present embodiment, and it can be "saved" only as men learn to give up in exchange for it those earthly pleasures and ambitions which are so dear to the carnal or natural.

man.

All this harmonizes with what we have previously taught concerning the continuity of personality as dependent upon character. Personality resides in soul rather than in the material body. But it also, with the exterior body, pertains to expression; it is part of the existent, rather than of the essential man. And it becomes permanent and immortal only as it yields itself to become a true expression of the divine man.

But does the destruction of the psychical man in the lake of fire make an end of man? Here we must reply as before: "It puts an end to his existence but not to the essence of his being the spiritual nature derived from God, and because of which man is made in His image. The unworthy expression of that image is destroyed in the consuming fire-the image itself, the true spiritual being of man, cannot die, but must still pursue its path toward perfect expression. Here comes in a doctrine of reincarnation, or the resurrection to another earthly life for the ends of further progress and discipline.

But an innumerable multitude pass out of this state of psychic being into the state of spiritual manhood without this loss of the soul in the consuming fire, and this necessity of another start upon the path to true manhood—that is, without the necessity of reincarnation. What determines this issue is, of course, the soul's relation to Christ, the Saviour of men and the Judge of both living and dead. We have said that the psychic region fills. up the

space between earth and heaven, but that, as differing from the realm of spirit, it is the region of expression and embodiment. On its lower side it touches earth. The soul, or psyche, gives form to the earthly man. Such souls, therefore, as pass out of this body still earthly in their affections and pursuits, are still held within the earthly sphere. It is from this class that came the manifestations of demoniacal possession and of bodily disorder which were so marked in the days of Jesus and the apostles, and which still abound, although in ways, perhaps, less obvious than then. So far as there is any reality in modern spiritualistic phenomena, they come from this lower region of the psychic realm. Here lies their danger. And it is from this region that the reliquae of defunct souls, after dissolution, are gathered up for further incarnation. This involves a break in their self-consciousness and in the thread of their existence. As outcast ones they were lost, and must begin anew to find their way back from the outer darkness into the light of life.

This closeness of relation between the earthy and the psychic spheres of man's being explains also why it is that they who are remanded back to earthly conditions bring the germs of former evils with them. It is that, through further conflict with these ingrained evils they may find the way to overcome them. There is both a purpose of judgment and of mercy in this law, which requires them to reap what they have sown, but which gives them also the potency and seed sown in tears.

hope of a better harvest from the

The law, too, of solidarity of race

comes in to help on to a beneficent result. For the prin

ciple of reincarnation involves something more than the re-embodiment of separate single souls which have been lost. The law of heredity favors the view that reincarnation may gather up the scattered elements of several such souls who were linked together by ties of kinship or affinity, grouping them together under the headship of a dominant soul in order to repair their waste and prepare them to reach a higher level in the scale of manhood. For, as we have in other connections stated, those who reach the higher levels in this battle of life must become the ministers of succor and strength to those who are struggling on the lower.

When we draw the line, therefore, between earthy and heavenly men, as being the only two classes of which Scripture speaks, we are not to forget that the lines from both these regions overlap and meet in the psychic realm which lies between and unites them both. So that it is in one sense true as a correspondent in a late number observed that there are earthly men who have crossed the line into the unseen world, and who remain earthly there, and are judged there as such. But we are not ready to infer from this, as does he, that no law of reincarnation for such is required, or is possible. Because, after the judgment and destruction of such persons in the realm of the dead, as depicted in Rev. xx, we would be driven to regard them as forever extinct, unless there be this provision for their recovery through the only process of resurrection that seems possible in their case-a re-embodiment under earthly conditions that shall start them again on the experimental path toward that ideal manhood in the image of which they were created, and which, to their

great suffering and loss, they failed to realize. Nothing short of some such provision as this can either fulfill the divine purpose in the creation of man, or make good the divine promises to seek and to save the lost through the agency of an elect seed of blessing and to confirm, through a generation to come, the promises which the generations who have gone failed to obtain.

Any view of redemption falls short of the truth which does not connect it with the promise of God to raise the dead, and any view of resurrection is false which makes it a mere prelude to damnation, and which does not locate the death and hell in which sinners are destroyed this side of resurrection and not beyond it.

THE SECOND DEATH.

It is in the Apocalypse alone that we meet with this expression. To the Church of Smyrna, which was the special exponent of the Church under persecution, and which stood face to face with the terrors of prison and of death, the Risen Lord sends these cheering words: "Be thou faithful until death and I will give thee a crown of life. . . . He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death" (ii, 11).

Accordingly we read in the twentieth chapter, of “the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshiped the beast neither his image," that they lived and reigned with Christ in the first resurrection, and that on them "the second death hath no power." This death is defined

in the fourteenth verse as the lake of fire into which death and hell were cast, and into which was also cast whosoever was not found written in the book of life." Also in the next chapter (vs. 8), "the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone," in which all liars and murderers, and sorcerers have their part, is declared to be the second death.

With regard to the vision of the twentieth chapter, it is apparent that throughout it relates to the dealings of the Divine Judge with souls in the realms of the dead. It is the souls of the martyrs whom the seer saw as not hurt of the second death, over whom "it hath no power," and as rising to live and reign with Christ. While "the rest of the dead," whose judgment he afterward describes, must be presumed to be also "souls," the question of whose resurrection to life or of whose destruction in the lake of fire was to be determined by "the things written in the books." Manifestly the whole life-record of these souls was exposed. Now as these persons had died out of the body, which was their first death, what is here contemplated as their second death must be the death of the soul, or a death occurring in the psychical state. That such a death is possible was plainly declared by Jesus when He warned His disciples to fear Him who is able, beyond the death of the body, to destroy the soul also in hell (Matt. x, 28).

We hazard nothing, then, in affirming that the test to which the gospel subjects men involves just this question of the salvation of the soul, and that, by the loss or gain of the soul, it refers to this very issue which the soul must meet after death. The question will then be determined by its character and deeds whether it is fit for life. Some