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The New Testament further teaches that this quickening of man by the Divine Spirit may take place in this life. Men may become here and now spiritual, so that they shall not, in the truest sense, see death (John viii, 51, 52). How our friend in the face of all this class of Scripture teaching can maintain that all men are so entirely mortal as to be wholly dissolved by death and non-existent until a distant resurrection, we cannot understand. The teaching referred to in Job xiv belongs to the twilight of revelation and applies only to the natural man as such, who, unless quickened by the Spirit, does go down to destruction until reconstructed by the power of God in resurrection.

But something even in his case must survive as a basis for resurrection. Our correspondent speaks of the continued existence of a picture or idea of the man in the creative mind. But an idea in the mind of God is a reality and the deepest reality. Everything that exists takes its origin as a thought or idea of God. It then and there takes form and spiritual substance. It is the real entity which afterwards is clothed in outward form and personal expression. It is after this idea or image of God that man was made. As a spiritual entity, therefore, man has eternal existence in God. And after the destruction of body and soul in which this image was imperfectly and unworthily expressed, this essential man continues to exist and must again seek personal expression. Hence there remains in even the unsaved man the germ and potency of resurrection. This change is not therefore a fresh creation, as this letter describes it, but a recovery and reinvestment.

There is no ground either in Scripture or reason or science for the hope of future existence for man, except in the fact that the highest and ultimate Being in the Universe-God-personalizes Himself in man. This implies that the root and ground of every man's being is in God, and that therefore he is germinally spirit, which, being divine, neither sins nor dies. But in the progress of man to perfect personality, he takes on imperfect forms of personal expression in body and soul. These must perish from the way until the goal of perfect manhood, which is the image of the invisible God, is reached.

WORDS OF RECONCILIATION.

VOL. VIII.]

JUNE, 1892.

[No. 6.

It will be more convenient, if correspondents would address us during the summer months as follows: "L. C. Baker, Princeton, N. J."

ESSENTIAL TRUTHS RECONCILED.

In every system of religious faith which good men have embraced and, which has maintained its hold upon successive generations of adherents, there is always some essential truth which gives it vitality and persistence.

1. In orthodoxy we have the truth that the claim of God's righteousness upon man is inflexible, of the certainty of retribution, of the harvest law of character by which men must reap as they have sown. We have the assertion of the importance of present opportunities, the proper emphasis put upon this present life, and that here in this sphere of earth and time men must win or lose the rewards of Heaven and the crown of life.

2. In universalism we have the essential truth made dominant that God is Love, that He is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works, that He will not suffer His image in man to be forever defaced or blotted out, that all His and our enemies, including death and the devil who hath the power of it, must be destroyed,

that He must seek to the uttermost His lost ones until He find them.

3. In conditionalism we have the essential truth that sinful man is mortal and must perish in body and soul, that God only hath immortality, and that man can obtain it only as he becomes like God and partakes of His nature, that therefore the end of the wicked is destruction. Eternal existence is the portion only of the righteous.

In each of these systems, however, the truths they hold are disproportionate and become exaggerated even into untruth, because of their rejection of what is necessary to complete themselves, and which the other systems could supply.

Our aim is now to show that there is a reconciling principle around which the essential truths in these various systems crystallize and form a perfect union. That principle is that, as the wages of sin is death, there must always be a redemptive value in resurrection.

This is a radical principle of the gospel, the first testimony of which is that God quickeneth the dead.

Allied to this principle and growing out of it, these things are seen to be true.

1. While the body and soul of man are destructible in hell (Matt. x, 28), there must remain an element in his being which is capable of receiving the quickening life from God, and which is therefore spiritual and indestructible.

2. This essential element in man is divine, because it is spirit, which is God, and because it moulds man in His image.

3. It may, therefore, be regarded as the essential man. In the truest sense it is the inmost self which survives all

changes and which death cannot destroy. It is the individual as distinct from the person.

4. The person or outward expression of this intrinsic man may be marred and imperfect, and so far as it is so it must perish. The existent personal man, therefore, who lives in the region of the outer consciousness, may, and indeed must die, so far as he fails to truly express the inner self which is eternal and divine.

5. As to how far identity of person will be restored in resurrection will depend upon how far the personal or existent man has been subjected to the essential. Wicked men may "lose themselves and be cast away." "They that have done ill" fail of "the resurrection of life" and attain only to "the resurrection of judgment" (John v, 29).

6. While every man must be thus raised in his own order, it is yet a blessing to all who died in Adam that they shall be made alive in Christ.

First then, how are these principles to be applied to the winnowing and renovation of the system known as orthodoxy?

They eliminate from it its dogma that the soul or person of every man is essentially immortal and destined, if unrenewed, to suffer in an eternal hell. It is seen that the immortal part of man is spirit, which is of God, and therefore incapable of suffering or of sin, that what is cast into hell is the outward personality of body and soul through which this spirit sought expression, and that this personality is lost or saved just so far as it yielded itself to become a fit habitation for the spirit. The orthodox doctrine of an immortal suffering body and its degrading view of resurrection as providing for the unjust such a body in

which to endure eternal torments, is seen to be a monstrous perversion of God's gracious purpose to raise the dead. All His retributive judgments upon sinners end in their destruction as such, and in the rescue of the divine and immortal nature in them for further experiment in life until the goal of perfect personal manhood is reached. All that is required by the Scripture teaching on this subject is that there be a complete and eternal destruction of that form and character of manhood which has proved unworthy to abide, and one which must carry with it the self-consciousness which pertains to this outer realm of man's being. Only those personal qualities abide which have been assimilated by the divine spirit in man. So that not only all the treasures of man's present life may be lost in this consuming fire, but even the thread of his personal self-consciousness. And yet the individual essence, the sub-conscious self, cannot be lost because it is of God and must finally find its way back to God. It is to this end that He has provided even for wicked men a resurrection from the dead. This must be for them one "of judgment," for they come forth stripped of the treasures of the former life and compelled to begin the experiment and discipline of life anew, while on the other hand they that have done good come forth to "the resurrection of life," because they have saved their "souls" or lives (which are their persons) and so enter upon their future life upon a higher plane, with their treasures laid up in Heaven and their life hid with Christ in God, and to be manifested with Him on that high plane of spiritual and eternal being to which He was exalted.

It is thus plain that orthodoxy can find in the light of

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