Evolution, or the Appearing?

" Progress "— Review of Drummond's " A City without a Church"—The coming of Christ— Eschatology—The Roman Antichrist—The restoration of Israel—The resurrection

CLOSELY allied to this view of man's moral incompetency stands the doctrine of the hopeless inability of the race to attain social redemption. The vaunt of "progress " ^* is but the echo of the boast of self-righteousness. Both heresies have their common source in the self-esteem of the human heart. They are " the counterfeit presentment of two brothers," the face and obverse of the same false coin. Those who preach the dignity and goodness of man generally minimize the appalling corruption of society, and explain that tragedy, human history, as if it were a pleasant drama proceeding through five acts to a delightful denouement.

This was not Gordon's attitude. He believed that the present age was evil and would remain so unto the end. "Jesus

^* To quote Amiel once more: "The plea justificatory of progress has a criterion that is quantitative, that is to say, purely exterior (having regard to the wealth of life), and not qualitative (the goodness of life). Always the same tendency to take the appearance for the thing, the form for the substance, the law for the essence; always the same absence of moral personality, the same obtuseness of conscience, which has never recognized sin present in the will, which places evil outside of man, moralizes from outside, and transforms to its own liking the whole lesson of history." (" Journal Intime," p. 60.) did not say," he wrote, " ' This is the best world that was ever made; things are growing better and better; there is ten times more happiness than sorrow on the earth. Only live on the sunny side of the house and keep your curtains lifted and you will be all right.' No such optimistic vaporing as this! But, ' In the world ye shall have tribulation. Let not your heart be troubled. I go to prepare a place for you'— a place of deliverance. Ah, that is what we long for— deliverance from the world's great crushing machine, with its wheels of war and famine and pestilence and earthquake and alcohol grinding men to powder by millions every year. To be able to see God behind all this Satanic discord, and to believe in him spite of all this titanic cruelty of the elements, is not always an easy thing.... Let us not imagine that we are now reigning with Christ on earth or that the kingdom of God has been set up in the world. The church's earthly career during the present age is, like her Lord's, a career of exile rather than of exaltation, of rejection rather than of rule, of cross-bearing rather than of scepter-bearing."

The permanency and sovereignty of evil during the present age was one of his deepest convictions. The poor we have with us always, but there are others too— their oppressors, and the continuous, unending army of sin. The historical orbit of our planet is no more than its astronomical orbit an upward spiral. Mankind passes century after century through like phases of sin and through the same experiences of moral wretchedness. Only he that hangeth the stars on nothing and holdeth the earth as a very little thing can and will deflect its course finally to higher planes.

The progress which seems to be making in certain periods of the world's history Gordon felt to be external and formal, a mere coating of the surface hiding perilous depths. The present age he believed to be an age of election. Its ultimate purposes are purely disciplinary. Human society is the earth in which the plant grows. What happens to it is immaterial, except in so far as its development is tributary to the church of Christ. It may be vastly improved, enriched with the blood of a dozen revolutions and a score of liberation wars; it may be weeded of numberless noxious and parasitical growths; it may be cleared of innumerable stones of stumbling and rocks of offense. But the great Gardener is thinking not of his plot, but of the transcendently beautiful flower, the church of Christ, which he is raising on it with tender interest and solicitude. Like the Japanese florist, who often spends fifty months on a single chrysanthemum bush, he is laying out on it the care and nurture of millenniums. The church and the world stand in eternal contrast on the pages of the New Testament. Any attempt to make the one coterminous with the other will result, as in the past, in corrupting the church down to the level of the world and in the reduction of its religio-thermal line to the cold temperature of secularism.

That Christianity has modified, in a greater or less degree, the world's life, and that it will continue so to do, he of course never questioned. "The patient sunbeam brooding over the buried seed till it draws out the hidden germ which it contains is all the time warming the surrounding atmosphere." But this result is to be considered as entirely subsidiary to the purposes of God in the present age. " Civilization is not regeneration. Civilization puts Christianity into the world; regeneration takes man out of the world. Civilization attempts to diffuse God's Hfe and truth among men; regeneration separates men unto God. The one process is pervasive; the other elective. The one makes men better citizens of earth; the other makes them citizens of heaven." The blessing which the world receives from the church is thus collateral, for the latter is not destined in this dispensation to establish its ideals as recognized statutes for the control of mankind. Its position is to the mass of men now, as ever since the day of the cruci-

EVOLUTION, OR THE APPEARING? Z^Z

fixion, that of an unwelcome and rejected witness to unappreciated truth.

