was not inferior to Judaism as a new dispensation, but was in fact the most ancient and original, and presupposed by Judaism itself, the election in Christ preceded the election of the Jewish nation in their forefathers; and redemption, the verification of the archetype of humanity through Christ and proceeding from him, is the end of the whole terrestrial creation, so that everything else appears as a preparation for this highest object in the counsel of creation in reference to this world.

Of the apostle Paul's views in reference to the last conflict which the kingdom of God will have to sustain, and his expectations of the victory to be gained by the approaching coming of the Lord, we have already spoken in our account of his ministry; ante, p. 205. The prospects of the consummation of the kingdom of God bear the same relation to the development of the New Testament dispensation, as the prophetic intimations of the glorification of the theocracy by the work of the Redeemer bear to the development of the Old Testament dispensation. Everything prophetical must be fragmentary, and hence cannot furnish us with clear and connected knowledge. We cannot, therefore, help considering as a vain attempt, the endeavour to frame, by a comparison of particular apostolical expressions, a connected complete doctrine of the consummation of all things. From the standing-point of the apostles this was not possible. It might indeed happen, that in moments of higher inspiration and of special illumination, many higher but still isolated views might be imparted, which yet they could not combine into an organic systematic unity with their other representations on this subject.

With the doctrine of the consummation of the kingdom of God, is closely connected, in the Pauline system, the doctrine of the resurrection. This doctrine does not present itself here as an accidental and isolated fact, but stands in intimate relation to his general mode of contemplating the Christian life. It is the fundamental view of Paul and of the New Testament generally, that the Christian life which proceeds from faith carries in it the germ of a higher futurity; that the development of the divine life begun by faith, through which a man appropriates the redeeming work of Christ, and enters into fellowship with him, will go on until it has pervaded

human nature in its full extent. Thus the appropriation of the body as an organ for the sanctified soul, as a temple of the Holy Spirit, must precede the higher state in which the body will be furnished as the glorified and corresponding organ of the perfected holy soul, Rom. vi. 5-8, 11; 1 Cor. vi. 14. Expositors, for want of entering sufficiently into the profound views of the apostle, and of grasping the comprehensive survey that stretches from the present into the future, have often erred by a mistaken reference of such passages either solely to the spiritual resurrection of the present state, or solely to the bodily resurrection of the future.

The difficulties which were raised, even in the apostle's time, respecting the doctrine of the resurrection, were founded particularly on the gross conceptions of it, and on the mode of determining the identity of the body. Paul, on the contrary, in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, teaches that, by the same creative power of God which caused a peculiar creation to proceed from a grain of corn, an organ of the soul adapted to its higher condition would be formed from an indestructible corporeal germ. It may be asked, what is the essence of the body considered as an organ belonging to a distinct personality? Only this is considered by Paul as abiding, while the corporeal form is subject to change and dissolution; the former, as something belonging to the representation of the whole personality, will be restored in a form corresponding to its glorified state. And as the body of man is the mediating organ between the soul and nature, the idea is here associated of a Palingenesia of the latter, with the resurrection to which Paul alludes in Rom. viii. 19-231

1 The later distinguished commentators on this epistle have acknowledged this to be the only tenable exposition; and even Usteri, who had before brought forward the strongest objections against it, has been induced, for the same reasons which appear to me convincing, to accede to it. Against that interpretation, according to which this passage refers to the anxiety of the heathen world, the following reasons appear to me decisive. 1. Paul would in that case have used, as he generally does, the word кóσμos. 2. If we admit that he here pointed out the deeply felt sense of universal misery, the feeling of dissatisfaction with all existing things, the longing after something better, though without a clear knowledge of the object, as felt by the heathen, yet he would attribute such feelings to only a small and better part of the xóoμos; it is impossible that he could assert this of the whole mass of the heathen world sunk in sin. Yet we must grant that, in describing an age of

This idea stands in close connexion with the whole of the Pauline scheme of doctrine, and the Christian system generally: the κληρονομία τοῦ κόσμου, which promised to believers that they shall reign with Christ-that to them as to Christ all things in the future world shall be subjectthat this globe is destined to be the scene of the triumphant kingdom of God-that in its progressive development this kingdom will subject all things to itself, until the consummation which Paul marks as the aim of this universal longing.

