become severe torment is plainly taught in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus before referred to.

6. Romans ii. 5, 6, is quoted in proof that the "wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish" which is sure to come npon every soul of man that doeth evil in (the) day of wrath and of revelation of the righteous judgment of God are to be poured upon the wicked after their resurrection. And yet we are assured in the previous chapter that the wrath of God is now revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and that evil doers now receive in themselves the due recompense of their error (vs. 27), and show themselves "worthy of death." It is a begging of the question to assume that all these passages relate to a post-resurrection judgment when not one of them affirms this.

7. It is a still more flagrant petitio principii to apply 2 Thess. ii. 7-9. to the risen dead. Those who are to be punished with "eternal destruction from the face of the Lord" are described in the previous epistle as living on the earth, and saying one to another "peace and safety when this day of fire overtakes them.

8. If this crude compiler of texts had consulted the Revised Version of 2d Peter ii. 9, he would have seen that, instead of teaching that "the ungodly are reserved unto the day of judgment to be punished" the passage reads "the Lord knoweth how to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto (the) day of judgment." In like manner there is not a word to show that (the) "day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men" spoken of in

The article does not occur in the Greek.

Ch. iii. 7, falls upon any other class than the generation overtaken by it, just as the flood, with which it is compared, fell upon the men of that day.

The fact is the whole of our current conception of these passages about coming judgment is vitiated because it does not base itself upon the Old Testament teaching in which the roots of these passages lie. The idea of coming judgment, and of the day of the Lord's vengeance, is never there the vague and distant thing which we have gathered it to be from a surface study of the New Testament. Moses and the prophets had much to say about the punishments to be visited upon the wicked.

But they are curses that fall upon them in their persons, their bodies, their souls, their households, their fields, their commonwealths. They look beyond this life indeed. But the darkness and bondage of Sheol, into which the proud and impious enemies of Jehovah passed, lay just beyond death and a long way this side of resurrection. All the glimpses there given of the resurrection present it to us in the light of a "hope toward God," even for the unjust (Acts xxiv. 15). This disregard of the Old Testament doctrine of judgment, of death and sheol as the wages of sin, is the vice and weakness of our modern eschatology. It has stripped

for us the gospel of half its meaning. It has perverted

our ideas of both death and resurrection. It has made men believe that the judgments of God are so remote that perhaps after all they will never reach us. It has shut our eyes to the proofs all around us, and in our own experience, that our God, not " God out of Christ," as we so often hear, is a consuming fire, and that evil-doers

are now treading on the brink of hell, and even disciples, if they are to escape in the fire that shall try every man's work, must now consent to pluck out an eye, or cut off the hand that offends. "For every one shall be salted with fire." (Mark ix. 49).

STUDIES IN THE BIBLE.

WHO ARE THE OUTCASTS?

And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.-Isa. xxvii. 13.

We have seen that there is a class of passages in Old Testament prophecy which look forward to a deliverance of prisoners, who have been carried away into captivity by "the hand of the enemy," and are held as captives in the realm of death. Whatever minor and preliminary deliverances may be referred to, release from Sheol is the ultimate thing in view.

Of the same character are those passages which speak of these captive ones as "perished" and "outcast." It is in connection with their final recovery from death that Jehovah is spoken of as He that "gathereth together the outcasts of Israel" (Ps. cxlvii. 2; Isa. xi. 12).

In respect to the passage above quoted, the phrase, "In that day," connects it with the splendid Messianic prophecy of the previous chapters. That the deliverance of which it speaks is connected with the Messiah's

work of raising the dead is plainly stated. In Chapter xxv. 6-8, occur the beautiful words:

And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. And He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away all tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of His people shall He take away from off all the earth for the Lord hath spoken it. And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us.

In Chaper xxvi., which begins also with the phrase, "In that day," we have another emphatic prediction that the dead of Israel shall be raised.

Awake and

Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise. sing ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead" (margin the shades, vs. 19, R. V.)

In

In the Mosaic law the blowing of the great trumpet ushered in the year of jubilee (Lev. xxv. 8–10), which is specially the type of the restitution of all things. the New Testament the same symbol is employed to denote the coming of the Son of Man (Matt. xxiv. 31) and the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. xv. 52). St. Paul also connects this event directly with "the saying that is written," which we have quoted from Isa. xxv. 8. The words "ready to perish" and "outcasts" in the passage before us literally mean "the perished ones," and the banished, or "thrust out ones." (See Gesenius under the words abad and nadach). We have, therefore,

a strong presumption, if not absolute proof, that the lost and banished ones, to whom this passage refers, and for whom the great trumpet is to be blown, are the exiles in Sheol. And this is further confirmed by the fact that Egypt, as the land in which God's people were in bitter bondage, and Assyria, into whose remote recesses a large part of them were carried and lost to view, are both types of that realm of death into which men are borne by the course of nature and the course of this world. * No literal return of these exiles has fulfilled this word of the prophet. The outcasts in these coun

tries literally perished there.

In any subsequent return

likely to be literally The large majority

of the Jews to their own land which may now be looked for, the dispersed of Israel are not gathered from Egypt and Assyria. of them are not there. And yet God's Word must stand. If we regard the ancient exiles in these lands as having literally perished there, as was true of them, and if we view Egypt and Assyria as typical of this great world-system of natural laws and of bestial dominion, under whose grinding power the generations of mankind are driven down as captives into the realms of death, we shall see how naturally and impressively such prophecies as this bring before us the great promise of resurrection which runs like a thread of light through all this darkness, and illumines all the past history of mankind, as well as its future, with the rising sun of this "hope toward God."

*See article on "Egypt, Assyria, Babylon," Vol. I, page 306.