charged with the duty of struggling out from under them; but it will be also seen that the highest duty and safety of those who are in better condition is to help their poor and suffering brethren to rise above their burdens. For the race is so bound together that, if one member suffers, all must suffer with it, and the perfection of the whole can be secured only as the lowest are rescued and uplifted.

He sees

And as regards the obligation of the Christian to run with patience the race set before him, it is vastly illumined and increased by these principles. He sees himself called to be a king and priest unto God. He stands as a prince among his brethren, both living and dead, charged with their highest interests as well as with his own. himself to be the helper of the weak ones who preceded him in the chain of life, and that the strong ones who have gone before him and won the crown are now his guardians and helpers. There opens out around him and before him the new relations into which this doctrine brings him to His Divine Head and Saviour, to his kindred who have gone before, and to those who still surround him with loving care and ministries, and invest him with responsibilities. He sees himself as holding new and more sacred relations to the whole brotherhood of mankind, and as charged with their highest interests. And knowing himself to be united in life with the Son of Man who is in heaven, to whom the Father hath given all power in heaven and on earth, he views himself also as a channel of His redeeming grace and power, and believes, not only as respects his personal salvation, but as the medium of salvation to others, that He who hath called him into this partnership with His Son will fulfill in him this work of faith with power, and the good pleasure of His goodness.

THE PSYCHIC REALM.

In drawing the line between the two forms of manhood defined in Scripture as the earthy and the heavenly, we have perhaps not been careful enough to include within the limits of "the earthy" all that belongs to it. It will be remembered that we have often heretofore insisted that the term "soul," as distinct from "spirit," pertains to embodiment, and that it describes a finer and more subtle vesture of the spirit than the material body. It therefore pertains to the existent or outward man rather than to the essential man who is spirit and divine. Scripture therefore represents the soul as perishable (Matt. x, 28), and warns men against the danger of losing it. But it also represents it as surviving the death of the body, as in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

There are many other proofs from Scripture that man may continue to exist in a psychic realm of being which is intermediate between the physical and the spiritual. Indeed the manner of our Lord's resurrection, which furnishes the supreme proof that the soul of man lives after death, seems to indicate that it lingers for a time in the realm of psychic being before rising into the glory of the spiritual. At His first appearance to Mary Magdalene, He tells her that He had not yet ascended to his Father. The manner of His subsequent appearance during the forty days favors the view that in a psychic body He appeared to the two disciples who at first knew him not, and afterward to the assembled company, and still later to a portion of the disciples on the shore of the lake. He appeared in a body

that still retained some of the properties of earthy manhood. It bore the marks of the wounds, it could be handled, it was capable of receiving food. Peter affirmed that certain witnesses "did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead" (Acts x, 41). And yet He was able to appear or disappear at pleasure-to vanish from sight or to enter a room with closed doors. But after His ascension He was no more seen of men under these forms of psychic manhood. Only as a glorified spiritual being was He manifested to a few eminent saints, such as Stephen and Paul and John, who in ecstasy or trance were lifted on to a mount of vision where the spiritual eye was opened to behold Him. In those few instances we read still of a human form indeed, but of dazzling brightness and clad in shining raiment. After His ascension, the normal method of His manifestation is the spiritual. The Holy Spirit reveals Him to and in the inmost spiritual being of those who are open to receive Him: so that He now appears among men in the hearts and lives of those in whom His image is being formed. "For me to live," says Paul," is Christ." And before, He had said to Saul of Tarsus, "Why persecutest thou me ?”

It is in evidence, therefore, that there was a transition stage of being through which our Lord passed, in progress to His exalted seat at the right hand of power and from glory to glory. He would be in all things made like unto His brethren. This psychic realm of being is the one into which all human souls pass at death. It is the Hades of Scripture, a region intermediate between the carthy. natural human life and the spiritual and heavenly. And, as covering all that intermediate region, it reaches, on the

one hand, down to the depths of Gehenna, where souls may suffer the second death, and upward to Paradise and to the gates of that Holy City in which is the throne of God and of the Lamb, and where they "see His face” and “inherit all things."

Certain things are eminently true of this psychic realm. In the first place, it is a realm of judgment. The judgment-scene in the twentieth chapter of Revelation depicts this ordeal. It has been commonly assumed that these verses describe a universal judgment after a general resurrection. But it is not universal, nor can it be proven that it follows resurrection, or, at all events, a completed resurrection. The first verses of the chapter expressly exclude from this judgment a certain class of martyrs and overcomers. But it proceeds to include the mass of the dead. They have not yet attained to a proper resurrection-the text does not so state-but it describes them simply as the dead who had been held captive in the realms of death and Hades. And there is nothing in the vision inconsistent with the view that it depicts a judgment now going on. Those who hold that none of the martyr saints nor of the apostles are yet risen may of course hold consistently that this whole scene belongs to the future. But we believe, as did all the early Christians, that a class of victors are already glorified with their Lord. It requires a most painful distortion of what St. Paul wrote in 2 Cor. v, and elsewhere, to maintain that he did not expect to pass directly into the presence of the Lord. And therefore we believe that in this vision St. John saw things shortly to come to pass, yea, already begun, and that the Sitter on the great white throne is continually judging the dead “ac

cording to their works." Some souls, when the books of their previous lives are opened, are found "written in the book of life." They are those who "have done good," and are worthy of " the resurrection of life." Others must go down into "the lake of fire, which is the second death." Fire destroys, dissolves for new combinations, purifies. The whole realm of death and hell must be cast into it. But to assume that these souls are cast into the fire for eternal torment is to put not only a false construction upon the nature and the function of this destroying agent-it. is to deny the nature of the being of the soul.

Only spirit is immortal. Soul pertains to the mortal being of man. The soul becomes indestructible only as it is penetrated and transformed by the Spirit of God. This is its resurrection of life. But a soul, which is in reality the psychic vesture of spirit, may be "destroyed," "lost," "perish." This is the second death.

This vision then, as is common in Scripture, presents at one pictorial view, the process and results of what is in reality an age-long judgment. And the destruction of the souls of the dead in the lake of fire is a process similar to that destruction of the body which is going on around us in the sphere of sense and time. Jesus frequently spoke to men of the danger of the whole body's being cast into hell, where the fire is not quenched. This fire was the expressive sign of that destruction which is visited upon the bodies of men for sin, whose wages is death. He also warned them against a possible destruction of the soul in the same gehenna of fire. The destruction of the soul necessarily completes the destruction of man as an earthly being. For soul, as we have seen, forms a part of his