He usually connects the doctrine of the eternal life of the individual with the doctrine of the resurrection, and says nothing of the life of the soul in an intermediate state after death till the end of all things. The designation of death as a sleep in relation to the resurrection that is to follow, may favour the opinion that he considered the state after death to be one of suppressed consciousness like sleep, and admitted that the soul would first be awakened at the resurrection of the body, though in every other reference to death he could describe it under the image of sleep as a transition to a higher existence. When in the church at Thessalonica the anxieties of many were excited respecting the fate of the believers who had already died, he only intimates to them that, at the time of Christ's second coming, the believers then alive would not anticipate those who were already dead. But it might be

great excitement, and pervaded by a vague and obscure anxiety, it might be said, that an anxiety of which they were unconscious was at the bottom of their wrestling and striving,—that they were in a state of unhappiness, which only he who had attained a higher knowledge could explain to them; and thus Paul might apply the expressions used by him to describe the spiritual condition of the world around him. But then, he must have described this state of men's minds as something peculiar to that age, and not as having existed up to that moment from the beginning, ever since the creation had been subject to this bondage. 3. According to his own ideas, he could not say that the kooμos against its will was subjected, in a manner free from blame, by God himself to the bondage of a vain existence. 4. According to this interpretation, Paul must have taught, that as soon as the children of God had attained their destined glory, it would spread itself over the heathen world, which would then enter into the communion of the divine life. But if it be assumed that Paul here so openly and clearly expressed the doctrine of a universal restitution, he must first have mentioned the appropriation of redemption by faith as a means of salvation equally necessary for all; he could not have admitted the possibility of such a state of glorification not brought about through faith in the Redeemer.

supposed, that had he admitted a continuance of consciousness. in more exalted and intimate communion with the Lord as taking place immediately after death, he would have reminded the persons whose minds were disturbed on the subject, that those for whom they mourned had already been admitted to a higher and blessed communion with their Lord, as the later Fathers of the Church would not have failed to have done.

Yet since Paul was convinced that by faith men pass from death unto life-since he testified from his own experience under manifold sufferings, that while the outward man perished the inward was renewed day by day, 2 Cor. xiv. 16, and this experience was to him a type of the future-since also the outward man would only pass to a higher life from the final dissolution of death—since he received a progressive development of the divine life in communion with the Redeemer since he taught that believers would follow the Saviour in all things-from all these considerations it necessarily followed, that the higher life of believers could not be interrupted by death, and that by means of it they would attain to a more complete participation in Christ's divine and blessed life. This idea of a progressive development of the divine life in communion with the Redeemer, is indeed not one introduced from a foreign standing-point, into the doctrine of the apostles, but proceeds from his own mode of contempla tion, as we learn from a comparison of his language in numberless passages. Still we are not sufficiently justified to conclude from that idea of such a process of development in the earthly life, that Paul believed in its progression after the close of our earthly life, in the period intervening till the resurrection. We may imagine the possibility that the consequences flowing from those premises would not be

1 For although he has not expressed this in precisely the same terms as John, yet the sentiment they contain follows of course from what he has repeatedly asserted respecting deliverance from spiritual death, and the life produced by faith. Between the two apostles there is only a difference of form, not of the manner in which the idea of wh is employed by them,-for in this they agree, in considering it as something that really enters the soul with believing; but John refers the idea of Swn aluvios to the present, Paul only to the future, although both substantially agree in the recognition of the divine life founded in faith, which bears in it the germ of a future higher development, anticipates the future, and contains it in itself as in bud.

consciously developed by him, since the thought of the resurrection and everlasting life were in his mind so closely connected, that he would be induced to leave the interval between the death of believers and their resurrection as an empty space. But, in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul expressly makes this distinction between the soul and the body, that the latter will die, and be given up to death on account of sin, the germ of which it carries in itself, but the former will be alive, exalted above death, so that it will have no power over them; accordingly, their life will be exposed to no repression or destruction, but be in a state of progressive development, never again to be interrupted by death. And the conclusion which we may draw from this single passage, is confirmed by those passages in the later Pauline epistles, which intimate that higher degrees of communion with Christ and of happiness are immediately consequent on death. The admission of this fact is by no means contradicted by his representing that the last and greatest result in the consummation of the kingdom of God, will proceed, not from its natural spontaneous development, but from without by the immediate event of Christ's rapovoía; as, in the same manner, the facts of the appearance of the Son of God in humanity, redemption, and regeneration, though they are not deduced from a preceding development, and constitute a perfectly new era in the spiritual life, are far from excluding, but rather presuppose, an antecedent preparatory development. Now, the later epistles of Paul contain such passages, in which he expresses most decidedly the hope of a higher development immediately consequent on death, of a divine life of blessedness in more complete communion with Christ; Philip. i. 22, 23. We cannot in truth perceive how Paul, if he supposed the second coming of Christ and the resurrection to be events so very near, could say, that he "desired to depart and to be with Christ which was far better,” in case he placed the salutary consequences of death only in something negative-in freedom from the toils and conflicts of earthly life, under which, as he so often declared, he experienced so much more intensely the blessed effects of the gospel on his own soul,—and had not contemplated a higher kind of communion with Christ, a higher development of the life which was rooted in that communion as a consequence of death.