was the most ardent. And in no other was there more of this spirit of mutual and all-embracing love. "But as touching brotherly love," writes Paul to them, "ye have no need that I write unto you for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another. And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more." (1 Thess. iv. 9, 10. See also iii. 12, 13; 2 Thess. i. 3.

The true revival needed in the church, is the revival of Christian love. The great awakening for which the world's salvation tarries, is an awakening of the church to the sin of division. Until then the world will continue to baffle and to taunt the church with the saying "“Physician, heal thyself."

A WORD OF WISDOM.-There is a refreshing humility in the following words by F. W. H. Myers, in the Fortnightly Review. He does not refer indeed to revelation

as the true source of knowledge concerning man's destiny, but he admits at least that the drift of true science is not in the direction of the materialistic view.

For my part I believe that many questions which the religious world believes to be already closed in one sense, and the materialistic world in the other, are really just beginning to come within the purview of science. We are just beginning to understand the first elements of problems which so many preachers have solved with a peroration, so many philosophers with a formula, so many physiologists with a smile or a sneer. It is, as I hold, to experimental psychology, to an analysis whose growing power we can as yet hardly realize, that we must look for a slow but incontrovertible decision as to whether man be but the transitory crown of earth's fauna, between ice-age and ice-age, between fire and sea; or whether it may truly be that his evolution is not a terrestrial evolution alone, not bounded by polar solitudes, nor measured by the sun's march through heaven, but making for a vaster future by inheritance from a remoter past.

STUDIES IN THE BIBLE.

ETERNAL FIRE, A FACT OF SCIENCE AS WELL AS OF SCRIPTURE.

We have thus far examined the Scriptural use of the term "eternal fire" and its cognates sufficiently to determine,

1. That the one radical idea, common to them all, is that of destruction.

2. The term comprehends and is the exponent of all the agencies by which the consuming energy of Nature wastes and destroys the bodies and souls of men.

Thoughtful men have long been waiting for some statement of the doctrine of future punishment which should be scientific as well as Scriptural. If we are not yet able to arrive at this, we may at least indicate the direction in which it may be found.

Our primary source of knowledge upon this subject is the Holy Scriptures. But its interpreters have too often forgotten that God has revealed Himself to men in other ways than through His Word. As man was made in His image, no conception of God's government of the world can command permanent assent which violates what He has revealed of Himself in man and in the constitution of human society. And as all things were made by Him, nothing can be true which does not accord with what He has made known of Himself in the system of Creation. The mistake of Theology has been in its too exclusive view of God as the moral governor of the world, and of man as His subject. Whereas man is also

the product of a created system of which God is the Author, and the subject of natural as well as of moral law. His place and destiny in this system of nature needs to be studied before we can appreciate the Bible terms which define his destiny as a subject of God's moral government.

We therefore pause here to inquire whether there is anything in Nature corresponding to the Bible doctrine. that sinful men must be cast into eternal fire.

The observations of Science convince us that the primary condition of the elemental substances out of which all created forms have been built up, was one in which their atoms were held apart by great heat. The visible universe is for the most part a wilderness of fire. The nearest star to us in space is the Sun, a vast incandescent globe of fire, in whose photosphere vaporous masses of iron and sodium, and other minerals are glowing with intensest heat. On the Earth these same substances have been cooled down, and have combined according to their chemical affinities. In this process of combination the heat-energy has been rendered latent. There has thus been a progress in the creative process from the state of primeval fire, to one of chemical combination and equilibrium, and cosmical order, by which these elements have become subordinated to the ends and uses of Life. antagonistic forces seem to have been contending for the mastery on this arena of the universe, the eternal fire and the eternal Life. The fire resolves all things into their primary elements. It is constantly claiming back the things that have been wrung out of its bosom. All processes of decay are but the slower gnawing of the tooth

Two

of this eternal fire. Life, however, has been from the first capturing and subsidizing these substances to the ends of its manifestation. Under its transforming power they are organized into a variety of creature forms, advancing from one stage of development to another, until finally man has appeared at the summit of the series, the highest embodiment of created life. It has been from the first, however, a law of creation that all defective forms of creature life cannot abide. They are but transient and must give way to higher forms. There has been a constant struggle in Nature toward a perfect and abiding form, but it has not yet been reached. Type after type, race after race, has been suffered to sink back into the womb of the eternal fire out of which they were brought forth. But along all the series the abiding Life has been conserving the fruits of past triumphs and making new conquests.

Still, however, it remains the law of Nature that all defective forms of life must yield to the law of decay and go back to the elemental abyss out of which they sprang. And to this law man is no exception. He exists as yet only in a sinful and imperfect type of manhood. therefore he is made subject to vanity, and is under bondage to this law of corruption. He must depart into the eternal fire.

And

The eternal Life, however, has at length been manifested in the person of the perfect Man. It was" with the Father" from the beginning, and has now been "manifested unto us (1 John i. 1, 2). The man-nature in Christ has reached its ideal as the perfect and indestructible image of God, the depository and

vehicle of His Life, the representative of His authority, the inheritor and administrator of His vast estate. As such, Jesus is now triumphant over death and all the powers of the Universe, crowned Lord over all.

It is then not only in obedience to the requirements of a moral law, but also to the law of nature, that sinful men are consigned to the eternal fire, and that only those who, by faith in Christ are made partakers of His nature, enter into the eternal life. This is no arbitrary sentence of an irate Judge. It is according to the eternal order of Nature.

We have already seen that the term "fire" stands in Scripture as the representative of all the death-dealing forces of Nature. In them all God is seen as a consuming fire." We have also here to notice that a wide generalization of the passages in Scripture which refer to angelic powers, convinces us that they are either closely identified, if not identical, with what we call the forces of nature.* They are the executive forces of the one Supreme force in Creation. And as it is these forces which draw men down into that abyss of dissolution which, in this economy of Nature, may be viewed as its gulf of eternal fire, it is in their agency that we find the proper explanation of the angels which attend the administration of the Son of Man. They "gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity and cast them into a furnace of fire" (Matt. xiii. 41-42). And they are the angels of His might who shall attend Him at His revelation from Heaven in flaming

*See upon this subject Chaps. I, IV, and VI, of " Mystery of Creation and of Man."