This insistence on the Paulo-Calvinist formula, as opposed to what might be called the formula of Rousseau, found expression in a criticism of Professor Henry Drummond's " A City without a Church," so cogent, so just, and so scriptural withal that we cannot refrain from quoting it at length. It is an admirable reply to those who are so taken up with social programs as to forget the program of the ages and the promise of Christ's appearing, and who, like our first parents in Blanco White's sonnet, are, in their keen interest in grasshopper, tree, and leaf which the sun reveals, wholly unconscious of the starry possibilities which it conceals.

"The theology of the Broad Church is emphatically an Elysian theology, at whose fountains those who have been embittered by the rigorous teaching of the former or Puritan age drink and forget their sorrows. Its preaching is as idyllic as that was dogmatic; and, so far from any suspicion of a paradise lost, it constantly assures us that, if man ever fell at all, he must have fallen upward, judging by his present goodly estate.

" Now we are not called to choose between optimism and pessimism in religion. The mischief comes of just this choosing; the magnifying of the hopeful elements in Christianity and in common life, to the utter ignoring of the dark and dreadful facts, and vice versa. Indeed, some one has reminded us that, etymologically, heresy signifies a dividing or choosing— the selecting of one extreme of Christian truth to the utter ignoring of the other extreme. And one need only glance through the history of dogma to observe how many of the great heresies have been exaggerated half-truths instead of absolute falsehoods. A true theology will certainly be both pessimistic and optimistic; for it will contain within its scope the doctrine of a paradise lost, with all the dreadful consequences past and present issuing from man's fall; and also the doctrine of a paradise regained, wherein shall be no more sin and no more death.

" We remember listening not long since to a sermon from the honored Bishop of Massachusetts, who has just passed away— noble man and eloquent preacher, but, as one of his eulogists has claimed, ' a Broad-churchman without apology.' ' We know that the Son of God has come,' was the text. As he went on in its unfolding, there was the rush of impassioned thought and fervent speech so characteristic of the speaker, bearing the great congregation irresistibly onward to the end. But when the sermon was completed one hearer began to reflect in silent amazement upon what had been said. The sum of it was this, that the King's Son had been sent to visit an outlying province of the kingdom; that at the tidings of his expected coming the whole people were filled with glad expectation; that his arrival was signaled by an outburst of popular acclamation, in which the people said one to another, ' The King's Son honors us with a visit. He is our prince we are brothers. Let his coming give a new sense of our divine sonship, a new impulse to our universal brotherhood.' It was a fascinating picture, and painted with a brush dipped without reserve in ' the enthusiasm of humanity.' To an eminent preacher of the new school, who was afterward expressing his admiration to us, we replied, ^* Yes; but, as a matter of fact, when the King's Son came, did not the citizens hate him, and send a message after him, saying, " We will not have this man to reign over us"? Did they not say, "This is the heir: come, let us kill him "? '

"'Very true,' replied my friend; 'but you must remember that the preacher is an idealist.'

" And this is the point of the whole matter. We are bound to be realists in the pulpit, since we live in a world of real sinners in danger of real judgment— a judgment resting on the awful but real fact that men have rejected the Son of God, whom the Father sent into this world for their salvation. Idealism in poetry and in romance, if you please, but not in the sermon. Not that one should be a pessimist in preaching any more than an optimist; he should, above all else, be a truthist. And he is the best friend of humanity who rouses men from their self-complacent dreams, and confronts them with the hard facts of real life and revealed truth.

" We doubt if any Broad Church preacher has yet measured up to the superlative optimism of Professor Henry Drummond. One of his latest discourses lies before us as we write entitled ' A City without a Church,' based on the words of Revelation, ' I John saw the holy city. New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.' In what does the professor find the realization of this lofty vision? Listen: 'This city, then, which John saw, is none other than your city, the place where you live, as it might be, and as you are to help to make it. It is London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Melbourne, Calcutta,' etc. In a word, the dream is that by sanitation, by drainage, by ventilation, by education, the municipality where we reside is to be transfigured into a veritable city of God on earth. The part that we are to have in effecting this metropolitan evolution is very glowingly set forth. ' Begin with the paper on the walls: make that beautiful; with the air: keep it fresh with the very drains: make them sweet; with the furniture see that it is honest. Abolish whatsoever worketh abomination in food, in drink, in luxury, in books, in art; whatsoever worketh a lie in conversation, in social intercourse, in correspondence, in domestic life.' All very admirable; but it is the possible evolution of New York, with its unspeakable Tammany rule above and its Stygian pool of nameless sin beneath, into a Jerusalem the Golden which staggers our imagination.

