For our citizenship is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change the body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through" (not through," Ev=IN) "Jesus Christ our Lord. Ye are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 66 66 But are these sublime privileges to be enjoyed, and these transcendent prospects to be realised, without the ministry of evil? No! Who values safety? The person exposed to danger. Who appreciates life? The criminal condemned to die. Who presses to his heart with unutterable thankfulness the glorious truth of redemption by the blood of Christ? The man who has groaned under the loathsome burden of sin, and felt his utter inability to kill the dragon that was crushing him. "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I THANK GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD." "Therefore being justified. by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope; and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." ED. BEYOND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST.* QEYOND question this is a work of remarkable ability. We by no means say that we are able to agree with the entire view of this able writer. With a very considerable part however of his argument we do go.. The Priesthood of Christ: A Re-statement of Vital Truth. By Joseph Parker, D.D. London: R. D. Dickinson, Farringdon-street. We hold that all truth, and especially so grand a truth as that of which he treats, is multiform, has many sides, and many aspects. We hold that the various minds of various men, all, we will suppose, under the influence of divine grace and the love of truth, will, nay must, lay especial hold of that aspect of doctrine which commends itself most to their peculiar mental organisation and their own most pressing wants: and that thus even one mind may, at different periods of its spiritual experience, dwell more upon one aspect of truth than on another; or, to use Dr. Parker's words, "that in the same soul there may be such variations of mood and temperature as to require, in the course of a lifetime, every possible aspect in which the infinitely various ministry of Jesus Christ can be set." (177.) Perhaps the history of one earnest mind, variously assailed by trial, turning to every aspect in which Christ our High Priest is placed before us in the Scriptures, might afford the best solution of many of the difficulties which surround this mighty question of which we speak. We would venture to say of the execution of this book that in our opinion it has been written in too many words. In the author's statement, however, in his preface, that while he would not have us regard his book as a volume of sermons, yet that most of it has been in some form delivered from the pulpit, we find the explanation of what appears to us to have too much of repetition. In two pithy sentences-for Dr. Parker knows as well how to condense as to expand-he lays before us the basis of our entire question. He asks in the setting out of his work-"What did Jesus Christ do for men that men could not have done for themselves?" and farther on in his work, he repeats this question in other words-" Why should men have required a priest?" Here is indeed the root of this entire matter,human insufficiency, and Christ supplying the mighty want which none but he could do. We do not know that a better definition of what is meant by a priest could be given than that which Dr. Parker gives :-"A priest," he tells us, "is one who stands between God and man, because man has in some way disqualified himself for having immediate personal access to God; and not only does the priest stand there, but he is ordained for the express purpose of offering gifts and sacrifices, that is to say, if he had nothing to offer he would not be a priest while, of the offering which Christ our priest has offered to God on behalf of men, he tells us what it was, and how its idea constitutes the very spirit of prophecy, as predicted in Genesis, typified in the wilderness, foreshadowed in the ritual, sung in the psalms with mingled mournfulness and hope, and declared by Christ Himself to be the laying down of his own life." (144-151.) With such definitions of humanity, of its great priest and his offering, we can scarcely question the fundamental soundness of Dr. Parker's own view of the question of which he ably treats. But the great difficulty with him is how to find a point of rest for the apparently irreconcilable and opposing theories which men, all of whom he supposes to be actuated by a sincere and honest love of truth, have formed upon this whole subject of expiation and priesthood. In the pursuit of the solution of this difficulty he brings before us in an extremely interesting manner men whom he takes as the representative men of the great conflicting theories. He first brings before us the case of the poet Cowper, the unhappy child of genius and of sorrow. Speaking of the subject Cowper says:"God is always formidable to me, except when I see Him disarmed of his sting by having sheathed it in the body of Jesus Christ." Commenting upon this expression of Cowper, in order to show that such a view of expiation was the only view that could be true to such a mind, but that to such a mind it was the truth, our author tells us, "If you had said to the poet, God loves you; He sent his Son Jesus Christ to tell you so, and to lead you home to peace, and rest, and joy,' the poet would have exclaimed: This is impossible! this is mockery! You do not know how many and terrible are my sins! You do not see what I see; the avenging spectres, the spirits of wrath and torment that throng the sultry air, are hidden from you,-O God, I dread Thee!' You must meet his case by a tragedy that shall overpower