the Father in heaven is perfect before we are fit to share in the completed kingdom of God (Matt. v. 20, 48); and if, on the other hand, only one sin is unpardonable, blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, mockery of the holy truth which the heart has known, and the power of God,-how could the decision of that future tribunal on those who appear before it in neither state of heart fall on either side of that dread alternative? But the positive proof for the contrary is found on all sides in the declarations of Jesus, if only we pay attention to it. How definitely is the rejection of Israel announced more than once, its banishment into the dark prison where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. viii. 12), and yet the sharpest of such prophetic words closes with the intimation that even for Israel an hour will come when it will cry believingly to its Messiah, "Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord" (Matt. xxiii. 37-39). Still more plain and comforting run the judicial words about the heathen world: "If such deeds had been done in Tyre and Sidon, nay, in Sodom and Gomorrah, they had repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you that it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, and even for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the day of judgment than for you" (Matt. xi. 20-24; Luke x. 13, 14). Here one asks in vain what a more tolerable eternal damnation can be? The idea only becomes possible when the punishment-just as we found it should be taken in Matt. v. 25, 26-is thought of as a finite one. The same idea of the limited and transitory punishment in the other world lies in principle directly before us in the declaration, Luke xii. 47, 48: "He that knoweth his master's will and doeth that which is worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with many stripes; but he who knoweth it not and doeth what is worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes." From the connection in which it stands the saying is thoroughly eschatological. It speaks of the punishment “on that day," but what can one think of an eternal damnation which consists of only a few stripes? A limited and passing punishment, however, naturally becomes a chastisement or means of improvement, and so there logically springs from the idea of a future judgment which is in a measure relative, the idea that there may be development and conversion in

the world to come. And that may be proved on other grounds. Jesus implies that Tyre and Sidon, Sodom and Gomorrah, would have willingly repented if only they had had in their day such means of grace, such signs of Christ, as Chorazin and Bethsaida enjoyed. Surely it follows from the righteousness of Him who does not seek to reap where He has not sown (Luke xix. 21), from the mercy of God who willeth not that one of the least of these should perish (Matt. xviii. 14), that that full revelation of God in Christ which would have brought about their conversion on earth will yet be offered them in the world to come. And for all who need it, this is already implied in the thought that God judges the world by Christ. That God judges the world by Christ means, that He places the life of everyone in the holy light of His perfect revelation in Christ, and thus He ratifies His judgment in each case by the witness of conscience (Rom. ii. 15, 16). But how is this possible unless this revelation of God in Christ is brought near to those in the world to come who did not know it on earth? Finally, our idea is confirmed in the most positive way by the words about the sin against the Holy Ghost which cannot be forgiven, "neither in this world. nor that which is to come" (Matt. xii, 32). This addition would not only be idle and meaningless if in that world forgiveness were utterly impossible, but since the only unpardonable sin requires that a man have first experienced the love of God in Christ, before anyone can be finally cast away there must have been the closest approach to his heart of the gospel. If all this is correct, then it follows, according to Jesus, that there is in the silent world of the departed a law similar in every respect to that which rules in the history of the world as it moves forward on the earth. The judgment of God in Christ runs through both as punishment in order to save, and the day of judgment, in the eschatological sayings of Jesus, is a symbol of the idea that all, whether good or evil, that human life contains, must finally come into the full light of divine revelation and be felt in its true worth by the man himself; that there must come a day in which the man is weighed in God's unerring balance.

BEYSCHLAG.—I.

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§ 11. THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

One special article of eschatological expectation in which the riddle of the last day, so far solved, once more presents itself, is the resurrection of the dead. The views of Judaism about it were very much divided. The Sadducees denied any continued existence after death at all. The Essenes and Alexandrians limited it to a continued existence of the soul. The Pharisaic belief in a bodily resurrection was dominant, but was divided again into two different notions, the one expecting a general resurrection of the dead, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame and contempt (Dan. xii. 2), the other expecting a resurrection of the righteous only, the wicked abiding in death. Both, however, meant by resurrection that the earthly body should be restored and made immortal, and both placed it in connection. with the expected glorification of all nature at the last day (cf. John xi. 24; Rom. viii. 19-23). Until then it was thought that the souls of the departed were in Sheol or Hades, a place of blessedness or woe, a Paradise or a Gehenna, but still awaiting the final decision and consummation of their lot. These notions Jesus adopted, as has already been said; but in so doing He spiritualised them, and treated them. solely as true symbols of religious ideas. It is surprising how little weight He lays on bodily death from the first; how the idea of the true life in antithesis to the life of the body deprives dying of its significance to His mind. Fear not him who kills the body, and is not able to kill the soul," He exclaims to His disciples (Matt. x. 28); "but fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." For Him the true life of man is connected with the soul and not with the body; and even the soul has not life in itself, but only in God. If it does not live to Him, if it seeks to live in itself and for itself, it comes under the power of death; but if it surrenders itself for His sake, then it enters into true life. "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it (ảтoλéσei); and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall preserve it" (Swoyovýσe). Luke xvii. 30; cf. Mark viii. 35; Matt. x. 39, xvi. 25. According to this the future condition is regarded by Jesus as proceeding organically and with logical necessity from the