" And this is what is dreamed of by the preacher: ' What

3l6 ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON

John saw, we may fairly take it, was the future of all cities..., It was the dream of a new social order, a regenerate humanity, a purified society, an actual transformation of the cities of the world into cities of God.' Now we would not criticize the amiable philanthropy by which this transformation is proposed to be effected. But why not tell exactly what John did see? If it is worth while to take a text, why not expound it fairly in its relation to context and connection? First, John saw the earthly city, the metropolis of Christendom, as commentators have generally held, ' Babylon the great,' which has ' become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird,' which has made ' all nations to drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.' But this city, so far from showing any upward development, goes down with a crash under the accumulated weight of her own abominations.

" And John saw an angel who cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, 'Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!' What a text is here for one who would preach to the cities of the nineteenth century! What an enforcement would be given to it by citing the long array of sister cities, from Sodom and Gomorrah to Pompeii and Herculaneum, which have sunk in like manner beneath the wrath of God against their accumulated sins! And what a tremendous force the preacher's warning would have, after setting forth this solemn teaching of revelation and of history, if he were to cry to the cities of today, ' Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish'!

" Only after the vision of the fallen city comes the other of the New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven. How significant this expression in our preacher's text! The ideal city does not rise up by evolution; it comes down by revelation. This is according to the divine way. When the race, in spite of all God's teaching, tended steadily downward, redemption was effected only by ' the Son of man, who catne down from heaveji.'' When natural birth gendered only to sin and death, a great Teacher appeared, saying, ' Except a man be bom from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' And when the history of great cities has repeated itself century after century, in luxury ending in corruption, and corruption ending in doom, God sets before us our only hope of municipal righteousness and holiness in a city ' coming down frofn God out of heaven^

" This teaching is not congenial, but it is convicting. Tell men the exact truth— that when God sent his only Son into the world he received a crucifixion instead of a coronation, and that therein is made manifest the last and most awful revelation of its depravity; and the tendency of such faithful preaching will be to make men despair of human nature, and, as their only hope, lay hold of the divine nature. Tell men the literal fact of the repeated doom and decay of great cities under the weight of social depravity, and it may lead them to ' look for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.' The hard, literal truth is not popular; optimistic dreams are immensely so. Lord Chesterfield's maxim is universally true: ^* If you would make men think well of you, make them think well of themselves.' But how constantly is it the mission of the faithful prophet to make men think meanly of themselves, that they may learn to think well of Christ!

" So far as the actual facts go, there is no evidence that the idyl of social evolution has any foundation. Within the sphere of conscious experience we may speak dogmatically. Saints are not evolved from sinners, except through the new birth and New Jerusalems are not evolved from municipal Babylons by improved drainage and sanitation. This is the undoubted fact, and on the whole we deem it more profitable to be occupied in ' truthing it in love ' than in dreaming it in optimism."

No doubt it took courage to assert this view in those years,

3i8 ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON

when the idea of " progress " seemed absolutely to override the age. In later years the drift of opinion has been far away from the speculative optimism formerly prevailing. This frame of mind, as Huxley remarked in almost his last message to the world, " is met with more commonly at the tables of the healthy and wealthy than in the congregations of the wise." ^* It was enough for Gordon that the New Testament placed our hopes in something far greater than industrial reform or diffused education, in something more blessed than a Utopia of production and distribution, where, under the happiest conditions, death would yet yearly slay its millions, and disease waste and torture its tens of millions, and sin haunt and trap and destroy. A New Jerusalem with such citizens would be the hatefulest of nightmares. It adds much to our interest to know that those best qualified to judge concur in his belief that " our passion for progress is in great part the product of an infatuation which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and in absorbing itself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after another." t The verdict of

* Sheldonian address, " Ethics and Evolution." " The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If for millions of years our globe has taken the upward road, yet some time the summit will be reached and the downward road will be commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year."

t Amiel, "Journal Intime," p. 169.

