were to live again, though put to death. Just as the same apostle had said of the Lord: "Him ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain, whom God hath raised up." (Acts ii. 23, 24.)

But the force of the apostle's argument is not materially affected, whether we understand him as referring to death by persecution, or death as the effect of God's judgment against sin, as the common lot of the descendants of Adam.

By referring to the preceding context the reader will perceive that the condition of the dead, between the time of their death and resurrection, is not the subject of his discourse; he is rather seeking to strengthen the flock of God, amid the sore persecution they had to bear for their Lord's sake. He reminds them that suffering for well-doing was not peculiar to them; that the Christ himself had suffered, even unto death; and therefore, as their Lord had suffered for them, they should be ready and willing to suffer for Him, no longer living according to the desires of the flesh, but according to the will of God. Viewed in this light, the language of verse 6 seems to amount to this: "Your sufferings are in no respect peculiar, for the gospel was preached to, and received by, the disciples, who have already been subjected to death, who, although it was the will of God they should so suffer, yet that by submitting themselves to sufferings and death they should live again, according to the pleasure of God, when at the resurrection they are made alive by the spirit.' Comfort this, like the assuring words of our Lord, "He who loseth his life for My sake shall keep it unto life eternal."

Such, we think, is the most probable meaning of the apostle's words; but, as W. G. Moncrieff observes in his work, Spirit: "Let the full force of the text be what it may, it teaches nothing about disembodied spirits; for surely it would require a most merciless torturing of the words, live according to God in the spirit,' to make them express this: "live according to God, as disembodied spirits, in the unseen world."

The translators seem to have viewed the language in a similar way as we have done, seeing they have rendered the Greek verb in the past tense : "For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead." According to the view taken by those who apply the words as Dr. Farrar has done, they would require to be: "For this cause is the gospel preached to them that are dead." Perhaps such a rendering may yet be argued for, but it would be in strange contrast to such statements as: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest." "The night cometh when no man can work." A great deal of Scripture, indeed, would require to be rewritten before we could find any warrant there for the idea of the evangelising of the dead.

But, after all, the apostle is speaking of dead persons, while Dr. Farrar and his school are thinking of persons still alive! Those unsaved ones who are supposed to be the subjects of evangelisation in the unseen state are not thought to be dead, but more sensibly alive than when in the body. It is not they, but their bodies-the house in which they lodged for a while-which has crumbled to dust. As men throw

aside a worn-out garment, so they, it is supposed, have left their bodies behind them, as so many old clothes, and, in the unseen world whither they have gone, have the gospel, which they despised here, preached to them there with so much effect that, according to Canon Farrar, all, or nearly all, shall be saved by it.

Why, then, take a passage which speaks of those who are dead to sustain a theory regarding persons who are ALIVE? In the Scriptures there are no two greater opposites than death and life; and never do we find the Scriptures speaking of a person as dead, while he is understood to be alive, whether the reference be to natural or moral life. The persons of whom Peter speaks are evidently regarded by him as having been once alive, and now dead. It is not of bodies, as such, he is writing, but of persons; and the Scriptures uniformly speak of the person as dying— "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Man returneth to his earth in that day his thoughts perish."

It is only by ignoring the testimony of Scripture, and substituting for it the conceptions of men, that the pleasing fancy of reformation between death and resurrection can be held. Hence we find its advocates speaking with contempt of "an array of texts of Scripture," and denouncing adherence to its natural and grammatical sense as "servile interpretation." The day is at hand when it shall be seen who is the wiser-he who takes God's word to mean what it says, and obeys it, or he who wrests the Scriptures, by making them conform to his own fancy, or treating them as old-world lore, which the march of intellect has left behind!

Notwithstanding our deep sense of the sincerity, ability, and learning of Dr. Farrar, and many others like minded, we must oppose their dream of salvation in the unseen state, for the apostle of Christ assures us that" Now is the accepted time, Now IS THE DAY OF SALVATION." 51, Buccleuch St., Edinburgh.

W. LAING.

THERE

ZION VERSUS GREECE.

A FIGHT FOR TRUTH.

