of being "saved already," or of having "passed from death unto life" but men may surely cease to "kick against the pricks," and they may have grace given them to wait, amid the "fearful looking for of judgment," with a hope, however faint, that on the "new earth" they may be permitted to serve God, though it be only as "hewers of wood or drawers of water."

I do not, of course, pretend that all this is clearly revealed; for the direct teachings of the Bible relate only to present duty. But there is nothing in Scripture against what has been said; nothing that forbids the hope of mercy beyond the grave. On the contrary, there is very much to encourage such an expectation—very much that distinctly points to a large restoration of those whom most account as lost (John xii. 32; Rom. v. 18, 19; xi. 32; Col. i. 19, 20; Rom. viii. 20; Heb. ii. 14; Rev. xxi. 24; Isa. xix. 24, 25; Esek. xvi. 53-55).

But the works of God, whether natural or moral, are, as a rule, gradual. Nothing is perfected without labour and toil, and only by very slow steps can it be supposed that those who have here neglected the things that belong to their eternal peace will be raised from their lost estate, and made fit for the higher occupations of a better world. Thoughts and feelings far enough from purity and goodness may still cleave to them-for sin has its abode in the soul, not in the body-and the eradication of evil habits, the sad result of years of self-indulgence and perversity, may require both time and discipline before they can be lost in perfected holiness. Our God, however, is wonderfully patient, and as He himself tells us, "long-suffering and full of compassion." The work of Christ, too, is greater than we sometimes imagine, His grace further reaching, and his pity beyond compare. Let us beware, then, of limiting the Most High; of supposing that we can measure thoughts and intentions which are infinite, or of presuming to assert-which Scripture nowhere does-that a mercy which endureth for ever cannot be exercised in any world but this.

Yet must we not, on the other hand, either deny or seek to evade the thought that a dread possibility still remains; that there are those whom silence and sorrow will only harden; that there are those whose spirits will be seared rather than softened by processes which, intended to melt, in their case issue only in deeper insensibility to good. Of such it becomes us not to speak. Stings of conscience, incessant, and unrelieved by distracting occupations, but ever failing to accomplish that for which they have been sent; selfish regrets, unmingled with any higher aspiration; envy and hatred dominant, yet without the possibility of gratification; the utter absence of anything like that "godly sorrow" which leadeth to repentance,-dejection, but no sub

mission, despair, but no penitence,-remorse, but no grief,these are the characteristics of the man who, rejecting the gift of God, is rewarded according to his ways.

That the final lot of such will be utter destruction is plainly enough revealed. EVIL IS NOT TO BE ETERNAL; and because it was never intended to be so, God graciously, after the Fall, cut off our first parents from the tree of life, lest, eating thereof, they should live for ever. IMMORTAL MONSTERS HAVE NO PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE OF GOD. All life is in Christ. We live because He lives. We rise from the dead because He rose. He alone is the "Prince of life," the "firstborn from the dead," the "firstfruits of them that slept," and so the sure sign and pledge of the last great harvest.

[The Editor is fully aware that some points touched in this article will for a time have to be regarded as open questions, on which devout and thoughtful men may differ with mutual esteem. He would submit that the term "separate state" takes one important matter for granted, and that it is, perhaps. worthy to be noted that the New Testament, not only does not employ the phrase, but never speaks of a resurrection in the passages which imply unbroken consciousness after death and the immediate being with Christ; and, on the other hand, never implies consciousness and being with Christ as prior to resurrection in those passages in which resurrection is spoken of. If this be true, it is possible that the key to the whole subject is to be looked for and found in this direction. Possibly there is no returning on our path. Quite possibly some of the passages which speak of resurrection are graphic representations to make the fact of a future life more vividly conceivable, and that the true state of the case may hereafter be found to have been presented in those passages which teach continuous life and consciousness after death. The spiritual bodies of Elijah and Moses, who appeared in glory and conversed with Jesus, would really seem very sufficient. We gain nothing by grosser corporeity. The greatest forces are the most subtle, and God Himself, who is Spirit, is perfect.]

A SUGGESTION ON THE MEANING OF THE WORD ΑΙΩΝΙΟΣ (ETERNAL).

BY ONE WHO IS NO SCHOLAR.

I AM not able to discuss this subject on classical grounds. So far, indeed, as anything like real scholarship is concerned, I must confess that my knowledge of Greek is simply nothing. But I think this circumstance will render of none the less value ideas which may bear upon the question from another quarter. Per

haps, indeed, such ideas may take a simpler, and therefore clearer form, through standing alone. I may say, however, that I believe the results of philological study are entirely in accord with the views I wish to propose.

