ACTION OF THE PRESBYTERY OF WEST

JERSEY.

We stated in our May number that we had sought advice from this body to which we belong,

I. As to the limits of the constitutional rights of a Presbyterian minister to agitate within the church for the removal from its system of doctrine of any error which he believes may have crept into it at an important point; and also what duty in reference thereto is imposed upon him by his ordination vows which bind him to seek the purity of the church, as well as its peace.

2. Whether the discussion raised in this magazine about the eschatology of our Confession so far transcends. these limits that we ought to carry it on outside of the church instead of within it.

The Committee, to whom the matter was referred returned this answer to the first question :

"The real meaning of the question is: If a minister changes his theological views and thinks that the standards of the church are wrong and unscriptural, what constitutional right has he to agitate his own views within the church?

We answer, It is his first duty to inform his Presbytery of the change in his views. He has a right to bring the subject before the ecclesiastical courts in a regular and constitutional manner. How long, and how far, he may continue the discussion and agitation is a difficult. question, and to be decided according to each man's own conscience, remembering his ordination vows, in which he adopted the Confession of Faith as containing the

216 Action of the Presbytery of West Jersey.

system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures, and promised to be zealous and faithful in maintaining the truths of the gospel, and the purity and peace of the church."

At a stated meeting of the Presbytery held on June 27th the motion was made to adopt this as the answer of the Presbytery to the first question. We objected to the first part of it, in which the Committee so paraphrased our inquiry as to imply that there had been a change in our theological views along the whole line of the teaching of our standards, whereas the question implied divergence only "at an important point." The Presbytery acknowledged the force of our objection, and directed this part of the answer to be stricken out, so as to make it begin with the words "It is his first duty," etc. They then adopted this part of the report. To it, we interposed no objection, as we have endeavored to follow the course it marks out. We made known to leading members of the body the views we have since published, and followed their advice in calling the attention of the brethren privately to them. We afterwards introduced an overture to the General Assembly to appoint a Committee to inquire into the propriety of revising the eschatological teaching of our Standards, and offered publicly at the time to receive advice about our course from any Committee the Presbytery might choose to appoint. As the answer adopted virtually leaves the decision of the question with a man's own conscience, we could ask no more. We have endeavored to act in all good conscience in this matter before God and man. And as to the obligation imposed by our ordination vows, we could

not act in any other way, with our views of the church as a living body in which the Spirit of God dwells for its growth in knowledge and purity. We cannot regard it

as a mere association for the conservation of a certain system of doctrine. We were therefore bound to seek the purity of the church by calling its attention to certain wrong interpretations of Scripture by reason of which the framers of our Confession have fastened on her a view of God's dealings with the most of His creatures so repulsive to her own enlightened Christian convictions that she cannot and dare not set forth these mysteries of the future from her pulpits in the faithful use of the terms there prescribed. In the interest of the church's honesty, as well as purity, in the interest of a right knowledge of God, which lies at the basis of all true spiritual life, all her healthful progress, and all her beneficent work for mankind, we have raised this discussion. And it has proceeded, we believe, right along the lines which our brethren of the Presbytery in this an swer say we ought to have taken.

As the Committee's answer to our second inquiry has not yet been acted upon by the Presbytery, but is still further to be considered at its next meeting in October we decline for the present to publish it, or to give our views upon it.

NOTES ON CURRENT OPINIONS AND

EVENTS.

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.-A friend has sent us a copy of a book with this title, by the Rev. Thomas S. Potwin, of Hartford, Conn. The preface states that it is an "attempt to maintain the doctrine of conditional immortality, and to outline, in part, its ad justment to orthodoxy, old and new." The argument, on the whole, is well sustained. Although we do not see that the author has contributed much to the support of this doctrine beyond what has been effected by the labors of those who have gone before him. His book, however, has the merit of avoiding the excesses into which some of the advocates of conditionalism have been led in their views of the nature of man, as a being incapable of existence apart from the body. At this point he approximates to the explanation we have given of the future state of the righteous. He be lieves that they enter upon the first stage of resurrection life imme diately after death. He speaks of "the body of the intermediate state as a preparatory condition to the final manner of life of the redeemed." We are one with him in resisting the idea that the saints of God, who are made partakers of His eternal life by Christ Jesus, remain in a state of unconscious sleep until a distant resurrection. And we sympathize also with his view that we cannot conceive of them as mere bodiless spirits, unclothed during this long interval. But we much prefer the explanation of this mystery which we have frequently suggested, as founded in the tripartite nature of man. He finds nothing in Scripture "opposed to the belief that men enter upon a resurrection life for body as well as soul immediately after death" (page 117). We ask, then, what is the meaning of that earnest expectation of the creature in its waiting to be delivered from its bondage to corruption "at the redemption of our body?" (Rom. viii, 19-23). We are obliged to view the resurrection of the bodies of the redeemed as connected with a great crisis in the history of creation as well as of redemption. The creature will then be glorified, and the sons of God will be "manifested." But the "soul" of man lives on after death; and, as distinguished from "spirit, "it pertains to the embodied side of

man's nature. As distinguished from the visible body of flesh and blood, the soul may be viewed as a psychical body. Hence the righteous man, whose soul is saved, does not lose all embodiment in death. He does not become a naked, outcast, spirit. We prefer, therefore, to find in this fact the explanation of such anastasis as Scripture predicates of believers, this side of the day of glory.

The writer finds also a possible probation for the heathen in this intermediate state. We have often explained our view of this matter, which is far less objectionable, that no anastasis is provided for any who die out of Christ, except as it shall reach them through the royal and priestly offices of those who constitute, under Him, the church of the first-born, and that salvation to eternal life and blessedness will be possible to any who have failed of it in this life only after, and not before, their resurrection from the dead. There may be a probation in Hades for resurrection, affecting the time and order of it. But probation for eternal life in glorified manhood is possible only to men, and not to "spirits in prison."

While the author of this book does not properly discriminate at these points, we are in full sympathy with the general aim and drift of his argument. We believe, with him, that goodness and not hate, life and not death, are to triumph in this universe of God. We agree also in his first postulate, that, whatever may be true of the spirit of life which animates man, man as man is not inherently immortal. Scripture does not teach this. Science is against it. By every possible form of statement we are assured that the wages of sin is death. Moral death is an adjunct of this condition. But it is not the essence of it. The destruction of man's present embodied being, and his consequent ejection out of his inheritance in this created system, is the threatened penalty of sin. The grace of God in Christ has interfered so as to make this casting out not final. All shall be made alive again, so that all may be brought within the reach of the provisions of this more abounding grace. But that some will fall out of the line of this progress in the triumph of life, and sink out of sight in a second death, is a plain inference from Scripture. And as such lives fail to become rooted and grounded in Christ, in whom alone is life, they cannot be immortal. The best Christian thought of the day is more and more inclining to this view.