his deliverance from bondage to sin, and so from death which would forever have held him captive. It was the clearing away of the obstructions which hindered the realization in man of the divine end in his creation. It was the handing over to death and destruction his body of sin and death which was unfit for and which could not inherit the kingdom of God, in order that he might be created anew in righteousness and true holiness. The process of individual salvation in us is precisely this: The Spirit of Christ in us must bring the old earthy man to this same altar of sacrifice. It must die in us in order that the new man may be raised up in power. There is no such thing as salvation from sins or rescue from their penalty so long as men hold on to their sins, or make a darling of this old nature in which sin resides. All must be crucified with Christ.

We thus see how the death of Christ must be viewed, not as an expiation offered to God, but as a living sacrifice rendered to Him of that humanity which could reach its perfection only through the suffering of death. And it was vicarious, not in the sense that Christ endured this suffering instead of us, but with us and for us. It was in our behalf, inasmuch as all the members of the humanity of which Christ partook share in the benefits of His perfect sacrifice and in the fruits of His victory. He was our Head in this great transaction. We are the seed that shall spring out of the corn of wheat, planted in His grave, in that new form of divine manhood in which He was raised.

The main point at which theology has erred in its conception of the saving mission of Christ is in making His

death to be the central fact of that mission rather than His resurrection. It has built up its whole system of Christian doctrine around the death of Jesus, whereas the New Testament presents to us His resurrection as the central fact, and His death as in order to it. Let any one read, for example, the first sermons of the apostles as reported in the Acts, and observe how little our modern ideas of expiation by the death of Christ enter into those addresses, and how all the stress is laid, and all the hope for man's salvation, upon the fact that God had raised Him from the dead. Remission of sins, indeed, is preached through His name, but the fact mainly presented as the basis of such remission is His resurrection. This fact, of course is not, and cannot be separated from the fact that He died for our sins. But emancipation from our sins, which is the underlying idea of remission, would not be possible had not Christ risen. It could not be effected by His death alone. This was only the path which must be trodden in order to this victory. If Christ be not risen, we are yet in our sins, and must forever remain in bondage to that corrupt nature which cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Such is the teaching of St. Paul (I Cor. xv, 14-17, 50), and such is the emphasis put everywhere in the New Testament upon the resurrection of Christ as the divine operation effective for man's salvation. Our systems of theology, as any one may observe who makes a study of them, fix the centre of this divine efficiency in the death of Christ, and bid the sinner look to His cross for relief rather than to the triumph to which the cross led. And hence the preaching based upon this theology has produced a practical piety which is often more concerned

as to how it is to get rid of the consequences of sin than of sin itself.

The death of Christ has put the whole human nature in which sin resides under the ban of death, and we are not to seek to evade the consequences of this doom, nor is there any provision for our escape from this just penalty. Our hope of salvation is that, beyond this accepted penalty, the grace of God provides for a quickening of the dead, and transmutes the very suffering and death through which we must pass in order to reach it into a means of ridding us of the body of sin which dragged us down to death.

The invitation of the gospel is thus specially an invitation to "Believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification" (Rom. iv, 24, 25).

THE ATHANASIAN CREED.

This creed is not one of the required symbols of the Episcopal Church in this country, although it is authoritative in the Church of England. Its damnatory clauses, however, do not command the assent of the better portion of that Church. One of these clauses-toward the closeraises the issue we have been discussing in this magazine, and upon it the whole question of the nature of future punishment turns. It says: "At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall give account for their own works."

"And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire."

It is to be observed that the creed does not pronounce definitely that man is so constituted that he must of necessity exist endlessly in the fire to which he is consigned. On the contrary, its statement in the opening clauses is that he who does not hold the Catholic faith shall "without doubt perish everlastingly." This statement on its face implies that the end for which the unbeliever is to be sent "into everlasting fire" is for destruction. The phrase "to perish everlastingly" does not seem to be consistent with the idea of an endless existence in the fire.

The point, however, at which we call in question this closing clause is not the truth of the statements themselves -which are drawn from the words of Scripture-but the order in which they are put. They imply that the resurrection of the unjust occurs before their consignment to the fire. This order is not required by the language of our Lord in describing His work of judgment-Matthew xxv, 31-46, does not teach that the "all nations" comprise the risen dead—and it is opposed by the unanswerable objection that it connects the sinner's doom with his resurrection, rather than with his death, which is the wages of sin, and so makes resurrection, which is the fruit of Christ's redeeming work, to become to the unjust an unutterable

curse.

If the various Scripture passages which compare the wrath of God against sinners to a consuming fire be examined, it will be seen that it is the bodies and souls of men as constituted under this present system of the world against which this fire burns. It is altogether an assumption to suppose that "the whole body" which is to be cast into this gehenna is a future resurrection body. If the

vision of the great white throne in Revelation xx, 11-15, seems to contradict this, our answer is that the obscurer teachings of Scripture cannot avail against the plainer. But it is not necessary even in this case to appeal to this principle; for in the passage referred to, it is a judgment of "the dead" that is there described, the issue of which is defined as "the second death," in contrast with the issue in the case of the martyrs just before described as the "first resurrection." The dead appear before the throne not as risen, but as candidates for resurrection. And it is the unrisen and not the risen dead who are represented as "cast into the lake of fire." For "souls," we are plainly taught by Jesus, may be destroyed in gehenna as well as bodies (Matt. x, 28). So that we are not required by the vision of this chapter to set aside this principle, inherent in the very nature of the case, that resurrection is a redemptive act. And therefore the Athanasian creed reverses the true order of the divine judgments when it locates the destruction of the ungodly by everlasting fire after their resurrection. That fire burns them up before resurrection. It is out of this pit of destruction that they are raised. Their destruction may have been so complete as to include their souls. Their very selfhood may have been lost in this pit. It is never promised that the souls or persons of the wicked shall be restored from death. On the contrary, the "soul" is the very thing they are told they shall lose (Matt. xvi, 25, 26). Nothing is saved in their resurrection but the divine substratum of their being which is imperishable in death and hell. This is brought up out of the pit of fire to begin the experiment in life anew. Here is the grace to all men in resurrection. The death they