ciple of religion, was prepared and typified by the establishment and development of a national communion, distinguished by religion as the foundation and centre of all its social institutions, the particular Theocracy of the Jews. The kingdom of God was not first founded by Christianity as something entirely new, but the original kingdom of God, of which the groundwork already existed, was released from its limitation to a particular people and its symbolical garb; it was transformed from being a sensuous and external economy to one that was spiritual and internal ; and no longer national, it assumed a form that was destined to embrace the whole of mankind; and thus it came to pass, that faith in that Redeemer, whom to prefigure and to prepare for was the highest office of Judaism, was the medium for all men of participating in the kingdom of God. The apostle every where represents, that those who had hitherto lived excluded from all historical connexion with the development of God's kingdom among mankind, had become, by faith in the Redeemer, fellow-citizens of the saints, members of God's household, built on the foundation laid by apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone; Eph. ii. 19, 20. The same fact is represented by another image, that of the original root of the stock of the Theocracy in Judaism, in Rom. xi. 18. Christianity, then, allied itself to the expectation of a restoration and glorification of the Theocracy, which was preceded by an ever increasing sense of its fallen state among the Jews. Those who clung to a national and external Theocracy, looked forward to this glorification as something external, sensuous, and national. The Messiah, they imagined, would triumphantly exalt, by a divine and miraculous power, the depressed Theocracy of the Jews to a visible glory such as it had never before possessed, and establish a new, and exalted, unchangeable order of things, in place of the transitory earthly institu tions which had hitherto existed. Thus the kingdom of the Messiah would appear as the perfected form of the Theocracy; as the final stage in the terrestrial development of mankind, exceeding in glory everything which a rude fancy could depict under sensible images; a kingdom in which the Messiah would reign sensibly present as God's vicegerent, and order all circumstances according to his will. From this point of view, therefore, the reign of the Messiah would appear as belonging entirely to the future; the present condition of the world (the αἰὼν οὗτος, or αἰὼν πονηρὸς), with all its evils and defects, would be set in opposition to that future golden age (the alùv μέ22wv) from which all wickedness and evil would be banished. But in accordance with a change in the idea of the kingdom of God, a different construction was put on this opposition by Christianity; it was transformed from the external to the internal, and withdrawn from the future to the present. By faith in the Redeemer, the kingdom of God or of the Messiah is already founded in the hearts of men, and thence developing itself outwards, is destined to bring under its control all that belongs to man. And so that higher order of things, which to the Jewish mind was placed in the future, has already com

menced with the divine life received by faith, and is realized in principle. In spirit and disposition they have already quitted the world in which evil reigns; redemption brings with it deliverance from this world of evil,* and believers, who already participate in the spirit, the laws, the powers, and the blessedness of that higher world, constitute an opposition to "this world," alùv ovтoç, the "evil world," aiav Tovnpóc. Such is the idea of the kingdom of God presented by the apostle as realized, in the spirit of it, on earth; the kingdom of Christ coincides with the idea of the church existing in the hearts of men, the invisible church, the totality of the operations of Christianity on mankind;-and the idea of the aid ouros is that of the ungodly spirit of the present world maintaining an incessant conflict with Christianity.

But as we have already remarked in reference to the Christian life generally, as founded on the necessary connexion of the ideas of faith and hope, the Pauline conception of the kingdom of God necessarily contains a reference to the future; for as the Christian life of the individual is developed progressively by inward and outward conflicts, while aiming at that perfection which is never attained in this earthly existence, the same thing is also true of the manifestation of the kingdom of God on earth, which comprehends the totality of the Christian life diffused through the human race. The knowledge of the manifestation of the kingdom of God is necessarily accompanied by a recognition of this manifestation as still very obscure and imperfect, and by no means corresponding to its idea and real nature. Hence the idea of the kingdom

* Deliverance from the "present evil world," tvεords aidν Tоvnрós, necessarily accompanies redemption from sin. See Gal. i. 4.

