of his nature, which also demonstrate his infinity, in all his perfections. The Hebrew theism was essentially unique, for it alone expressed God's revelation of himself; and that form of essential theology passed, in its fullness and with much more luminous demonstration, into the New Testament-eminently into Paul's epistles. The divinely ordained forms of worship, as observed by the fathers, and afterward reduced to specific forms in the Hebrew ritual, reappear, as to the spiritual import of their symbolism, in the fully developed and constructively arranged doctrines of sacrifice and redemption by price, and of atonement by substitution; and these are clearly wrought out by this divinely instructed apostle. And as in the Old Testament the lessons of the prophets served to expound and illustrate the symbolism of the Levitical ritual, so it became the duty of the New Testament teachers to point out the unquestionable fulfillment of these prophecies by Christ in the scheme of Gospel grace. Herein is seen a verification of the sublime truth, that "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." In this we detect the largest, best, and most purely spiritual meaning of the saying, "Christ is the end of the LAW." And to make this manifest is the object of which Paul never loses sight.

The apostle's Grecian mode of thought was especially needful for the proper elucidation of the essentially spiritual characteristics of the Gospel. The Hebrew mind appears to have been especially inclined to only objective conceptions and contemplations. It seemed to lack subjectivity and the power of introspection, and in its outlook it was inclined to take cognizance of only externals, while the religion of Christ is eminently spiritual, and the knowledge of it requires habits of subjectivity and introspection-an element in which the Greeks especially excelled. Their purely metaphysical conceptions of the true, the beautiful, and the good became especially available when applied to the "truth as it is in Jesus," to "the beauty of holiness," and to that essential righteousness which is the living spirit of the Gospel, both in Christ's atonement and in the personal salvation of believers. But in all their speculations respecting the supersensuous elements in the human character, the Greeks uniformly failed to apprehend and appreciate the highest, and the only adequate, conception of real and

essential goodness-holiness, and its spiritual opposite-SIN. To that conception the heathen mind never attained; it was a specialty of Hebrew thought, because only the Hebrew mind had been directly taught it by God himself. But this element was abundantly supplied from the Old Testament, and more clearly and forcibly by Christ's own words, and later by the writings of both St. John and St. Paul. The Hebrew conception of SIN-itself a purely metaphysical something, contemplated and defined according to the Grecian methods of thought, is the ever-present background to the apostle's wonderful presentation of the divine holiness; and his scheme of the salvation of the Gospel takes in both of these spiritual and ethical entities. The concurrence of the Hebrew substance and the Grecian methods was requisite for the proper elucidation of that which the Holy Spirit teaches when he comes, according to the promise of the departing Christ, to "convict the world [in respect] of sin, and of righteousness, and of [the] judgment."

There is also prominently manifest in this epistle a specifically Roman method of thought, in its emphatical assertion of the universal presence and the sacred sovereignty of law—its rectitude and its unchangeableness. It allowed no transgression, nor condoned any offense. Its authority was the inseparable accompaniment of the march of Roman conquest, forming an atmosphere in all Rome's dominions, and before its tribunals only the righteous could be justified, and in respect to the guilty the sword of its power was not borne in vain. How these things make their impress upon the earlier portions of the Epistle to the Romans is obvious to every thoughtful reader, intensifying the sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and showing that sinners shall not stand in the judgment. This rugged Roman element gives to that inspired exposition of Gospel truth its authority over men's consciences. The epistle is also specifically Roman in its subordination of the individual to the commonwealth. The human race is a great aggregate unity, in which, though the individual is not wholly lost, yet many of his highest interests are implicated in it. The head of the commonwealth of humanity is charged with the interests of the whole race, and so of every individual, who must gain or lose according as those interests in the hands that hold them are conserved or lost. Care is indeed taken to

affirm the powers and the responsibilities of the individual, but not so as to hide from our view the great truth of the solidarity of humanity; that in a highly important and practically effective sense the whole race of mankind was present in Adam's transgression and fall, and also in Christ's sacrifice and redemption, both effective and provisional.

The readers of this epistle will therefore do well to remember these things while seeking the deep import of what they read. Especially must a careful attention be steadily directed to the sense of the leading terms of the writings; and here neither the lexicons nor the best writing in the Greek anthology will be found to be adequate guides. When the apostle speaks of law, it may be according to either the Roman or the Mosaic conception, or perhaps, in a higher and broader sense, corresponding to the "Wisdom" of the eighth of Proverbs or the "Logos" of St. John; and whichever may be its sense in any given case must be clearly determined by its connections. When he speaks of SIN we are carried beyond the classical notion of missing the mark, of misdirected actions, to something of a purely ethical character, which looks beneath the outward forms of mechanical actions or volitional purposes into the spiritual substratum of the soul, and in its own direct relations to God himself, the essentially holy One, and the righteous Judge of all men. And placing law and sin thus apprehended over against each other, the fearful and hopeless condition of the sinner before the law becomes fearfully manifest; so disclosing the necessity for another way of salvation than simply legal righteousness. At this point is introduced the fact of atonement by Christ, the death of the just for the unjust, to bring us to God and his salvation.