For example, Bryce says (" American Commonwealth," vol. ii., p. 733): "In Europe, whose thinkers have seldom been in a less cheerful mood than they are to-day, there are many who seem to have lost the old faith in progress; many who feel, when they recall the experiences of the long pilgrimages of mankind, that the mountains which stand so beautiful in the blue distance, touched here by flashes of sunlight and there by shadows of the clouds, will, when one comes to traverse them, be no Delectable Mountains, but scarred by storms and seamed by torrents, with wastes of stone above and marshes stagnating in the valleys."

And Professor Seeley in like vein: " The creed which makes human

EVOLUTION, OK THE APPEARING? 319

history is, so far as it expresses itself on such matters, exceedingly dubious as to the way society is moving and as to the distance it has covered toward better things. Froude, Taine, Bryce, Carlyle, Sir Henry Maine, J. E. Thorold Rogers, Professor Seeley, and Mr. John Morley are but a few of those who seem to regard the conception of progress as a mirage. History ends, indeed, in a cul-de-sac from which there is no escape.

But it is just here, Dr. Gordon would say, that in the New Testament scheme despair is transmuted into hope, pessimism into optimism. The escape is from above. As man was redeemed individually by the first coming of Christ, so he is to be redeemed collectively and socially in the second coming. Jesus did not teach us to pray daily, " Thy kingdom come," only to mock us with such travesties on his kingdom as prevail wherever men have built cities and founded states. If it were so, there are not a few who, rather than face a future such as the past, would long to see Huxley's "kindly comet" efface with its hot, shrivehng impact this suffering planet. But it is just because the King is coming in the power of his kingdom that we can patiently endure the present controlling democracy of lusts and crowding selfishnesses and shouldering vanities, with its "cries and counter-cries of feud and faction." Even the darkness has its message of cheer. " The shadows point to the dawn. As I wake in the twilight of the morning, I often

nature larger makes men at the same time capable of profounder sins admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human nature has inevitably developed downward as well as upward, and if tke Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make a question whether mankind has gained on the whole." (" Ecce Homo," p. 351.) see the glimmer of the street-lamps falling upon the walls of my chamber; but in a little while the lamp-lighter passes by and turns out one after another, leaving the room in deeper darkness than it had been at any time during the whole night. Yet I know that he is only putting out the street-lamps because the sun is about to rise and flood all the heavens with his light. So the darkness heralds the dawn."

In the light of the church's present attitude on this subject, the question of Jesus, " Shall the Son of man, when he cometh, find faith on the earth? " seems prophetically suggestive. For, as the careless world repudiates Christ in his capacity of Saviour, so too, largely, the church denies him in his great and ever-imminent final mission to mankind. "The Syrian stars look down upon a grave from which Jesus never rose." This is the utterance of agnosticism. " The Syrian stars look out from distances through which Jesus shall never come again in person." This is the utterance of the dominant Christianity. If Christ is not risen our faith is vain. Yes, and if Christ is not coming our faith is doubly vain; for the risen Lord has then denied his promises and broken his plighted word. Without this hope we, who are disillusioned of the old watch-cry, " Progress," must indeed be " of all men most miserable."

" We need two motives, memory and hope, to keep the soul in equilibrium. Memory must constantly draw us back to the cross, and hope must constantly attract us forward to the crown, if our hearts are to be kept in even and balanced communion with God. As the waters of the sea are held between two mighty gravitations, the moon now drawing those waters toward itself, and the earth now drawing them back again, thus giving us the ebbing and flowing tide by which our earth is kept clean and healthful, so must the tides of the soul's affection move perpetually between the cross of Christ and the coming of Christ, influenced now by the power of memory, and now by the power of hope."

EVOLUTION, OR THE APrEARING? 321

On this doctrine Gordon's voice was " to unawakened earth the trumpet of a prophecy." Hardly a sermon was preached without some allusion to " the glorious appearing." Never a day passed in which he did not prepare himself for it, in which its hastening was not sought for with prayer. " Yet a little while [how little! how little!], and he that shall come will come." ^* Those who know him will not soon forget the pathos and tenderness with which he used to introduce the untranslated words {poov, ooov) into his reading of the passage. No Christian of the early chruch ever looked with more assurance for the manifestation of the Lord in the clouds. In his papers were found the following lines, which show what a reality the promise of Christ was to him personally, and how earnestly he cherished the hope of that coming which some day will purple the whole glad east.

