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articles of the distinction it warrants between this class and "the just." The hero of this book was eminently a good and righteous man. Like Cornelius, he would have been "accepted before God" on this ground. But even Cornelius did not yet know Christ and the power of His resurrection. Peter was sent to impart to him this, "in order that he might be saved." Such a man as Elsmere would find the reward of his good deeds "at the resurrection of the just." He would some day discover that in visiting the sick and feeding the hungry poor, he had done it ignorantly unto Christ, although he did not then believe in Him as the living Lord of men. We say this in order to guard against the inference that God takes no notice of and has no recompense for the good deeds of any but saints. These have their special place in His love and counsels. All the families of the earth are to be blessed in them. But there have been and are righteous men, not of this class, whose good deeds are kept in remembrance before God, and who shall "go away unto life eternal." When the veil that now hides His glory from their eyes is taken away, and Christ is revealed to them in His true character, they will gladly confess and worship Him as Lord. Such we believe to be the future reward of the just. But, we repeat, never will the Bible be understood, and the ways of God toward men be justified, until the well-marked distinction between the "man in Christ" and the merely good man is brought out clearly in the consciousness of the church and testified to before the world.

2. Our second remark is that if the church all through her history had rightly understood and proclaimed the meaning of the resurrection of the Lord, such books as

Robert Elsmere would never have been written. At least she would have been spared the grief and humiliation of such defections from among those nurtured on her own bosom, as this book and others of kindred origin give proof of. The glory of the Divine Christ has been tarnished, and the lustre of his triumph over death eclipsed, by the long denial within the Church that the whole of mankind has interest in that triumph. The countless generations of the dead are supposed to have passed forever beyond the reach of its benefits. Death, it is assumed, ends all hope for those who have not been saved in this life from their sins by this their only Saviour. Thus it is denied that He rose again that he might be Lord over the dead as well as the living. The gates of hell prevail against Him to hold fast forever these multitudes of captives. Or, if a resurrection be conceded to them, it is only for purposes of judgment and eternal damnation. No wonder that under such a dishonoring view of the results of this Messiah's work for the race, the meaning of His resurrection should have been crowded back into an unimportant place where it has become attenuated in many minds into a "Christian myth," and that even professed Christians are clamoring that it would be better for the Church to throw it overboard altogether as useless luggage. We do not hesitate to say that the meaning of this grand fact has not yet been properly understood by the Church. Its relation to the whole race of mankind, dead and living,has not yet been brought out. Its place in the scheme of creation and in the progress of its highest creature, man, toward the goal of his destiny as the son and heir of God is yet to be pointed out.

And this because theology has given us only a fractional Christ, whose death and resurrection achieved only a fractional redemption. The Church and mankind need a new gospel of the resurrection which shall show to men that the Divine Father, in providing for the ransom of all from death to another life, means blessing for all. Not that this blessing can come without moral fitness for it, or that it can in any way divest men of accountability for deeds done. But men need to be

acquainted with and to be tested anew under a gospel which shall not conceal the divine love in this ransom, and which shall deal with men, not as candidates for eternal torment, but as under training for another life into which they are to be lifted by the Risen Son of Man. The point that this book makes against the Church for her failure to lay hold of the masses is well taken. She has gone too much upon the theory that the only thing worthy of her efforts is the endeavor to make saints of them, and for this but few of them are capable. She has discovered no hope for them short of this. And yet a true estimate of the redemptive value of resurrection would have taught her that men may fall short of saintship and yet reap a reward from right living in the life to come; and that, therefore, every advance in the rescue of men from animalism and evil passions, every cultivation of purer and higher impulses, every step toward, the formation of a just and humane and unselfish character is so much future suffering saved, and so much gain toward a higher level in the life to come, in which every one must reap as they have sown. We have often spoken of the Church's appointed work toward the fallen and the outcast

in the ages to come. is in training here, and which lies ready to her hand all around us. To do this work intelligently and hopefully she needs to know that it is not all thrown away even where it fails to make saints. The life to come is not so dissociated from this life that any education in truth and righteousness is lost unless it reach the highest level. Robert Elsmere wrought among these degraded classes as if the conception of God which Christianity supplies were too narrow for their wants: and its traditional conception has been too narrow and unsympathetic. But the full Christianity of the New Testament is large enough to reveal the whole of God to men, to meet all their many-sided wants and to satisfy all their aspirations. And nothing is more needed to supply this just conception of God than a right view of His provision to redeem mankind from death. And this of course implies that His methods of working in human redemption all centre around a risen Christ. If Robert Elsmere had understood the place and meaning of this foundation fact in the Christian scheme, he never could have rejected it. And he would have found that it furnished him just the ground on which to work out his most cherished schemes and to fulfil his largest hopes for the elevation of his fellow-men. We long to see the day when the new adaptation of the Gospel to human needs after which he groped, and for which there is a need now strongly felt, shall be tried on these lines. For this right view of Christianity will educate men into right views of God and of their relation to Him. It will show them on the one hand the nature of his penalties—as inexorable and yet salutary. It

And this is the work for which she

will give a new significance to death as the wages of sin, and to hell as that pit of destruction into which sin casts its victims, the burning of whose fires they already feel in the inflamed passions and ambitions, the cankerous diseases that consume them in body and soul. On the other hand it will give new significance to and magnify the grace of God in resurrection, which is rescue from this pit of death. It will show that, while God, in the gift of Christ as well as in the law of creation, has put a redemptive and remedial power in the gift of life, He must still keep all life in bonds and under judgment that is not purified and made eternal through union with Christ. But this "hope of the dead" insures that the process of education in life is not all confined to this brief experience of it, and that the failure of it, with its bitter penalty of death and hell, is not final and inevitable. Its law also of "according to deeds done" insures that no gain in this process made in this life, although it may not reach the goal of eternal life in Christ, will be lost. And therefore the highest motives remain, and the strongest encouragement for helping our fellow-men through all their faltering and stumbling to lead better lives-to enlarge and ennoble their minds through natural science, as Robert Elsmere did; to band them into guilds for self-help and unselfish work for others, and so to gradually make them receptive of that knowledge of God which purifies and saves. His great mistake was in not seeing how the doctrine of a Divine Christ, and of the provision of a future life for the race in Him, glorifies all such efforts and makes their results secure and eternal.

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