present. This inner connection, represented in contrasts, forms the real kernel of the Parable of the Rich Man and Poor Lazarus. The rich man, whose earthly life is spent in clothing himself in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day, in the other world, where sensuous joys are unknown, can only be tormented with vain longings. The poor man was a genuine Lazarus (God is my help), and had learned to seek and find his help in God amid the miseries of earth; and as the pearl grows within the diseased mussel, so there was formed within him the pearl of a life which must be seen in its spiritual beauty when appearances have ceased and truth appears. As in this passage the dead do not seem to be disembodied or wholly out of relation to the external world, so Jesus does not insist, on the other hand, on the restoration of a body at the resurrection. Not only does He not speak of a restoration of the earthly body such as was expected by the Jews, the point of His answer to the question of the Sadducees lies in His rejection of such a notion. "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage "-they are as little fitted for begetting children as for dying again; they are, it is said in Luke xx. 35, as the angels. Even if this suggests the notion that angels have some sort of spiritual body and are raised above the distinction of sex, it is at anyrate the case that the centre of gravity in Jesus' idea of the resurrection lies elsewhere than in the question of corporeity. To Him the idea of the resurrection coincides essentially with the idea of life in the full sense of the word, life in God. For this is His proof of the resurrection: God calls Himself in the presence of Moses centuries after the death of the patriarchs, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." "But He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." He whose God He is, and who abides in communion with Him, lives though he were long dead. Still more remarkable, in the same train of thought, is the phrase which precedes it in Luke, though it is also in the mind of the other two evangelists of dè καταξιωθέντες τοῦ αἰῶνος ἐκείνου τυχεῖν καὶ τῆς ἀναστάσεως TηS ÉK VEKρŴV. Not all the dead, therefore, attain to the resurrection, but only those who are worthy of it, only those who are, as it is further said in the same context, equal to

νεκρῶν.

the angels, and children of God. Accordingly, of the two notions about the resurrection which were current among His people, Jesus decided in favour of the more profound, which declares that only the righteous are raised, as is attested also in Luke xiv. 14 (ἐν τῇ ἀναστάσει τῶν δικαίων). The resurrection is to Him not a formal concept applicable to all, whether they have cultivated in themselves a higher life or not; in it the true divine life of a man is brought to the glory for which he is destined; it is, in a word, the perfection of the personality in God, in which the glorified body can only be thought of as the expression of the perfect inward beauty. That is also formally expressed in the concluding words of Luke, υἱοὶ εἰσιν θεοῦ, τῆς ἀναστάσεως υἱοὶ ÖVTES, that is, they have attained the end of their eternal destiny just as sons of the resurrection and sons of God, perfect images of the heavenly Father.

12. RETROSPECT AND CONCLUSION

Let us look back from the height of this result on what has just been proved with regard to the last day. If Jesus considered the resurrection to be the reward and perfection of the righteous, how impossible is it that He should have fixed a term for that consummation uniform for all, and should have consigned the departed to an intermediate state, which would only have a meaning if it were measured out to each according to his individual need! Even from this side, therefore, the notion of a last day as an actual terminus the same for all, falls to the ground. The distinction of the aidov οὗτος and αἰὼν ἐκεῖνος, which Jesus has appropriated and applied in His answer to the question of the Sadducees (Luke xx. 34, 35), cannot be adduced against this, for that view is spiritualised in His teaching, and is divested of the character of a purely temporal antithesis. When Jesus speaks in Luke xvi. 8 of the υἱοὶ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, and places over against them the υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός, He describes not merely the men of this period of time, but men whose thoughts and aims are merged in the temporal and finite, while the world of eternity shines into this temporal state and makes some to be children of the light. Thus in the present, in which the