TRANSLATED.

I

" Day-dawn and morning star,

And upward call for me.

Ring out, ye bells of heaven, clear and far. When I my Lord shall see.

' Caught up to meet the Lord

With sweep of angel wing,
No winding-sheet for me, or house of sod!
O death, where is thy sting?

' Put out to sea no more

Drop anchor, furl the sail

My storm-tossed bark at last has reached the shore

I'm moored within the veil."

^* Heb. X. 37.

32 ² ADON/RAM JUDSON GORDON

Advocacy of this doctrine cost him much. It seems to awaken suspicion and lead to estrangement— this great doctrine of hope. " It is not wanted," he used to say, " by a church with millionaire merchants and great universities. But, after all, it was for the assertion of this doctrine that Christ at the last was crucified.* The servant is not greater than his Lord, and should not complain of mere ostracism." Having the almost entire consensus of learned opinion with him as to New Testament teaching on the subject,t he was content to wait until the church should forsake allegorizing and spiritualizing interpretations, and turn back to the hope in its literalness. Meanwhile he always cautioned reasonableness and balance in the treatment of this as of other prophetic teaching.

" There has been more or less fanaticism in time past connected with this doctrine; and that may be a testimony to its

truth. A Chinese proverb says, 'Towers are measured by

their shadows, and great men by the detraction which follows them.' It is so of doctrines; those that are most compact with truth cast the deepest shadows of superstition. The eschatology of the new-departure theology will cast no shadow; it is so vague and general that the sunlight will easily shine through it. But those who hold the eschatology of the first century must guard it sacredly from all extravagance and excess. The best way is to be very certain about the fact of the Lord's return and very uncertain about the time; to profess no more than the Scriptures profess— that we know neither the day nor the hour when the Son of man cometh."

Nevertheless he believed that the New Testament gave significant intimations as to the occurrences which should pre-

* ' Hereafter ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." (Matt. xxvi. 64.)

t Godet, Christlieb, Pfleiderer, Alford, Ellicott, Harnack, Meyer, Oehler, Stier etc. cede and attend the second coming. In days when it is the custom to mutilate the gospel and to cast aside all that cannot be made to accord with preconceived opinions, the extent and importance of New Testament prophecy is generally overlooked. Those who dwell on the predictions in Isaiah, in Micah, and in the Psalms, the foregleams of Messiah's coming, will hear little of the passages in Matthew, Romans, Thessalonians, and the Apocalypse premonitory of his return. Eschatology is to most Christians an Ultima Thule, a faraway, acknowledged fact, yet of little interest in every-day life. Voyages thither are the most adventurous which men can make, and travelers returning thence are listened to with incredulous ears.

Yet why should it seem a strange thing that God should send a ray of light through history to guide the children of light? Surely he who lives beyond and above the time relation to which we are subject, and to whom past, present, and future are one, knows the last as perfectly as the first. May he not have sent from Patmos a message to us which those in the Spirit can interpret, just as he has sent from the remotest stars before the dawn of our history pencils of light whose story the spectroscope unseals and reads to us late-born? So Gordon thought. " Fossil sunlight," said he, " is what Herschel named anthracite coal. The vast stores of light poured out upon the globe during past geological ages were consolidated and packed away in the bowels of the earth because this busy nineteenth century, with its myriads of railways and ocean steamers and manufactories, would need them. Have you thought how large a proportion of both Testaments is prediction? And is it therefore of no use to the practical working church of today? Nay; the vast profusion of prophetic light, falling upon the minds of the prophets and treasured up in their inspired pages, may soon be needed. And those who are delving in the mines of eschatology, instead of being engaged in an aimless and profitless toil, may be providing the church with the needed warmth for that predicted time when iniquity shall abound and the love of many wax cold, and with light for the day foretold by the watchman of Idumea: 'The morning Cometh, and also the night.' " ^*