This is the "Jerusalem which is above," vw 'Iɛpovoahìμ, the mother of believers; Gal. iv. 26. Rothe disputes this interpretation (see his work before quoted, p. 290), but without reason. He is indeed so far right, that, primarily, something future is designated by it, as appears from its being contrasted with "the Jerusalem which now is;" but this future heavenly Jerusalem, which at a future time is to be revealed in its glory, is to true believers something already present, for in faith and spirit and inward life they belong to it; while the earthly Jerusalem is, for them, something passed away; they are dead to it, and are separated from it. From this it follows that the heavenly Jerusalem stands to them in the relation of a mother; the participation of the divine life by which they are regenerated, and which represents itself in them, constitutes them the invisible church. The perfect development of this life belongs to the future; their life is now a hidden one; the manifestation of it does not fully correspond to its real nature. Though the idea of the invisible church is not expressed in this distinct form by Paul, yet in spirit and meaning it is conveyed in the above expression, as well as in the distinction which he makes in 2 Tim. ii. 19, 20; (see p. 450), and when he forms his idea of the body of Christ according to this distinction, it entirely coincides with that of the invisible church. Hence, also, this idea was strikingly developed by the Reformation which proceeded from the Pauline scheme of doctrine. And it is important to maintain it firmly against ecclesiastical sectarianism, against the secularization of the church, whether under the form of Hierarchy, of Romanism, or, what is still worse, of subordination of religion to political objects, the supremacy of the State in matters of religion, Byzantinism.

of God in its realization, can only be understood if we view it as now presenting the tendency and germ of what will receive its accomplishment in future, and this accomplishment Paul represents not as something which will spontaneously arise from the natural development of the church, but as produced, like the founding of the kingdom of Christ, by an immediate intervention of Christ himself. Hence the various applications of this term. Sometimes it denotes the present form assumed by the kingdom of God among mankind, the internal kingdom, which is established in the heart by the gospel; sometimes the future consummation, the perfected form of the victorious and all-transforming kingdom of God; at other times, the present in its union with the future and in reference to it. The conception of the idea of the kingdom of God in the first sense, is found in 1 Cor. iv. 20. The kingdom of God does not consist, the participation of it is not shown, in what we eat or drink, but in the power of the life; not in ostentatious discourse, as in the Corinthian church, but in the power of the disposition; Rom. xiv. 17. The kingdom of God is not meats and drinks-its blessings are not external and sensible, but internal, by possessing which we prove our participation in it, such as justification, peace in the inner man, and a sense of the blessedness of the divine life.* The reference to the future is introduced where he speaks of the reigning of believers," ovußaoiλevε "with" Christ; and where he says, that those who, although they have received outward baptism and made an outward profession of Christianity, yet contradict it by the course of their lives, shall not inherit the kingdom of God; 1 Cor. vi. 10. The passage in 1 Thess. ii. 12, where Christians are called upon to conduct themselves in a manner worthy of that God who had called them to his kingdom and glory, has certainly a reference to the future, as far as the glory of this kingdom has not yet appeared; in 2 Thess. i. 5, the apostle says that Christians, as they already belong to this kingdom, fight and suffer as members of it, shall therefore have part in it when it shall appear in its consummation.

This requires our attentive consideration. At the time of which we are speaking, the church comprised the whole visible form of the kingdom of God; everything else stood in opposition to it; and yet the kingdom of God is destined to universal sovereignty,-to appropriate everything as its organ; as everything in humanity depends upon it, the kingdom of God must stamp its impress on the race before it can find the realiza

* The connexion of this passage, Rom. xiv. 16, appears to me to be this: Give no occasion for the good which you possess as citizens of the kingdom of God (more particularly in the present instance, Christian freedom), to be spoken ill of by others; for it is not of such a kind that you need be afraid of losing it; even if you do not avail yourselves of your Christian freedom, if you neither eat nor drink what you are justified in partaking of as Christians, as free citizens of the kingdom of God. Your good is one that is situated within you, not dependent on these outward things; for the blessings of God's kingdom are not outward, or objects of sense, they are within you; they consist in what is godlike, as the apostle proceeds to specify.

tion of its true idea. Such an universal sovereignty in reserve for the kingdom of God, Paul certainly acknowledged; but the thought was then, and must have continued to be, not familiar to his mind, that such a supremacy of the kingdom of God was to be formed by that developing process which Christ compares to leaven, through the natural connexion of causes and effects under the Divine guidance. It was, as we have already shown, the necessary and natural view for this stage in the development of Christianity, that this supremacy of the kingdom would be brought about, under altogether different conditions from those of earthly existence, by the second advent of Christ. Hitherto, therefore, there could be no visible appearance of the kingdom of God beyond the pale of the church. Another relation of the ideas of the kingdom of God and of the church to one another, must be formed when the kingdom of God had more effectually exerted its power as leaven in the development of the human race-when by a natural instrumentality, preparation had been made for what, to Paul, appeared as something that must be realized in an immediate manner by a new external event-when the kingdom of God, which entered the world first of all in the form of the church, had appropriated to itself all other things which belonged to the the organism of human life. Then the idea of the kingdom of God, in its earthly form of appearance, would become more extended than that of the church, which at this time could not have taken place.

