Eternal life is the gift of God to the soul through Jesus Christ. It is God's life communicated to man - the life of God in the soul of man. This is distinctly stated in the First Epistle of John (chap. 1:1), as the life which was from the beginning, the eternal life which was with the Father, but is manifested to us, giving us fellowship with the Father and with his Son.

The root of this eternal life is in every human being. It is what we call "the spirit" in man, as distinguished from the soul and body. It is the side of each person which touches the infinite and eternal.

Fichte, the most spiritual of German philosophers, says, "Love is life. Where I love, I live. What I love, I live from that." * When we love earthly things, our life is earthly, that is, temporal; when we love the true, the right, the good, our life is spiritual and eternal. Then we have eternal life abiding in us. Then all fear of death departs. The great gift of God through Christ was to make the right and true also lovely, so that loving them, we could draw our life from them. When God becomes lovely to us, by being shown to us as Jesus shows him, then by loving God we live from God, and so have eternal life abiding in us.

The natural instinct of immortality is the spirit, or sense of the infinite and eternal. But it needs to be reënforced by the influence of Christian conviction, hope, and experience, in order completely to conquer the sense of death. It is not by logical arguments in proof of a future existence that immortality becomes clear to us, but by living an immortal life. Dr. Channing says truly, "Immortality must begin here.” And so Hase (Dogmatic, § 92) says, "Any proof which should demonstrate, with mathematical certainty, to the understanding, or to the senses, the blessings or terrors of our future immortality, would destroy morality in its very roots. The belief in immortality is therefore at first only a wish,

* Die Bestimmung des Menschen. Berlin, 1800.

and a belief on the authority of others; but the more that any one assures to himself his spiritual life by his own free efforts and a pure love for goodness, the more certain also does eternity become, not merely as something future, but as something already begun." *

Whenever Jesus is said to give eternal life, or to be the life of the world; whenever the apostles declare Christ to be their life, or say that as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive; when Paul says, "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin

* In addition to the extracts from Professor Hovey, Meyer, Lücke, and De Wette, the following passages from F. D. Maurice ("Theological Essays") are interesting, as showing a concurrence of testimony from yet another quarter to the thesis of this section:

"When any one ventures to say to an English audience, that eternity is not a mere negation of time, that it denotes something real, substantial, before all time, he is told at once that he is departing from the simple, intelligible meaning of words; that he is introducing novelties; that he is talking abstractions. This language is perfectly honest in the mouths of those who use it. But they do not know where they learned it. They did not get it from peasants, or women, or children. They did not get it from the Bible. They got it from Locke. And if I find that I cannot interpret the language and thoughts of peasants, and women, and children, and that I cannot interpret the plainest passages of the Bible, or the whole context of it, while I look through the Locke spectacles, I must cast them aside.

...

"Suppose, instead of taking this method of asserting the truth of all God's words, the most blessed and the most tremendous, we reject the wisdom of our forefathers, and enact an article declaring that all are heretics, and deniers of the truth, who do not hold that eternal means endless, and that there cannot be a deliverance from eternal punishment. What is the consequence? Simply this, I believe: the whole gospel of God is set aside. The state of eternal life and eternal death is not one we can refer only to the future, or that we can in any wise identify with the future. Every man who knows what it is to have been in a state of sin, knows what it is to have been in a state of death. He cannot connect that death with time; he must say that Christ has brought him out of the bonds of eternal death. Throw that idea into the future, and you deprive it of all its reality, of all its power. I know what it means all too well while you let me connect it with my present and personal being, with the pangs of conscience which I suffer now. It becomes a mere vague dream and shadow to me when you project it into a distant world. And if you take from me the belief that God is always righteous, always maintaining a fight with evil, always seeking to bring his creatures out of it, you take everything from me-all hope now, all hope in the world to come. Atonement, redemption, satisfaction, regeneration, become mere words, to which there is no counterpart in reality."

and death; ""to be spiritually minded is life and peace; "the life of Jesus is manifested in our dying (mortal) flesh;" when John says, "He that hath the Son hath life;" when in Revelation we read of the book of life, and water of life, and tree of life, the meaning is always the same. It refers to the spiritual vitality added to the soul by the influence of Jesus, who communicates God's love, and so enables us to LOVE God, instead of merely fearing him or obeying him. Love casts out all fear, the fear of death included. He who looks at the things unseen and eternal, partakes of their eternal nature, and though his outward human nature perishes, his inward spiritual nature is renewed day by day.