ПHERE will be no world-wide experience of glorious rest, except the Lord stir up the sons of Zion against the sons of Greece. (Zechariah ix. 10, 13.) Then the war chariot shall be cut off from Ephraim, and the war horse from Jerusalem. They shall cease to suffer from artillery and from cavalry, and they shall no more use them, and the King of Zion, whose name is Jesus, and who once rode into Jerusalem on an ass, the patient servant of industry, "shall speak peace to the heathen, and His dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth." Greece has been long dominant and overbearing, but her day will come. But when? The Lord says: "When I have bent Judah for Me," made him My bow, "and filled that bow with Ephraim," when all the twelve tribes of Israel are united and ready to vindicate Zion, and when "I have raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man." We

look for an actual fulfilment of this prediction; but this is very unfashionable in these days. We are now taught to make Zion represent the true Christian church, and of course Greece must then consist of those who harass and oppress her. When therefore the church awakens and unites to put Greece down, then there will be hope for herself and the world. This then is what we intend to discuss :

ZION versus GREECE.

What harm has Zion received from Greece? What is the nature of her plaint against the defendant to this action ?

1. This deponent saith that the Lord raised up from among her sons certain prophets, wise men, and writers. (Matt. xxiii. 34.)

2. That these sons of Zion went everywhere and preached the word of life.

3. That the Lord owned their labours, and gathered many brethren who believed.

4. That these were formed into churches which worshipped God and kept the Christian ordinances, as the Head of the church appointed.

5. This deponent further saith, that some of these churches were in Greece, notably one at Corinth, planted by Paul.

6. That certain men, who prided themselves in eloquence and philosophy, tried early to destroy Paul's influence for good there.

7. That they complained of his wanting eloquence in utterance, and philosophic insight in the matter of his preaching.

8. That they raised a storm of strife where peace ought to have dwelt. "One said, I am of Paul; another, I of Apollos; another, I of Peter; and another, I of Christ."

9. That at this very time, when clamouring for wisdom and oratory, they were tolerating uncleanness among them, going to law with brethren before unjust men; tampering with idolatry, detracting from Paul's apostolic authority, abusing the Lord's table, disregarding the Scriptures, and dividing the one body of Christ: then farther, they were exalting mere gifts and repressing divine charity; and some were denying the resurrection. All this was done when they proudly rated themselves to be competent to settle the merits of ministers.

10. That the apostle Paul aforesaid also gathered a church at Salonica whose members were early subjected to persecution. "The whole city" moving against believers and their ministers, and when these latter were gone, continuing the persecution.

11. The deponent also saith that at Philippi the sons of Zion had been shamefully treated by the sons of Greece.

12. After this, a Hebrew of the Hebrews striving to do good in Athens, one of the very Greek cities, was opposed by both the stern Stoics and the self-indulgent Epicureans, and brought up before the high court under a law forbidding any one to bring into the city any strange God. That he nobly defended his teaching and outstripped all their wisdom and yet few believed.

13. This deponent, farther, complains that at Ephesus certain sons of Greece, who were silversmiths, led on by one Demetrius, himself a Greek, made a terrible tumult in that city, because the truth preached by the sons of Zion mightily prevailed, and lessened their trade.

14. And farther, that to certain elders of the church of Ephesus who met him at Miletus, Paul, being a prophet, said, "I know this, that after my departure shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them (Acts xx. 29, 30), which thing early came to pass. One Hymenæus and one Philetus taught that the resurrection was past already, and overthrew the faith of some. And at the time Paul was a prisoner in Rome, well nigh seven years after he uttered the above warning, these sons of Greece, of whom Phygellus and Hermogenes were chief agents, had turned all Asia against Paul. Now these four great misleaders were of Greek nationality.

15. Zion also, through her sons, complains that many dark prophecies of coming trouble for herself were fulfilled in early times by the Greeks. Peter (in 2 Epistle ii. 1 to 3) saw that such would come. John knew them at work in the world (1 John ii. 18, iv. 1); and Jude was aware that they had actually crept into the church, and were doing great damage.

16. This deponent farther saith that these children of Greece had been disciples of one Plato, who held that men's souls never began to be and never could cease to be. That these, half Platonists and half Christians, dropped the first half of Plato's soul theory, and admitted that God made all souls, but kept the other half, and so robbed the doctrine of Christ of its nobler half to this day. He not only breaks our chains and sets us free, but gives eternal life. This last these mischievous Greeks obscured.