But it is not merely in reference to the series of events which are advancing to their completion that the external form of the kingdom of God is presented as part of a great whole; there is another consideration which is naturally connected with this view. As the church is a seminary for the heavenly community, in which its members are training for their perfect development, it appears even here below as a part of a divine kingdom not confined to the human race, but comprehending also a higher spiritual world, where that archetype, to the realization of which mankind are now tending, is already realized. The knowledge of God, according to the comprehensive views of Christianity, is represented not merely as the common vitalizing principle of the human race, but as a bond by which mankind are united with all the orders of beings in a higher spiritual world, in one divine community, according to that universal idea of the kingdom of God which is presented in the Lord's Prayer. Thus Paul represents "God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," not merely as the common Father of mankind, but also as Him after whom the whole community in heaven and on earth are named; Eph. iii. 15. By sin men were estranged, not only from God, but from that higher spiritual world in which the kingdom of God is already realized. As Christ, when he reconciled men to God, united them to one another in a divine community, broke down the wall of partition (Eph. ii. 14) which separated them, and joined Jews and Gentiles in one body, which is animated by himself as their head; so also while men are brought back to communion with God, they are connected with all those

who have already attained that degree of perfection in the kingdom of God to which the church on earth is aspiring. In this respect Paul says, that Christ, in making peace, has united all things in heaven and on earth in one divine kingdom; Coloss. i. 20.*

We here come to the important idea of a pre-existent Divine Being, who, through Christ, became manifested in time-the idea, to designate which we may, for brevity's sake, use the term Logos, though this distinct term for designating such an idea belongs only to a peculiar doctrinal type of the New Testament. Also on this subject we must maintain, in opposition to the arbitrary, unhistorical, destructive theories of a certain mode of thinking in our day, which is necessitated to find in all things only the human spirit seating itself in its self-reflection on the throne of God, that not a foreign element from without was introduced in the development of the doctrine that proceeded from Christ-also, that not from without, through many influences, has that been developed at which the idea of Christianity aims, and for which Christ only gave the first impulse; but we must here deduce everything from the original

* The passage in Col. i. 20, certainly has special difficulties which we shall consider further on. Although the view taken by Paul of the world of spirits is represented to us and more fully developed in the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians, which may be explained by their being written in the later period of his ministry, amid the opposing opinions that had then arisen; yet this cannot be considered as a mark of anything un-Pauline, for it can be easily proved that such a view of the various orders in the world of spirits was always held by the apostle, and that the relation of men to a world of good and evil spirits was always present to his mind; Rom. viii. 38, "angels, principalities, powers," ayyehol, apxaì, dvváμeis, of this or the other world; 1 Cor. iv. 9; xii. 4. Also in 1 Cor. xv. 24, by the universality with which he expresses himself, he can hardly be supposed to mean only the "rule, authority, and power" of this world, but must, to say the least, refer at the same time to the invisible regions. The manner is characteristic in which Paul joins together the evil in the visible and invisible worlds as one, and subjects the evil angels to the judgment of those who have become one with Christ, and who reign and judge with him. As to the passage in 1 Cor. xi. 10, I have often doubted, with Dr. Baur, the genuineness of the words "because of the angels," dià тovç dyуéhovs, since these words, after a sufficient reason has already been given for the injunction, seem a superfluous addition to the "for this cause," diù TOUTO. I have also been led to the same supposition as Dr. Baur, that the words may have been brought as a gloss into the text from the stand-point of a representation derived from the apocryphal Book of Enoch, relative to the intercourse of the fallen angels with the daughters of men; Gen. vi. 2. Women ought to be veiled, as a protection against the temptations and plots of the evil spirits.' Yet I do not venture to speak on this point with such confidence as Dr. Baur, for I can attach a meaning to these words which will be very agreeable to Paul's mode of viewing such subjects. Paul, always mindful of the connexion between the visible and invisible world, contemplates the angels as witnesses of the devotions of the church. Angels and men, as members of one kingdom of God that exists under one head, unite together in common acts of devotion to God. Now the women ought to be afraid to appear before such eyes in a manner which is inconsistent with the natural proprieties of the female sex, and which would mark a perversion of the female character. We must certainly attach a symbolic moral meaning to the veiling. Also in 1 Cor. ix. 23 we find an example, though not perfectly analogous, where a clause with iva, as marking a special object, is added to an assertion for which a sufficient reason had already been given with diá.