§ 5. Resurrection, and its real Meaning, as a Rising up, and not a Rising again. One part of the Christian doctrine of immortality is conveyed in the term "eternal life;" the other part in the other term, usually associated with it "the resurrection." The common Orthodox doctrine of the resurrection, is that the dead shall rise with the same bodies as those laid in earth; and this identity is usually made to consist in identity of matter, though Paul expressly says, "Thou sowest not that body that shall be." On the other hand, many liberal thinkers of the Spiritual School deny any resurrection, and think the whole doctrine of the resurrection a Jewish error, believing in a purely spiritual existence hereafter. Others, like Swedenborg, teach that the soul hereafter dwells. in a body, though of a more refined and sublimated character; and in this we think they approach more nearly the teaching of the New Testament.

It is a remarkable fact that the Greek words indicating the rising of men should have been translated, in our English Bible, by terms signifying something wholly different, and conveying another sense than that in the original. It is equally extraordinary that this change of meaning should seldom or never be alluded to by theological writers.

These words, translated "resurrection," "rise again,"

and the like, all have, in the Greek, the sense of rising UP, not of rising AGAIN. They signify not return, but ascent; not coming back to this life, but going forward to a higher. The difference in meaning is apparent and very important. It is one thing to say, that at death we go down into Hades, or into dissolution, and at the resurrection we come back to conscious existence, or to the same life we had before, and quite a different thing to say that what we call death is nothing; but that we rise up, and go forward when we seem to die. This last is the doctrine of the New Testament, though the former is the one usually believed to be taught in it.

The immense stress laid, in the New Testament, on the resurrection of Jesus is by no means explained by supposing that after his death he came to life again, and so proved that there is a life after death. What he showed his disciples was, that death was not going down, but going up; not descent into the grave, or Hades, but ascent to a higher world. This is the evident sense of such passages as these. We have not room to go over all the passages which should be noticed in a critical examination, but select a few of the most prominent.

1. 'Avάoτaois, commonly translated "resurrection," or "rising again," but which literally means "rising up." (So Bretschneider, "Lexicon Man. in lib. Nov. Test." defines it as "resurrectio, rectius surrectio.") *

This word occurs forty-two times in the New Testament. In none of them (unless there be a single exception, which we shall presently consider) does it necessarily mean a rising again, or coming back to the same level of life as before. In a large number of instances the word can only mean a rising up, or ascent to a higher state. Of these cases we will cite a few examples.

* In the German Bible we have the true word-"Auferstehung."

Ten of the passages in which the word 'avάotaσis occurs, are in the account by the Synoptics of the discussion between Jesus and the Sadducees concerning the case of the woman married to seven brothers. After stating the case, they say, 66 Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife of them is she?" It is plain that the word "resurrection" here is equivalent to "the future state," and cannot be limited to a return to life. This becomes more apparent in the answer of Jesus, as given, somewhat varied, by the three Synoptics: "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." (Matt. 22: 30.) Mark, instead of "the resurrection," has the corresponding verb, "when they shall rise from the dead." This certainly means, not rising again, but rising up, ascending to a higher state. And Luke adds another element, showing that the "resurrection" is a state to which all may not attain, but which is dependent on character; evidently therefore a higher state. 66 They which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world (To alūvos éxeivov), and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels" (or rather "are like the angels") " and are children of God, being children of the resurrection." (Luke 20:35, 36.) This last phrase, "children of the resurrection," is very significant, and intends a character corresponding to this higher state. There seems, indeed, to be a contradiction between this passage, which makes the resurrection conditional, and those which declare it universal. (See John 5:29, and 1 Cor. ch. 15.) But perhaps the reconciliation can be found in the apostolic statement (1 Cor. 15:23) "every one in his order.” All shall ascend into the higher state, called "the resurrection," but only as they become prepared for it. All are not now prepared to hear the voice of the Son of man (or of divine truth), which shall cause them to rise to the resurrec