tual brightness and beauty. It wears also a moral aspect, and upon this almost exclusively the Christian records dwell. We are told in these records that nothing is forgotten. Christ tells us (St. Luke viii. 17), "Nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad." And again St. John tells us (Rev. xx. 12), “I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.” This thought has been developed by the Rev. Alexander Macleod, D.D., in a work entitled The Books of Judgment. This author points out that in many cases it may not be even necessary to appeal to the universe for the record that is therein written, for this is sufficiently stamped upon the body itself, and he then draws a vivid and lurid picture of the sensual man in whom the mortal body is like a parchment written within and without—a truly mournful and terrible record of the deeds done in the body.

But if all this is possible with an organism possessing so little plasticity as the natural body, and where the wish of the individual is to preserve a respectable exterior, what must be the case in the spiritual body1 of such a man ?— "If they do these things in a green tree what shall be done in the dry?" What a hideous and horrible likeness must not that foul thing have that issues forth from the " grave

1 [Those who believe that the New Testament asserts the annihilation of the wicked in Gehenna, of course hold that only the just obtain the spiritual body. But we have no definite term for the body as it shall be (in the Hades of the New Testament) between death and the resurrection. It is probable that the want of such a term is due to the fact that the authors of our recognised version have unfortunately rendered both Hades and Gehenna indifferently by the word Hell, itself a term from Scandinavian mythology.]

and gate of Death" into the presence of the Unseen and Eternal?

251. It is extremely striking to read in this connection. the following extract from Plato's Gorgias. We quote from Jowett's translation. Socrates is the speaker :

"This is a tale, Callicles, which I have heard and believe, and from which I draw the following inferences: Death, if I am right, is in the first place the separation from one another of two things, soul and body;-this, and nothing else. And after they are separated they retain their several characteristics, which are much the same as in life; the body has the same nature and ways and affections, all clearly discernible; for example, he who by nature or training, or both, was a tall man while he was alive, will remain as he was after he is dead; and the fat man will remain fat; and so on and the dead man, who in life had a fancy to have flowing hair, will have flowing hair. And if he was marked with the whip and had the prints of the scourge, or of wounds in him while he was alive, you might see the same in the dead body; and if his limbs were broken or misshapen while he was alive, the same appearance would be visible in the dead. And, in a word, whatever was the habit of the body during life would be distinguishable after death, either perfectly or in a great measure and for a time. And I should infer that this is equally true of the soul, Callicles; when the man is stripped of the body all the natural or acquired affections of the soul are laid open to view. And when they come to the judge, as those from Asia came to Rhadamanthus, he places them near him and inspects them quite impartially, not knowing whose the soul is perhaps he may lay hands on the soul of the great king, or of some other king or potentate, who has no soundness in him, but his soul is marked with the whip, and is full of the prints and scars of perjuries, and of wrongs which have been plastered into him by each action, and he is all crooked with falsehood and imposture, because he has lived without truth. Him Rhadamanthus beholds, full of all deformity and disproportion, which is caused by licence and luxury and insolence and incontinence, and despatches him ignominiously to his prison, and there he undergoes the punishment which he deserves."

252. As, in Eastern monarchies, a veil was sometimes cast

over the face of the guilty ;1 so in the New Testament the veil of darkness is drawn over the fate of the lost soul who falls

into the hands of the living God. "And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding-garment: and he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding-garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."2

253. But this graphic and powerful picture of the fate of the lost given us in the New Testament fared as badly as other conceptions when it fell into the hands of the materialists of the middle ages. Its true meaning was entirely obliterated, and the Christian Hell, instead of being the Gehenna of the Universe, the place where all its garbage and filth is consumed, was changed into a region shut in by adamantine walls and full of impossible physical fires -the Devil being the chief stoker.

The one idea is awful, while the other is simply grotesque. An ancient Jew who had occasion to pass by the valley of Hinnom, and whose senses were invaded by the sights and smells of that doleful region, must have entertained a conception of the Hell described by Christ as different as possible from that which has reached us from the middle ages,

1 "As the word went out of the king's mouth, they covered Haman's face."Esther vii. 8.

2 St. Matthew, xxii. 11-13. [See, however, also Luke xiii. 28, where the true meaning obviously is "while ye are being cast out." There are other obvious mistranslations in our version; such as for instance that of Mark ix. 43, where for "the fire that cannot be put out” we have “the fire that never shall be quenched." It is to be hoped that the revised version will be such as to give readers ignorant of Greek a thoroughly correct idea of the meaning of the original, most especially on points of such awful importance as this.]

and to which some even of the readers of this book may have been accustomed in their earlier years.

To some extent no doubt Christ's description of the Universal Gehenna must be regarded as figurative, but yet we do not think that the sayings of Christ with regard to the unseen world ought to be looked upon as nothing more than pure figures of speech. We feel assured that the principle of Continuity cries out against such an interpretation -may they not rather be descriptions of what takes place in the unseen universe brought home to our minds by means of perfectly true comparisons with the processes and things of this present universe which they most resemble?

254. Thus the Christian Gehenna bears to the Unseen Universe precisely the same relation as the Gehenna of the Jews did to the city of Jerusalem; and just as the fire was always kept up and the worm ever active in the one, so are we forced to contemplate an enduring process in the other.

For we cannot easily agree with those who would limit the existence of evil to the present world. We know now that the matter of the whole of the visible universe is of a piece with that which we recognise here, and the beings of other worlds must be subject to accidental occurrences from their relation with the outer universe in the same way as we are. But if there be accident, must there not be pain and death?

Now these are naturally associated in our minds with the presence of moral evil.

We are thus drawn, if not absolutely forced, to surmise that the dark thread known as evil is one which is very deeply woven into that garment of God which is called the Universe.

In fine, just as the arguments of this chapter lead us to

regard the whole Universe' as eternal, so in like manner are we led to regard evil as eternal, and therefore we cannot easily imagine the Universe without its Gehenna, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. The process at all events would seem to be most probably an enduring one. [Many passages of the New Testament, however, seem to point to a continuity of moral development in the unseen universe, a development whose climax is to be reached when the last enemy, death, is destroyed in Gehenna.]

255. But it is fruitless to expect that Science should throw any light upon that greatest of all mysteries—the origin of evil. We have now come to a region where we must suffer ourselves to be led solely by the light which is given us in the Christian Records. And while on this subject we would quote from a very remarkable work on the Lord's Prayer2 by the Rev. Charles Parsons Reichel, B.D., which exhibits in a singularly clear light the testimony given by Scripture, as well as the fruitlessness of all attempts to obtain information from any other quarter. Our first extract relates to the personality of "The Evil One":

"In refutation" (says the writer) "of the objections that have been urged against the personal existence of the Adversary, this one observation is quite enough: that of the world of spirits we cannot possibly know anything save by direct revelation. It is beyond the domain of the senses; it is beyond the cognisance of reason. A man born blind might therefore as rationally attempt to disprove by a process of reasoning the existence of a sense of which he can know nothing except by testimony, as we attempt by a process of reasoning to disprove the existence of a spirit of

1 Including in it a state of things like the present physical universe; not, however, the very things that now exist, these being evanescent in energy at least, if not also in material.

2 Cambridge, Macmillan, 1855.