In the first place it may be remarked that the word divios was in use long before the New Testament was written. It was chiefly used by Plato (if not first found in him, among the authors known to us) about 400 years before Christ. In the second place it is important to note that the literal meaning of the word-its exact translation, indeed-is the "always being” (àsí-☎v); a derivation, I believe, given by Plato himself. Now to understand how Plato came to speak about "the always-being," and what he meant by it, we must enter a little upon the thoughts which were then interesting men, and try to apprehend the questions they were seeking to solve. I do not think this is difficult, and certainly it is on its own account interesting. We must try to put ourselves back, in feeling, into the condition of knowledge at that time, and then, perhaps we shall scarcely fail to see what question men were mainly battling with; how they treated it; and how far they succeeded: perhaps even we shall almost feel an after-throb of their passion, and faintly share the zeal of their pursuit the more if the suspicion should occur to us that it is not only an old-world struggle we are called on to witness, but that what they sought we also seek, that their fight is our fight. In Plato's day men had not succeeded, as in modern days they have, in bringing the visible world under the domain of reasonthat is, in tracing a rational order through it. This is the precise achievement of science, and it constitutes the great and most characteristic difference between the present and the ancient mode of thought. We see, by the aid of science, all the phenomena of the physical world as parts of an orderly and intelligible whole, in tracing the connections of which the reason finds its most perfect satisfaction. At least some privileged persons so perceive them; the rest of us believe, and even vaguely feel, that they are so. But in former times this was not the case. No ruling order had been traced in natural phenomena; to the eye of reason they were disorderly-that is, unintelligible. Especially they were unintelligible in this respect, that they began and ended without known or recognizable cause. There was no reason in their coming; no reason in their ceasing. That is, the causes of things were not known. For instance, when we see fire consume a piece of wood, we know that the combustion is a result of the union of oxygen with the chief elements of wood (carbon and hydrogen); we know that nothing is destroyed or really ceases to be, but that in the smoke and ashes all the constituents of the wood, and the oxygen besides, still exist. But

the ancients did not know this. To them the consumption of wood by fire was a total ceasing of the wood; something had been, but was not. What is to us but a mere change of form (an intelligible thing), was to them a ceasing of existence, a thing totally unintelligible, which the intellect with all its powers repudiates and denies. Or, again, when a ball is thrown against a wall and stops, there is, to our modern scientific apprehension, no ceasing of the motion, only a change of its form; as heat, &c., it continues, goes on indefinitely, ending never. But to the ancient eye the motion was and was not; nay, motions and things began as arbitrarily, as unintelligibly, as they ended. There was no accounting for anything, we might almost say without exaggerating. Now as knowledge of the phenomena increased, and the lack of reason in them thus became more palpable, this lack of reason became to some minds intolerable.*

There is certain proof that to some minds, and to Plato's emphatically, this unreason in the phenomena of the physical world did become intolerable. They called the physical world, or the "sensible world," as they termed it-the world we perceive by sense "unintelligible," or "absurd." It did not, would not by virtue of any methods known to them, conform to reason ; and they, being mightily gifted in reason (no men ever more so than some of them), repudiated it accordingly, relegated it to an inferior grade of being, denied that it existed at all in the true sense of existing, and affirmed that there was another world, which was intelligible, which did conform to the demands of the intellect. This was the "intelligible world," the world of ideas, or archetypes of all things, according to Plato. And it was the αιώνιος.

Why dos? Why were the things in this "intelligible world" the always-being things? Why was this particular term adopted-if not, as seems probable to me, created-to describe them? Surely the answer at once suggests itself. The great unreason and unintelligibility of the sensible world to those men was that the things in it began to be and ceased to be. That intelligible existence, therefore, or existence according to reason, for which their strongest impulses and convictions compelled them to search, must have presented itself to them with this emphatic

There is evidently another reason for the arising of this feeling. The lack of order or reason in the phenomena of nature, apart from science, was for a time concealed by Polytheism (or Fetishism, as it has been called), which ascribed all the more prominent natural powers or events to voluntary agents, and peopled earth and air with genii and demons. But as this superstition lost its hold, and yet no real causes were discovered, the unreason of the events necessarily became manifest. And the feeling of this unreason was a consequence of the purification of idolatry.

character, that it did not begin or cease. They sought the truly substantial, the absolute, that which existed in a deeper and truer sense than the mere beginning or ceasing things, which in the true sense (they held) did not exist at all. Therefore they called it the αιώνιος.

Now this origin of the term used by the Greeks to express that truer and deeper existence which underlies all that the senses perceive, seems to me to explain the reason that it appears to have a reference to duration. This reference is accidental rather than essential; it arose from the particular course imposed upon the thoughts of men by the limitations of their natural perception. In seeking to arrive at true existence, they had to put aside the characters which stamped non-existence on that which appeared to them to be; and this necessity they expressed by a term which put aside alike ending and beginning. What they demanded was that it should BE; and this they thought they secured by affirming that it always is.

A parallel may exhibit the case more clearly. Science also, like philosophy of old, seeks to find and to exhibit the world as intelligible; as a sphere of order, a domain of reason. But it started quite unlike philosophy, even with an express and unconcealed antagonism to it. Far from seeking an absolute beneath phenomena, it made it its especial work to trace out simply the sequence of the phenomena themselves, and to discover the order which they on an attentive examination might reveal. At once its object and its methods were new; the quest of philosophy was utterly broken off, and a different inquiry altogether instituted. Surely it might have been supposed the result also would have been altogether different. But is it so? I think the answer can hardly fail to excite both surprise and pleasure. So far from being different, the result is in all except its terms precisely the same. Science has attempted, and not in vain, to find a rational world beneath the unintelligible seeming. But how has it succeeded? Exactly by recognizing an dvos-an always-being; that is, by the affirmation that force and matter neither begin

nor cease.

Matter and force are simply the scientific divios. The doctrine of their absolute conservation-the general statement in which science sums up its net results-simply asserts them as the "always-being," and to accept them so, bringing all natural events into a series of mere changes of form, makes nature orderly; satisfies the reason in it.

The problem, then, of finding order or rationality in nature, evidently, for some cause, demanded a solution in this form, and hitherto at least has refused any other. It might be interesting to endeavour to trace the causes of this fact, but it would take