17. And moreover, as it is by a veritable new birth that men enter the divine family and thus become alive for evermore, these sons of Greece, with their vain philosophy, destroyed the Christian idea of the new birth and introduced an opus operatum notion of clearing the guilt of original sin from unconscious infants. Old terms had thus new and false meanings imposed on them, and this evil is still far spread.

18. It is farther complained against these adversaries of truth, that they have made life everlasting to mean holiness and happiness, but not length of days for ever and ever, contrary to scripture (Psal. xxi. 4), and death have they made to mean living for ever in sin and pain. This too in the judicial sentence against sin, which ought ever to be literal. And this evil is rampant now, and has been fifteen centuries.

19. And this deponent farther saith that these sons of Greece, having the work of recopying the earliest Christian writings for the instruction of the church as to the formation of the canon of the New Testament in their hands, did, on finding that they contained many things against their innovations, wilfully decline to copy and preserve them, and thus deprive the church of ready means of defence against those who attack the authorship and date of her Scriptures.

20. And finally she, the church aforesaid, now specially complaineth, that whereas since 1806, when Dr. Buchanan procured among the Nestorians in India a noble manuscript of the Syrian New Testament, the Peshito, and thus gave opportunity for reconsideration of the formation of the canon, and of the true original disputed texts; the overwhelming numbers of Grecians, by education, and the overweening admiration of everything Grecian, will not now suffer her to recover the light and

Such, O

truth, which has been so long obscured and misrepresented. sons of Zion, is your mother's complaint against Greece, the schoolmistress of Imperial Rome and modern Europe. When will you rise up against this adversary of your best of mothers that she may hold fast the word and feed you with pure milk? See ye not that your mother the church has had the gifts which her Lord and Head promised when He said: Behold I send you prophets, and wise men, and scribes ? That these last were to secure to her the truth in a written form, that it might be preserved through all time?

Know you not that every author of the books of the New Testament could speak and write the Syrian language, so that it would only require a little revision in the spelling to bring it into the dialect of the Peshito, which is that of Antioch ? These men were all brought up from their youth to speak that tongue. Then as to what they wrote in Greek, have you estimated the power of the gift of tongues at Pentecost? Many years after, the force of that gift, which enabled them to go everywhere preaching the word, continued.

Paul writing to a church which was indulging it to excess, without making it edifying said: "I thank my God I speak with tongues more than you all," yet he would rather speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in an unknown tongue. However much then the men so gifted could speak, that they could in substance write, and what they could write in Greek, that also they could do in Syriac. This the sons of Greece, with their vain scholarship, are putting out of sight, that they may stand well with men of little or no faith.

Sons of Zion, remember that you are children not of the cold "West " but of the sunny East. In your home-land official dignity is reverenced far more than in the west. A writer of the doings and words of one in office, must, to satisfy public sentiment, give such officer his title. So Luke writes "Chuza, Herod's steward" (chap. viii. 3), also " Blastus the king's chamberlain " (Acts xii. 20). "Cornelius, a centurion of the band called Italian," "Julian, a centurion of Augustus' band" (xxvii. 1). Paul also writes, "Erastus, the chamberlain of the city saluteth you" (Rom. xvi. 23). Again, "Luke, the beloved Physician." This of his profession. Now Pilate must on this principle have been in office as governor of Judea when Matthew completed his gospel. For he calls him governor nine times in the story of the trial and death and resurrection of Christ; he writes the bare name only eight times. Mark, dealing with the same events, writes Pilate ten times, governor never. Luke, treating of the same facts, uses Pilate quite as often as Mark, but never governor. John, an eye witness as well as Matthew, and who seems to have recalled the share which Nicodemus took in the burial which Matthew did not choose to do, uses Pilate more than twenty times without once giving the official title.

A difference so marked must have a meaning. Pilate had abused his power and been degraded by Vitellius, governor of Syria, who was his superior in power and dignity; and when a bad man had gone such lengths, the feeling of contempt for him generally cherished forbade an author giving him a title which he had lost. He was governor when Matthew completed his gospel, which must have been within four years after Pentecost. For Pilate incurred dismissal about A.D. 37. How soon then did our Lord begin to send scribes? For the churches multi

H H