Atonement by sacrifice was a well understood Hebrew idea, clearly involving the notion of vicarious suffering and its resultant benefits to the party in whose behalf the sacrifice is made: or, as Robert Hall so well and ably puts the case, "the substitution of the innocent for the guilty," in the divine appointments for man's salvation. The symbolical actions ordained in the service of the bloody sacrifices clearly imply a figurative imputation of the sins of the party for whom the offering was made to the victim, and to this fact Isaiah evidently refers when in his Messianic prophecy he declares, 36-FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXVI.

"On him was laid the iniquity of us all," and "For the transgression of my people was he smitten." Paul's Hebrew methods of thought could not fail at this point to recognize a real substitution, and its appropriate results. His Roman conception of the estate of the lawful captive, and of the ransom price required for his liberation, would also serve him in this case, and by these must his words be interpreted when he declares, "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us." And keeping in mind the everpresent realization of Christ's death for sinners, the way of salvation by faith, the "justification" that is "without the deeds of the law," stands forth self-defined in the light of the Gospel of salvation. The law contemplated a way of salvation by personal holiness of heart and life, which man could not render; this was its justification. The Gospel provides a substitute for this, identical in its substance and results, which the apostle calls by the same name. It is still justification, not by the law, but by the conditional instrumentality of faith, and resting ultimately on Christ's mediatorial sacrifice-a sinoffering appointed by the Father's grace. Here sin is seen in its real metaphysical nature and its intense ethical and legal badness. Here is the disposing and commutative righteousness of the divine Sovereign, appointing and accepting the atonement. Here is Christ's willing self-abnegation. Here is the ready faith of the humble and contrite sinner. This is the righteousness of the Gospel.

The epistle is in all its parts an exposition of certain great spiritual truths, and this should be steadily recognized in the interpretation of its language. It speaks of death; but the word is taken out of its merely temporal and physical sense, and employed to indicate a spiritual condition of separation from God and of deadness of soul to spiritual things, entailing present condemnation and tending to eternal ruin. This is the judgment of which the apostle says that it has come upon all men to condemnation. It speaks of sin as a quality and condition of the soul, under all sinful acts and thoughts of the flesh and the body, and predicated of these not in their material and physically corporeal being, but as forms of depraved and degenerate human nature, the seat of sin and the instru ment of ungodliness. In St. Paul's nomenclature, the law is

spiritual, and the works of the law have their seat in the soul. Death is the condition of man in his fall, an alienation from God; his condemnation is the estimate placed on him, in his sin, by judicial holiness; his justification is his acceptance with God, in free pardon bestowed in honor of Christ's death, and in response to the sinner's own prayer of faith. The resurrection is the quickening of the soul with Christ, and eternal life is the state and condition of the renewed soul, continued into the interminable hereafter.

ART. IX. THE LATE GENERAL CONFERENCE.

THE SITUATION, THE WORK, AND THE OUTLOOK.

THE nineteenth delegated General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church was in session, in the city of Philadelphia, from the first to the twenty-eighth of May, 1884. It was, composed of four hundred and sixteen delegates, from nearly a hundred Annual Conferences, of whom about three fifths were ministers and two fifths laymen. Of these, between thirty and forty were colored men, from Conferences within the old slave States; and nearly as many more were resident non-English-speaking foreigners, chiefly Germans, who have been organized into Conferences, mostly in the Western States. There were also some fifteen or sixteen delegates from foreign mission fields-Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians, with one Eurasian, and one full-blood Hindu from India, and one native African. It was said by some who had looked into the matter, that of the delegates present less than one half had been members of the General Conference of 1880, only a comparatively few of the others had been members in earlier sessions, and that nearly one half of the body was composed of new men. In age, they ranged from the thirties to the seventies, comparatively few being less than forty years old, and still fewer over seventy. One delegate (Rev. Dr. Trimble, of Ohio) had been in every General Conference since, and including that of, 1844; another had been in that of 1848, but not continuously since; and nearly a dozen had served in six, seven, or eight General Conferences. Of the laymen, three or more were serving for