The first of these intimations of the Lord's near approach he found in the universal promulgation of the gospel which is taking place in our day. The witnessing churches which are being planted world over announce the coming King as the fire-beacons which flashed from hilltop to hilltop round the whole arc of the .^gean coast proclaimed the fall of Troy and the return of Agamemnon to Argos. Here he found the final and urgent motive for foreign missionary work. If one believes that the renovation of the world is contingent on the return of Christ, and that the time of his return will be determined, as far as the church is concerned, by a witnessing of the gospel of the kingdom among all people, no expression of doubt as to the preeminent value of missionary work among the brutalized and pagan peoples of earth can deter one from any self-sacr'fice which should hasten that consummation. Now this was what Gordon believed: " We are literally the people described by Paul as those upon whom the ends of

* He did not believe that the Book of Revelation was written by a " Deus quidam deceptor " to befool us with strange symbology. "Its weird, mysterious pages contain," so he once wrote, ' the whole map and delineation of the church's career from the ascension to the return of the Lord, but it was left for time to break the seals of this book and to discover its meaning. It is like the sealed orders given to an admiral which he is not to open till he is on the sea. And as now, corresponding to this chart, headland after headland of prophetic history has been descried, they have been recognized by the students who have been searching what and what manner of time the Spirit did signify in penning this prophecy. And though they have read no announcement of day or hour upon them, they have found them displaying the same cautionary signal with which the church started, ' Behold, I come as a thief.' "

EVOLUTION, OR THE APEEARING? 325

the ages are come.* We are living at the terminal point of the old and the germinal point of the new, and happy shall we be if we know the time of our visitation."

Again, identifying as he did the papacy— " that stupendous spider-web which, reaching from Goa to Acapulco and from heaven to hell, o'ernets the souls and thoughts of men "— with the Antichrist of John, he naturally found in its loss of temporal rule and in its steady decadence suggestions of the approach of him who should destroy it altogether with the " brightness of his coming." f To many such an interpretation will seem fantastic and obsolete, the worn heritage of the wars of the Reformation. This is natural enough in our day when the papacy constitutes a comparatively unimportant figure, whose weakness is acknowledged in its policy of opportunism, and whose existence would be half forgotten were it not for its assiduous advertising by encyclicals. Those who deprecate this Puritan exegesis, however, forget the blackness and vastness of the shadow which this institution has cast, for a space of time covering nearly one fourth of the centuries, from the first dawn of human history. They forget its portentous crimes against light and the inexpressible savagery, lust, and deceit which have here incarnated themselves. No one who has read Gregorovius and Von Ranke, and who remembers the literal portraiture of history, can ever complain of this identification as harsh. Scientific history, with its Bertillon-like methods, has measured and photographed this old offender. So if it is true that the papacy is the only portent in Christian history wicked and forbidding enough to answer to the prophecy of Antichrist, it is conversely true that no theory can explain this grotesque satanophany, this incredible perversion of early Christianity, except that which considers it a predicted and mysteriously predestined device for turning the truth into a lie. Surely there are no naturalistic

* I Cor. X. II. t 2 Thess. ii. 8.

grounds on which this bar sinister on the church of Christ can be accounted for. There was nothing, surely, in the content of Christianity as preached by the apostles which could lead one to foresee any such abnormal development.

The movements in Israel, too, filled Gordon with anticipation. To all thoughtful men the survival of the Jewish race must seem one of the most extraordinary facts in history. The shock of the barbarian invasions was so intense as to result in the complete evaporation of the Greek race; but the Jew has remained, as those preglacial plants and butterflies which still linger on our highest peaks, surviving the ages when ice covered whole continents and destroyed all other life. And what centuries of brutal persecution he has since undergone! Greek orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism have been the ceaselessly turning millstones to bray and pulverize him. Yet he not merely survives, an indestructible residuum in the retort of history; his emergence into the place of leadership is one of the striking facts of present-day life. The names of David Strauss, Mendelssohn, Heine, Marx, Neander, Gambetta, Halevy, Rothschild, De Hirsch, Liebknecht, Rubinstein, Disraeli, Bebel, Stendhal, Ricardo, Darmesteter, Franzos, Goldmark, Auerbach, Joseph Israels, Emin Bey, Bernard Weiss, Meyerbeer, Lasalle, Mendelijeff, Edersheim, the Saphirs, Palakof, Castelar, Blum Pasha, and a host of others, are suggestive of the power still latent in the race. For a Christian to doubt the extraordinary future in store for the people of the old covenant seems, in the light of the eleventh of Romans, wholly inexplicable. For him to question it in these days of Jewish renaissance is wilful blindness. To think that a race with such a past and of so great present vigor is to be forever condemned to play the humiliating role of pawnbroker and vender of old clothing to those of the outer court argues a mind singularly impervious to the significance of current events. " Those who are opposed to millenarianism," wrote Gordon, "seem to consider Israel as a factor in God's providence utterly eliminated, nevermore to emerge. When they hear any discourse on the subject of the conversion or regathering of Israel, they consider it quite as absurd as it would be for one to suggest the revival of stage-coaches and hand-weaving after a half-century of railroads and looms. The gathering of immense wealth into the hands of the Jew, as though in preparation for some vast demand upon his resources soon to be made; the control which he has gained of the secular press in European countries; his rapid ascendancy in the sphere of politics and philosophy all over the world; his complicity in the revolutionary and antichristian movements which are now agitating and alarming the nations; and, lastly, his expulsion from the countries where he has dwelt and his visible regathering into the land of his ancient habitation these are significant premonitions of a stupendous and longpredicted event: the removal of the veil from blinded Israel and the looking upon him whom they have pierced."

