WORDS OF RECONCILIATION.

VOL. VI.]

MARCH, 1890.

[No. 3.

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THE GREAT DEBATE.

The debate just concluded in the New York Presbytery is a remarkable one in the annals of the Church, and its results will be far-reaching. We have all along maintained, however, that this discussion in the Presbyterian Church has not yet reached the core of the matter. To us it is amazing that such men as Drs. Schaff, Hastings, Vandyke and others can speak so vehemently against the section on foreordination, and yet have not a word to say against those sections which represent God as raising from the dead the countless masses who have died in their sins

and then consigning them afresh to hell to suffer endless torments there without intermission in body and soul in its quenchless fires. (See ch. xxxiii, Questions 29, 89, L. C.) So far as we have observed, not a word has been raised against these statements in any Presbytery. The chapter on decrees has been freely arraigned as inconsistent with the Scripture teaching concerning the fatherhood and love of God; and yet every one seems afraid to touch these eschatological sections which are much more inconsistent, and where the heart of the whole trouble lies. For the question after all is not with the sovereignty of God in fixing the bounds and metes of human destiny, but it concerns the kind of destiny He has marked out. His purpose in resurrection enters directly into the determination of this question. Is that inter

vention a curse, or does it bring another opportunity in life? This is the vital point which we began five years ago to urge upon the attention of the Church, and to it it must sooner or later come. Men are now so afraid of having their orthodoxy tainted or brought under suspicion by anything that looks like hope for sinners beyond death, that even leaders in the Church, who must know that this is the real question involved, evade it and suffer it to remain concealed behind vague declarations of fealty to "our admirable system of doctrine."

We are glad, however, that the discussion has gone so far as it has. It must needs go further. Such a revolution in theological opinion cannot permanently be stayed by a few amended phrases, especially when these phrases weaken the barriers of the system into which they are patched. Unless the Calvinists are ready to go all the way over to

the Arminians in the matter of free will, so taking the determination of man's destiny out of the Creator's hands and putting it in those of the creature, they must sooner or later face this question of the kind of destiny that God has marked out for the human race. Their confession declares that He, from all eternity, parcelled out an immense portion of it for endless misery. We have told them, and now tell them again, that this gross libel on the Divine Name has arisen and has been perpetuated in the Church, through a false and most unworthy conception of the purpose of God in redeeming the human race from death. A false view of the nature of man and of death as the appointed penalty for sin, and of the meaning and purpose of resurrection, has obscured this whole subject and rendered possible this monstrous perversion of the gospel, by which the glad tidings to the human race of another gift of life through a conquering Christ becomes a knell of eternal despair to the most of those to whom the tidings are sent. Even so good and wise a man as Dr. Storrs would brand as unfit for missionary service a man who would dare whisper to the heathen that there is any hope couched in this victory for the countless generations of their ancestors who have gone down to death!

Thank God, the veil has begun to be lifted from such blindness to the grace and glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ.

NEW LIGHT.

The Rev. Dr. T. A. Hoyt, in his able argument before the Presbytery of Philadelphia against revision, asked with much emphasis, "Have we any new light on these old doctrines of God's Word which will warrant us in the attempt to frame them into a new creed ?"

This is a strong point, and it reveals both the weakness and the strength of this revision movement. The Presbyteries who favor it uniformly protest that they do not desire any such changes as will impair the integrity of the old system. They thus virtually confess that it has no serious defects. And their adversaries wield this admission with great force against their argument for change.

When we began our movement in Presbytery four years ago for a change, we placed it distinctly on this groundthat we had obtained new light upon the meaning of the primary doctrine of the Christian faith, the resurrection of the dead. We claimed that this light revealed a fundamental defect in the whole Westminster system, in that it robbed this doctrine of any "hope toward God" for any part of the human race but the elect; representing this provision to recover mankind from death as having no better issue than their endless torment. It thereby cramps the love of God in the atonement within these narrow limits and confines the gracious purpose of God in the choice of His elect to the selfish ends of their own salvation, and with no ulterior end of benefit to the race at large. Here then we have new light and a new commanding principle, powerful enough to disintegrate the old system and to reconstruct it in a new and more perfect form.

We agree with Dr. Hoyt in his claim that the Church has no right to revise the ancient faith unless she can make good her claim to new and superior light. The Presbyterian Church has so far made her way out of the old gloom as to stand in the twilight of the larger and better day. But she needs to open her eyes to this new truth about resurrection before she can see clearly that the God whom she rightly worships and glorifies as Sovereign is truly Love, and before she can understand His purpose in the calling of the Church as the chosen seed of blessing to "all the families of the earth."

ISRAEL'S REDEMPTION.

Professor Harper, of Yale University, has been giving in this city a course of lectures upon Old Testament prophecy and we have been an interested listener. All the old prophets, even the most denunciatory, mingle with their messages of wrath promises of Israel's restoration. Professor Harper arranges the various modes of interpreting these promises under three heads.

1. These promises are conditional. As the nation never fulfilled the conditions the promises remain void.

2. The prophecy means what it says, only the blessings have been made over to the Christian Church, the spiritual seed of Israel.

3. The promises will be literally fulfilled in a future age when Israel will be restored to his own land.

As to which of these he adopts, he has not yet made plain.