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of the indwelling spirit. The salvation of Christ provides, however, for the salvation of the person through its purification and transformation. Hence, Christians are exhorted to present their bodies in living sacrifice to God, and to be renewed in the spirit of their minds. Thus they put off the old man and put on the new (Rom. xii, 1, 2; Eph. iv, 23).

This destruction of personality, or the whole outward expression of man, and this salvation of it through a process of renewal and transformation, is the same thing often alluded to in the words of Jesus as the loss or salvation of the soul. The essential thing in personality is the soul, which is the builder of the body. Hence, the loss of the soul is also spoken of by Him as the loss of self. The deepest self in man, as we have seen, cannot be lost, because it pertains to man's spiritual nature which is of God. But the self of man as existent in his present form of being may be lost in the destruction of body and soul.

Now, it is in these views of the double nature of man that reconciliation is found between the two sides of Scripture teaching concerning the relation of God toward him, and concerning retribution and redemption. On the one hand, we are taught that man is God's child, that He loves him as such, that in the plan of creation man was made to be the representative of God in the ownership and administration of His estate. And God's counsel concerning him must stand, or He cannot be God. On the other hand, we read that man is by nature a child of wrath, conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, that death hath passed upon all men, that his days are as the grass, and that, for at least a very large proportion of the race, his end is

destruction. The first class of teaching relates to man in his essential being as the spiritual offspring of God, who is spirit, and in whom it is His purpose to find suitable and abiding personal expression. But in the progress and training of man for this high dignity, God has seen fit that man shall pass through lower and temporary forms of existence derived from this system of creation of which he is the appointed ruler. "Howbeit that which is first is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." And it is of these lower and perishable forms of manhood that it is said, "whose end is destruction." This earthy man, as we have seen, acquires a personal self-consciousness of his own, and seems to be even the whole of man as known to himself. This is the fact in the case of those who live only in this outer region of existence, engrossed with earthly cares, and pursuits, and pleasures. His destruction, therefore, may properly be regarded as the loss of the man himself, because his deeper self-consciousness as a child of God has been so suppressed that it has not risen to the self-conscious sphere; it remains sub-conscious. This leads us to discuss the subject of

SONSHIP TO GOD.

We hear on every hand, and from the point of view we have taken it is true, that all men are the children of God. But this is only true in the fact that at the groundwork of their being their nature is divine. They are germinally God's children, but they are not yet begotten as such, and therefore they are not yet properly "sons." The full idea of sonship requires that a son be a complete expression of the father's being and nature. This expression or image

He must be beof the Word of

is realized through a perfect embodiment. In the perfect Son of God there must dwell the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And man is not really born into full and divine sonship until he is thus conformed to the image of God's Son. From this point of view it is seen that, while all men are the offspring of God, all are not His sons, because not yet produced in His image. No man is by nature born into proper sonship. He must receive the right to become the son of God (John i, 12). gotten as such by the incorruptible seed God (I Peter i, 23); that is, the truth about God and about His Son must enter as a vivifying power into his mind and heart, quickening him out of death in trespasses and sins, and planting within him the seed of the new and perfect manhood of which the risen Son of God is the Head and Source. All men have, indeed, the capacity of receiving this seed of divine sonship, for all have within them the divine germ which is capable of being thus quickened. But it would be wrong to regard them as sons of God until so quickened. Until then they are not started on the path to that perfect personal expression of God which sonship implies. The personality of body and soul with which they are invested is corruptible and must needs be transformed before it can be wrought into this divine manhood. This requires a complete surrender of it in sacrifice to the will of God, that He may thus renew it. Otherwise it must be consumed as wood, hay, and stubble in the unquenchable fire.

It is under this category of the death or destruction of the evil personality in which man now exists that we are to range all Scripture teaching about retribution. It is

the old man, the natural, Adamic man, the earthy man, the man in flesh and blood, the body and soul unyielded to God that suffers this fate. This, as we have seen, carries with it the loss of the man's personal self which lived and moved and had its being in this region of the outward man. This man never was and never could be the son of God-he was only the creature of His hands. But he might have been changed by a process of new creation in Christ Jesus into His image, and so come forth through the alembic of death unto the resurrection of life. Failing in this, the man's resurrection must be one of judgment, inasmuch as death strips him of the treasures of his former existence, and resurrection only remands him to that condition of being in which the process of building him up into a personality suited to be a habitation for God-that is, into sonship-must be begun anew, and carried on through new stages of trial and judgment.

THE CRUCIFIXION OF SELF.

One of the saddest things about the present condition of Christianity is the evidence on every hand that large numbers of its professors do not, seem to understand the first principles of the doctrine of Christ. One of its fundamental principles is, that no man can be His disciple who does not forsake self, who is not willing to mortify it, who does not recognize that the very way of life lies through its crucifixion. The faith of Christ, as set forth by its most eminent preacher and exponent-the apostle Paul— begins at this very point and can make no progress in a

man from any other starting-point. The old man, the desires of the flesh and of the mind, the natural carnal self must be mortified, its personal desires and preferences, its envies and jealousies and selfish mutterings and murmurings and ambitions must not only not be heeded; they must positively be put down in the place of death and held there, in order that the graces of the new life and the fruits of the Spirit may have full sway. But instead of this self-abandonment and denial, one finds on every hand a selfish spirit governing the conduct of those who bear the name of Christ. Church members need to be spurred up to duty and to gifts of money needed for Christ's service by appeals to selfish motives. Some preferment must be accorded, some entertainment provided, some secret ambition or desire must be appealed to. Pastors tread with cautious feet through the precincts of their churches, lest some of this class be offended, or think themselves neglected. Much of their time and anxious thought are given to the smoothing of difficulties that arise from petty envies and jealousies which spring up in the breasts of their members, because the self in them, marked for crucifixion, has been a little humiliated and ungratified. What a different state of things would exist in all our churches if their members would but accept as a first principle of the Christian life, without which it can neither be begun nor carried on, that the self in them is not something to be petted and amused and fostered and indulged, but to be mortified, to be yoked down into the obedience of Christ, to be surrendered on His altar in loving service to God and loving sacrifice for the good of the brethren and for all mankind. Not all the tact and sweetness of an angel

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