Gordon found, as he looked with straining eyes into the approaching years, a sort of historical barometer in the Jewish race. Their present rapid rise he felt to be indicative of a fair morning ahead. The organization of the Chovevi Zion, with its hundreds of thousands of members of all classes, from the Montefiores and Goldsmids to the poorest Polish and Rumanian schnorrers, and the expressed intention of its constituency of purchasing and repeopling Palestine, filled him with quivering interest. At various times he set apart in his church special days of prayer for the Jews. For the somewhat noisy " reformed " rabbis, who revile their own great past and frivolously throw aside the promises of future national restoration, he often expressed his repugnance. But to the poor enmeshed Talmudist he was ever ready to stretch out his hand. His interest in the race was not merely exegetical. Many refugees from eastern Europe— outcasts too frequently, with the unlovely traits of the " hungry Greekling " of the Lower Empire— he helped at his door or in their own poor homes.

The restitution of Israel and its grafting in again he looked for as one of the great events consequent upon Christ's coming. But the advent day is also the day of the resurrection—"that blessed last of deaths, when death is dead." Here, as before, his beliefs were those of the early church untainted by Hellenicisms. Those two errors of an earthly theology, " that the world is the Christian's home and that the grave is the Christian's hope," were unqualifiedly rejected. To an exposition of the last verse of the eleventh of Hebrews he adds this conclusion, which in its connection may seem somewhat mystical, but which is in its main teaching scriptural

" Bodily perfection as well as spiritual perfection is included in the idea of complete sanctification. As the earlier martyrs must wait for the later martyrs before they can receive their full consummation of blessedness, so must the renewed soul wait for the renewed body in order that it may be perfected. The radical error in our consideration of the subject has been that we have fixed our attention entirely upon the spiritual part of man, as though this alone were the ' I ' in which his personality consists. Because our eschatology has so generally overlooked this great fact and substituted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul for the scriptural doctrine of the resurrection of the man, the eye has been fixed on death as the object of hope. And because our dying is held to release the soul from its gross environment of flesh, this event has been made the goal of the spirit's perfection. But is death the great sanctifier? No; it is only when the glorified soul is united to the glorified body that we shall awake satisfied in his likeness— an instantaneous photograph of Christ wrought in his memoers— the predestined purpose of redemption, that we should be conformed to the image of his Son, consummated at last in a flash of advent glory.

" Those who have not watched the trend of opinion on this point have h'ttle idea of the extent to which even in orthodox ranks the Swedenborgian notion of elimination has supplanted the primitive doctrine of resurrection. Instead of holding that at the sound of the last trump God ' will quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you,' it is becoming very common to maintain that at death a spiritual, incorporeal substance is released from the body. Thus one's death is his resurrection, since in that event an imprisoned spiritual body breaks its shell and comes forth like the butterfly from the chrysalis. It is not, therefore, the angel's trumpet calling the dead from the grave that ushers in the resurrection, but the sexton's bell tolling the dead to the grave. This notion seems to result largely from that ultra-spiritualism which would rule the body out of all recognition in the work of redemption. There is a kind of Manichean contempt for flesh and bones, and a feeling that it is gross materialism, to assign them any place in the glorified life."