The Body a Seed

THERE is then no question here of the regathering of material particles, no encouragement for unsatisfying appeals to God's omnipotence, what St. Paul teaches us to expect is the manifestation of a power of life according to law under new conditions. every seed a body of its own: not arbitrarily, but according to His most righteous will.

God giveth to

The seed determines what the plant shall be, but it does not contain the plant. The golden ears with which we trust again to see the fields waving are not the bare grains which were committed to the earth. The reconstruction of the seed when the season has come round would not give us the flower or the fruit for which we hope. Nay, rather, the seed dies, is dissolved that the life may clothe itself in a nobler form.

True it is that we cannot in this way escape from a physical continuity; but it is a continuity of life, and not of simple reconstruction.

Such a faith as this, even in its necessary vagueness, is sufficient to fill the heart of man. It substitutes for the monotony of continuance the vision of being infinitely ennobled.

An Antithesis in Nature and in Scripture THE reserve of the prophetic and apostolic writings

as to the unseen world is as remarkable as the boldness with which uninspired teachers have presumed to deal with it. But two thoughts bearing upon the future find clear expression in the New Testament. The one is of the consequences of unrepented sin as answering to the sin; the other of a final unity in which God shall be all in all. We read of an "eternal sin," of "a sin which

has no forgiveness in this world nor in the world to come," of a debt incurred of which the payment, to be rigidly exacted, exceeds all imaginable resources of the debtor, of "eternal destruction," of "the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched."

And on the other side we read of the purpose, the good pleasure of God "to sum up all things in Christ," and "through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, whether things upon the earth or things in the heavens," of the bringing to naught of the last enemy death, and the final subjection of all things to God.

Moreover, it must be added, these apparently antithetical statements correspond with two modes of regarding the subject from the side of reason.

If we approach it from the side of man, we see that in themselves the consequences of actions appear to be for the doer, like the deed, indelible; and also that the finite freedom of the individual appears to include the possi bility of final resistance to God.

And again, if we approach it from the Divine side, it seems to be an inadmissible limitation of the infinite love of God that a human will should for ever refuse to yield to it in complete self-surrender when it is known as love.

A final Divine Unity

IF F we are called upon to decide which of these two lines of reasoning, which of these two thoughts of Scripture must be held to prevail, we can hardly doubt that that which is the most comprehensive, that which reaches farthest, contains the ruling idea; and that is the idea of a final divine unity.

How it will be reached we are wholly unable to say; but we are sure that the manner, which has not been

revealed, will be in perfect harmony with the justice of God and the obligations of man's responsibility.

More than this we dare not lay down. But that end "the end "-rises before us as the strongest motive and the most certain encouragement in all the labours of the life of faith.

To the last we see little, and we see dimly. When the vision seems to grow clearer, we are forced by our earthly infirmity to bow the head and veil the face before the exceeding glory.

But in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ we can see the Father. That is enough.

Of Him and through Him and unto Him are all things.

The Duty of Spiritual Thought

THE life of man is the knowledge of God, the contemplation of Him who is the Truth. That is the message

of Christ.

But this knowledge lives and moves. It is not a dead thing embalmed once for all in phrases of the school which can be committed to memory. It is offered ever fresh as time advances for reverent study in the person of the Word Incarnate.

The surest knowledge once gained cannot supersede the necessity of unwearied, unceasing inquiry. No one can absolve himself from the duty of spiritual thought.

The mother of the Lord had received that direct, personal, living revelation of the purpose and the working of God which none other could have: she had acknowledged in the familiar strain of the Magnificat the salvation which He had prepared through her for His people she might well seem to have been lifted far above the necessity of any later teaching; but when the simple

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shepherds told their story, a faint echo as we might think of what she knew, she kept all these things, pondering them in her heart, if haply they might shew a little more of the great mystery of which she was the minister: she kept them waiting and learning during that long thirty years of silence, waiting and learning during that brief time of open labour, from the first words at the marriage feast to the last words from the Cross.

And shall we, when we think on such an example—we with our restless and distracted lives, with our feeble and imperfect grasp on truth-be contented to repeat with indolent assent a traditional confession? Can we suppose that the highest knowledge, and the highest knowledge alone, is to be gained without effort, without preparation, without discipline, and by a simple act of memory? Must the eye and the hand of the artist be trained through long years to discern and to portray subtle harmonies of form and colour while this spiritual faculty by which we enter on the unseen may be safely left unexercised till some sudden emergency calls it into play? Is it credible that the law of our nature, which adds capacity to experience and joy to quest, is suddenly suspended when we reach the loftiest field of man's activity?

The sum of human experience grows visibly from age to age; the sum of personal experience grows visibly from year to year; and the truth ought to find fresh fulfilment in every fact of life.

Unreconciled Antitheses are Prophecies and Promises of a Larger Future

UNRECONCILED antitheses are prophecies and promises of a larger future: "our failure is but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days."

If our faith could find a complete and consistent

expression here it would be condemned. It would not cover all the facts of life. The forms of thought belong to this world only.

The truth of life, like man, like Christ, who is Himself the Truth, belongs to two worlds. It is not simply the determination of physical phenomena, but the interpretation of the relation of man to nature and to God. heart has its own office in the search for it.

The

Outlines a Necessity, but a Symbol of Man's Weakness

WE acknowledge that outlines are a necessity for man's

representation of the truth of things; but they are a concession to his weakness and a symbol of it. There is no outline in nature, and no form of words can adequately express a spiritual reality.

The soul uses the outline, the formula, as an occasion, an impulse, a help; but it brings for its own treasure that which quickens them. And in this work the soul of the simplest, the most untutored, is at no disadvantage. chief instrument of spiritual progress is not knowledge but love.

Reflection on the Encarnation

So we shall look upon the Incarnation, the greatest conceivable thought, the greatest conceivable fact, not that we may bring it within the range of our present powers, not that we may measure it by standards of this world, but that we may learn from it a little more of the awful grandeur of life, that by its help we may behold once again that halo of infinity about common things which seems to have vanished away, that thinking on the phrase the Word became flesh, we may feel that in, beneath, beyond the objects which we see and taste and handle, is a Divine Presence, that lifting up our eyes to the Lord in