CONCLUSION.

1. Some who assume that the apostles believed Christ's final coming to be even then near in time, would logically infer, that because they believed so then, we ought to believe so now. But if they held this positive belief as to the actual time of the final coming, they held one positive error; and shall it be insisted that because they held this error we ought to hold the same? Are Christian people asked to receive such logic as divine authority in reference to a point of duty? Yet further, whatever that coming of Christ was which the apostles affirmed to be actually near in time then, has long since passed, and those words cannot be used to prove that the next coming must also be near in time now. A point of time which was near to come eighteen hundred years ago cannot be, in the same chronological sense, near at hand now, for the good reason that it must have long since gone by. Those apostolic words, in their precise relations to time, cannot by any possibility apply to the present hour as they applied to present time when spoken eighteen centuries since. Let us not be misled by fallacies.

2. The doctrine has been put forth from influential quarters that because the apostles lived in constant waiting expectation that the Lord would come to judge the world soon, therefore he must certainly come before the millenium. I submit that this conclusion is based on no logical relations. For if their expectation fastened on a definite time near at hand, it was certainly without divine authority, was a mistake, and therefore, can prove nothing whatever in regard to the actual time of that second coming. If, as we have assumed and sought to show, it was a sort of expectation which simply waited and loved and longed for a thing of the heart and not of intellectual time-computation, then it would certainly admit not only of eighteen hundred years' delay (as it has already), but equally well of a thousand more, for a short millenium, or of indefinite thousands, for a long one. Our position is, that an inference drawn ever so logically

from a mistake is worthless. The inference now under consideration cannot be drawn from the true view, from the real nature, of the waiting expectation of the apostolic heart. As no time-relations entered into that waiting, so no inference in regard to time can be drawn out of it.

3. I trust it has been shown that the Christian mind of our age, not to say also the general public mind, may fitly relieve itself of all apprehensions that the apostles labored under any such error of belief as to the time of Christ's final coming as must damage their claims to inspiration or their credit for intelligent good sense as disciples at the feet of their Master. It certainly appears that their Master spake of his then future comings clearly, not confusedly; guardedly, not recklessly; most impressively, and never otherwise. That he should have spoken of one coming then near, and of another in the remote, undefined distance; the nearer one immensely vital to the men of his generation and to their children; inexpressively valuable, moreover, through all future generations as a development of the great principles of retribution, of the sublime idea of judgment for the sins of men; this should seem no strange thing to us; nor that he should put the remoter coming upon the great prophetical canvass so that its shadings should seem to come out from behind, or we might say, from under the nearer one, to be seen through its light, and to be illustrated from its example; this too is so far from being mysterious and inexplicable, that we may well account it a masterly policy, a thing of consummate wisdom. Now, to our present purpose let it be said, the apostles seem to have made no mistake in apprehending these prophetic fore-showings given them by their Master. They saw the nearer coming, and spake of it as their Lord had done before; they saw also the remoter coming, i.e. in its nature and relations; they saw it especially in its moral bearings of impressive, momentous interest; and for the sake of these bearings they brought it near and held it in close and living contact with their hearts. But it does not appear that they ventured to form any definite opinions

as to the time, the century, the age, when this final advent should occur. They have given us no chronology on this subject. They have said nothing, therefore, which can compromise their credit as inspired men. On this point our

minds may be comfortably at rest.

4. Finally, the way in which the apostles held their views of Christ's then future comings the nearer one really near in time, and full of illustrative power; the remoter one, with the element of time eliminated, and therefore near only in the sense of being held close to the very heart, loved, longed for, appreciated proximately at its full and momentous value; this is truly a grand model of wisdom for us and for all the ages; the very consummation of practical good sense; a thing, therefore, to be studied diligently and wrought into our heart-experiences with unsparing assiduity. Success in this endeavor would make the now future coming a stupendous moral power upon the soul. It would save the Christian world from those sad effervescences and aberrations that are sure to come from admitting the element of time into our ideas of Christ's final coming. Let us be content with the divine economy: "It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father hath reserved as his own prerogative." Leaving the time when in his sovereign disposal, let us hold the great fact of that future coming in perpetual nearness to our heart, a thing of certainty, a thing of stupendous issues, a thing of most vital bearings, a fact of unsurpassed majesty and glory.

ARTICLE V.

CHARACTERISTICS DISTINCTIVE OF CHRIST'S KINGDOM AS CREATED BY REDEMPTION FROM THE WORLD, OR THE KINGDOM OF SATAN.

PART I.-THE ANTAGONISM OF CHRIST'S KINGDOM TO THE WORLD OR THE KINGDOM OF SATAN.

CHRIST'S kingdom is created out of the world by God's action redeeming men from sin. It exists and grows by God's redeeming grace delivering sinful men from the power of darkness and translating them into the kingdom of his Son. It implies a perpetual process of transforming the world into itself.

The first thought which flows from this fundamental conception, and is now to be our subject, is this: Christ's kingdom is in antagonism to the world or the kingdom of Satan. God's redeeming grace and the kingdom which it calls into being are in perpetual conflict with the power and kingdom of evil for the deliverance of man.

This kingdom of evil is called in the Bible the power of darkness, as opposed to the kingdom of God's dear Son; the kingdom of Satan, as opposed to the kingdom of Christ; the world, as opposed to the kingdom of heaven. The last is the most frequent designation, not because the world is conterminous with the reign of evil, but because it is subject to it, and the part of it immediately in contact with the kingdom of righteousness. It is only as we understand this use of "the world," as representing the kingdom and power of darkness in its direct antagonism to Christ's kingdom, that we get the full significance of many of the sayings of Christ and his apostles. We miss their power if we suppose" the world," as they often use it, means only earthly goods.1

1 "If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world

This antagonism appears in the opening of Genesis. Man sinless in Eden is encircled and protected by the law which prohibits him from evil. When by transgression he has overleaped the law, which encircled and protected him, into the midst of circumjacent evil, the law becomes a sword of fire shutting him out from good, himself a victim of the power of evil, and henceforth a part of it. Nor was the antagonism that of the law only, but deliverance from the curse of the law is itself to come through conflict and suffering: "it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Men are not represented here as each in an isolated individuality, but as related to powers of good and of evil which existed before man existed, and the scope of whose action outreaches the sphere of human life. This is in analogy with nature. A man's health does not depend altogether on his personal care of it. There are cosmic agencies under which the earth itself sickens and belches out pestilential miasmata; and the black death, the cholera, and plagues of whatever name move around the globe. And there are always invigorating cosmic influences from the sun, the air, the ocean, and the land, without which no human forethought could sustain life. So the Bible, from its very opening, represents the spiritual relations of man. The writer of Genesis knew not the earth's relation to other worlds and systems; but he knew that man's relations extended beyond the earth. The power of darkness has put its blight on man. God is seeking the lost man to bring him back to righteousness and peace. The earth is a battlefield for the soul of man between the powers of heaven and of hell.

hateth you." "The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me." "Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience." "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against..... the rulers of the darkness of this world." "Love not the world, neither the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." "Whosoever is born of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." John xv. 19; xiv. 30; Eph. ii. 2; vi. 12; 1 John i. 15; v. 4.