grace-outside, as one might say, of God Himself—in order to influence the Divine will; but God Himself was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself by Him (II Cor. v, 19).

As Paul does not admit the traditional dualism in God between love and righteousness, so neither does he make any distinction between the forgiveness of sin and the destruction of sin itself. The idea of an external expiation was not enough for him. The standard passages upon which it has been founded (Rom. iii, 25; Gal. iii, 13) are far from giving us his whole teaching on the subject; nor have they in the Pauline theory the capital importance attributed to them by scholastic theology. If we have any regard for the logical unity of the Pauline doctrine, we must expound these texts in harmony with Romans vi, 1-11; viii, 3, and II Corinthians v, 21. Only by the aid of these latter passages can we gain an adequate view of the apostle's entire doctrine of Redemption. Now, these texts make the practical effect of the death of Jesus to consist not in the satisfaction which it rendered to God, but in the destruction of sin that it accomplished.

Professor A. Sabatier.

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY is very plainly taught in the record of our Lord's final words to the Jewish people as given in Matthew xxiii, 30-39. He denounces them as by their own confession "the children of them which killed the prophets" and who, in their treatment of Him and His disciples, were about to "fill up the measure" of their fathers, and upon whom should be visited "all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of

righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias," whom they slew between the temple and the altar. The vice of religious bigotry, and hypocrisy, and cruel rage against the men sent to denounce their sins and warn them against impending judgments, was so in the blood that He styles them "serpents, a brood of vipers," fit only for the damnation of hell. And all this accumulated guilt and weight of doom was to 66 come upon this generation.'

Surely there is some radical principle of identity between fathers and children here. No arbitrary law of representative relations suffices to account for this transfer of responsibility and this cumulation of wrath. The former generations of evil-doers are regarded as one in being and destiny with their children, in whom all their vices were reproduced and summed up. This supposes that something more than a conventional or forensic relation subsists between them. Fathers and children were corporate partakers of one common life-a human organism in which they were members one of another.

And so in the coming salvation which should hereafter find Jerusalem in her desolation. Hereafter her people should look upon Him whom they had pierced, and say "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.” Is there such inequity in the judgments of God that we can suppose there could be this forward transfer of guilt and no corresponding reflex transfer of blessing? If the children were to suffer for the sins of the fathers, the fathers would hereafter also be blessed in the repentance and restoration of the children. As St. Paul puts it in the eleventh of Romans, "And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer,

and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them when I shall take away their sins."

CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS are stamped with the infirmities no less than with the nobleness of the men that made them. They are their best thoughts about Christian truth, as they saw it in their time; intrinsically they are nothing more! And any claim of infallibility for them is the worst kind of Popery, that Popery which degrades the Christian reason, while it fails to nourish the Christian imagination.—Principal Tulloch.

IT IS EASY to be traditional, dogmatic, when you do not require to think.—Tulloch.

"TOGETHER."-In Romans viii, 22, we are told that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. We are apt to overlook the force of the word "together" in this passage. The word "creature," which occurs repeatedly in this connection, may refer either to the human race, or to the whole natural system of which it forms a part. In either case we are taught that there is an organic connection between all its parts, so that the pain of one is the pain of all, and the redemption, of which the firstfruits portion are now the partakers, will be the joy and deliverance of all. Our theology has gone to great excess in the direction of individualism. Such passages as this show us how the individual is bound up in the race to which he belongs; how he must take his part in the suffering of the whole until the whole is delivered. In the light of the truth THECT

AND

teaching

taught We partner

with regard to the solidarity of the race, and

JAN 2) 1894

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ship in being and in destiny preserved between the living and the dead does not seem so strange.

IN PROPOSING re-incarnation as a probable solution of the problem of the resurrection of the unjust, our anxiety is not for this doctrine itself, but for the principle that lies behind it and which is essential to a right understanding of Scripture. This principle is that the generations of the living are so connected with the generations of the dead, that they take up their uncompleted probation, and both share in the results achieved. The doctrine of re-incarnation may not be a complete expression of this principle, it may only point that way. It certainly needs to be thoroughly revised, as it has come down to us from the past, in the light of the new hopes for the race brought in by the gospel. Especially it must be recast in a way that makes room for the Christian faith and hope that Jesus. Christ is the Saviour of the world and the Emancipator of the race from the grinding operation of the law of recovery to life as the heathen conceived it. For, while it . must remain eternally true that they who sow to the flesh must reap corruption, Jesus Christ saves men from the yoke of this law by lifting them into the higher region of the spirit, where they may sow to the spirit and reap the life everlasting, which is entire deliverance from the flesh and its bondage.

It is, indeed, no duty for a man to despise or reject his beliefs, simply because they are inherited; but it is his duty to see that they are held as matters of deliberate, unbiased, personal conviction. It is no hopeful sign of the individual or the nation that lightly throws off inherited

convictions; yet there is something more sacred and momentous still to each man than ancestral claims upon his heart and memory, even the claims of God and truth upon his conscience.--John Wilson in Enigma Vitæ.

NOTES ON CURRENT TOPICS.

THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE SYMBOLS.-The article of Professor E. D. Morris, D. D., in the last number of the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, makes clear-what no one who understands the common use of language could have doubted-that the Westminster Standards do not give the least standing-room anywhere for the doctrine of a post-mortem probation. On the contrary, they teach without qualification or reserve, as he affirms, that the unrighteous are to be everlastingly separated from the presence of God, and to be judicially punished by Him with unspeakable tortures of body and mind in hell-fire, without intermission or cessation, to endless ages.

We are glad to see this matter clearly and authoritatively set forth, so that all men may understand precisely what Presbyterian ministers are bound to believe and to teach on this subject, and that their own consciences may be stimulated to inquire whether the protest made in the hearts of many of them against this awful idea of God and of human destiny is not just, and whether it is right and honest for them to go on affirming this doctrine before God and men.

For whatever relief has been attempted by the Revision movement in other directions, this sore spot, which is the real seat of their trouble, has been carefully avoided.

While Dr. Morris is right in holding his brethren straight to the ⚫line of this severe doctrine, he is altogether wrong in his bold assumption that these awful statements of the Confession are drawn directly from the words of our Lord Himself. He quotes, for example, His words, "Where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched." But Dr. Morris knows that these words, as they first occur in Scripture (Is. lxvi, 24), relate to the consumption of dead carcases, and he ought to know that there is not the