Ixxv. NOTE J, p. 143. The forms of prayer contained in the first book of Edward VI., both in the Communion and Burial Service, will be found in Keeling, Liturgies, p. 210, 335, 341. The year preceding (A.D. 1547), the following was the direction for the bidding-prayer : 'Thirdly, ye shall pray for all them that be departed out of this world in the faith of Christ, that they with us, and we with them, at the day of Judgment, may rest both body and soul with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven,' Injunctions by Edward VI., 1547 J St>e Card well's Docu- mentary Annals, Vol. i. p. 21 sq. Though these words and the prayers alluded to are couched in language of great sobriety, no reasonable man can doubt, that our Church shosved great wisdom in omitting them in the subsequent prayer-books ; see Palmer, Oriyines Lituryiccc, Vol. ii. p. 95 sq. NOTE K, p. 144. Prayers of a kind somewhat analogous to the form of the bidding-prayer quoted in the last note, are still used in some of the services at the Commemorations of Bene- factors in ditl'erent Colleges. They are, however, all very cautiously worded, and could not by any distortion be forced into yielding countenance to the doctrine of Pur- gatorv. They are little more than expressions of prayer- ful hope. It is apparently not to be denied that such expressions have been tolerated long after the Reforma- tion. The reader who has any curiosity about such things, will find them scrupulously enumerated in a work entitled JUicrurym Anylicana, p. JJQ sq. 186 NOTES TO SERMON VI. With regard to the-exercise of this practice in private, much may be said on both sides. On the one hand, it is perfectly certain that some of the most loyal members of the Church of England have not scrupled to follow the practice ; on the other hand, the weighty remembrance that man is no K-ap^ioyvwor^c, and cannot possibly know the exact spiritual state in which those for whom he may desire to pray left this earth, seems to urge on us the most trembling caution, and to bid us to ponder well both the Majesty of God and the true nature of Prayer, before we allow, even in our closets, the perhaps irre- pressible itprisings of hope, sympathy, and love, to pass into the definite accents of prayer. What we might pray for, in reference to our departed brethren, might conceivably be such as not only could never be granted, but such as might even be in the highest degree unmeet to form the substance of a prayer to an all-merciful, and yet all -just God. THE END. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. HISTORICAL LECTURES ON THE LITE OF OUR LORI) JESUS CHRIST. 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