Of course it is not in himself alone, but in God working within him that the power of this perfection lies.

As Scripture reveals that even the unjust are to be raised out of death, but not "unto life," it would seem that the only condition of being possible to them would be one of renewed subjection to the bondage and discipline of this mortal state. This would be reincarnation. And there is no more difficulty in believing that their firstborn and conquering brethren help them through all the stages of their progress than there is in supposing that men are so helped in this present stage.

There is one point at which we confess to be still in doubt. With regard to all the lower races of mankind, from the days of the cave-dwellers and through all the grades of savagery and barbarism, no other explanation is more natural and philosophical than that they advance along the scale of life through reincarnation. And Scripture implies as much in its fundamental way of connecting its hope for these masses of mankind with the survival of a seed.

When we reach higher grades of humanity, however, in which the ethical and intellectual and spiritual elements of human nature are more developed, here the necessity for progress through reincarnation does not become so apparent. Even before the Christ-nature is begotten and formed in men, there may have been developed the germs of righteous character. A soul may thus acquire such power of spiritual life as may make it capable of progress in a future state without necessity for its return to earthly conditions. In other words, a process of reincarnation may not be needed where a soul has already virtually

broken through the trammels of an earthly life. We were at first attracted to this view of reincarnation because of its easy and natural application to the case of the unnumbered myriads of low-down men, who had come and gone on this planet, and who seem to have come up from the animal plane of life to the human, but whose path toward full manhood was yet so incomplete. We would by no means insist that there is no point short of perfect Christhood where this necessity ceases, and that there is no provision for the carrying forward to perfection of higher grades of humanity in whom the spark of a diviner nature has been kindled.

2. This correspondent also asks:

"How we reconcile the teaching that men must suffer the penalty of all their sins with the Lord's Prayer (and other Scriptures), where we are taught to ask God to forgive us our sins, even as we forgive those that sin against us. It is needless for me to say that when we forgive one who has wronged us, the matter is supposed settled."

We have taught that God forgives sin by putting it away, and that if it is not put away, the sin remains and the penalty also. For wherever there is sin there must be penalty. In the Lord's Prayer we ask God to forgive us, as we from the heart forgive other men their trespasses against us. This implies that the spirit of love has displaced sin in us. We could not thus love our neighbor without loving God; and love is the fulfilling of the law. It supplants the sinful states from which we seek forgiveness. Penalties, therefore, are removed, because the sin that made them necessary is gone. If the sin were to remain, the penalties would be continued. Even forgiveness between men proceeds on this principle.

In the

case our correspondent supposes, he forgives his neighbor in the expectation that animosity toward him in his neighbor's heart will be displaced. But if the neighbor goes on hating him and doing him injury, the matter which he "supposed settled" could not long remain so.

THE DIVINE FORGIVENESS.

The first announcement of the principle of the Divine Forgiveness was made upon that occasion when Moses, wearied and discouraged by the rebellion of the people, besought the Lord to shew him His glory (Exodus xxxiii, xxxiv), and when the Lord in response promised to make all His goodness pass before Him. The name by which He proclaimed Himself was "The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."

Here is stated the unvarying principle upon which God proceeds in forgiving sin. On the one hand there is abundant mercy, on the other an inflexible purpose to visit upon the guilty and upon their children to the third and fourth generations the consequences of his sin.

This is the uniform statement of Scripture in Old Testament and New. On the one hand, the divine mercy in forgiveness is represented as without bounds. It reaches the case of the vilest sinner, and flows over unto thousands

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of generations; that is, it is practically limitless and eternal. And yet in every variety of phrase and of illustration we are taught that every man must reap the fruit of his own doings, that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to render unto every man according to his work (Jer. xvii, 10; xxxii, 19). Nor is this principle set aside by the grace of the gospel. The New Testament is equally emphatic in declaring that every man must reap as he has sown, and that we must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things in body, according to that he hath done, whether good or bad" (II Cor. v, 10). This is the great resurrection principle (John v, 29). Nor are Christians by any act of faith, or otherwise, exempted from its operation. Nearly every one of the passages commonly quoted to warn the ungodly against a day of judgment were addressed primarily to believers. It is they who are told, "Be not deceived; God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" (Gal. vi, 7). A believer may have the liveliest faith that all his sins have been forgiven, and yet, if at any time he falls into wrong-doing, his fault or transgression is written down against him in an infallible book of remembrance, and sooner or later he must suffer the penalty.

In what then does the divine forgiveness consist? Our reply is that it is something deeper than the removal of penalty. It is something far more merciful than pardon; it requires and provides for the putting away of sin. This, indeed, is the etymological meaning of the oft-recurring Scripture word forgive. God forgives sin by putting it

away, and this not in some forensic or arbitrary way which sets a man right before the law when he is really unrighteous. He has provided to take out of and away from the man who submits to Him the sins that make punishment necessary, for God's penalties must be vis

ited upon a man so long as the sin remains. He re

mits the penalty by removing the sin that requires the penalty; albeit, in order to this He must put to death the very nature in which sin resides.

As, in the Hebrew tongue, the words we render "to curse " and "to bless," run back to the same root idea, so in point of fact, the very suffering which, sooner or later, comes to us when we are out of touch with the divine order of love to God and to man, is the means appointed to bring us to that harmony which all must gain.

...

Every self-denying, sympathetic soul becomes a mediator, through whom the reconstructive forces of the universe make their impress felt upon the race.

Professor S. P. Wait.

THE ASSUMPTION that this course of human life is strictly the probation of the individual in his mature development, and that the terminus of this probation is in the incident of the death of the individual, and that the location of heaven and hell is beyond the earth, and that the object of salvation is transportation to the one and escape from the other, and that human life is evil, and that the few who have a conscious faith, which has, in itself, no ethical ground, are alone saved in the ultimate assize to which all