the disease within him; he must be appalled, confounded, affrighted by a spectacle that shall overmatch the horror spread over his mind by the realisation of his own sin, and out of that greater tragedy he may come to derive the benefit appropriate to his peculiar distress." And a little farther on he adds, still speaking of Cowper,-" No other view could have made itself felt in the then state of his heart. This was the theology which saved him from the hell of despair." (173, 174.) We do not dispute that Cowper may be taken as a representative man of what very many would call the orthodox view of the atonement; and yet, with all deference to Dr. Parker, we do not think that Cowper should be brought forward as the representative of those opinions, or that the manner in which Dr. Parker has brought him forward is exactly just. Cowper was a man of diseased mind, for long periods of his life afflicted with positive insanity, gloomy and desponding in the extreme. Moreover Dr. Parker more than hints that in a different state of heart Cowper might have held very different, if not quite opposite views of the atonement from those which he did hold. Under these circumstances we certainly do not hold that Cowper is at all the most suitable representative man that could be selected. We think rather that a man of genial disposition and unruffled reason should have been chosen, and such a choice would have been easy, for such men have been in numbers, happier far than poor Cowper ever was, but substantially agreeing with him in opinion. And then, Cowper's views did not, in his seasons of deep mental alienation, save him from despair. How sadly does he compare the peace which he supposes his mother to have reached in heaven with the despair he felt on earth! "But me, scarce hoping to attain the rest, Always from port withheld, always distressed- In contrast with minds like Cowper's, and views on theology adapted to such, our author brings forward two different constitutions of temperament which will, he supposes, require a very different aspect of multiform truth to supply their want. We will give his descriptions in his own words. After dismissing the example of Cowper, he proceeds thus:- -"Set in opposition to this the case of a man whose constitution and temperament are of an exactly opposite type, and it will be a psychological impossibility for that man to accept the view which alone saved the poet from despair. Even if he found Cowper's very words in the New Testament itself they would be a stumbling-block and an offence unto him. . . The man, whom we are supposing for the purposes of this illustration, is thoroughly in earnest, supremely anxious to know and love and serve Christ. His notions of abstract or metaphysical justice are not amongst the principal characteristics of his mind; he is emotional, patient, hopeful, and his fatherliness is very pitiful and long-suffering: rectoral discipline there is next to none in his family; probably he may even felicitate himself upon the fact that he never lifted up the rod upon one of his children, without being able to add the felicitation that none of his children ever deserved it. Such a man coming to the life of Christ will, by no fantastic choice but by the operation of a divine law, appropriate the elements which are most congenial to his own nature, and in doing so will find a theology which never could have been discovered or accepted by such a mind as Cowper's." (175.) In the passage just quoted, we have Dr. Parker's second representative mind. We will now present to our readers his description of a third such, and then proceed to show where he finds the point of rest and union for them all. "A third example," he tells us, "will be very different. Imagine a man of unusual compass of mind, distinctively critical and by so much tending towards a scepticism that insists upon etymological proof of everything that is submitted for acceptance; a mind that will hold long and severe controversy over the niceties of grammar, and will suspend a faith until it has determined the force of a preposition or the proper arrangement of a disputed punctuation; not a prosaic mind either, but one that will have poetry by itself as poetry, and prose by itself as prose, and will separate as clearly and broadly between fancy and logic, as between flying and walking. Such a mind coming to the New Testament will probably be impressed by the simple and pure humanity of Jesus Christ. It will lay hold upon that as something absolutely indisputable, and will wonder that anything beyond humanity in its noblest and sweetest aspect, has ever been found in his illustrious and holy character. Such a mind as I am supposing is solemnised and ruled by a most rigid reverence: it could almost worship the sunrise, and is only saved from doing so because reverence is due to One alone, and that is God. To such a mind Jesus Christ is as a sunrise, a beauteous and pathetic revelation, a light that will warm into noonday and broaden into summer, but still only the largest of the orbs itself enkindled by a higher flame. Such a mind will love Christ, and follow him, and call him Lord and Master, and see nothing but excellence in his gracious and tender life. There it will stop." (176.) With such a type of mind Dr. Parker associates the well-known names of William Ellery Channing and James Martineau. Now how does Dr. Parker find the point of rest for views so various, and as many would say so contradictory to one another, as those of Watts and Heber and Cowper, and Payne, and Channing, and Martineau? "The common point of rest," he tells us," "is a Fact, not a Theory; it is a History, not a Speculation." "To theorise," he adds, "is to separate. It is evident, therefore, that we are to be saved by a Fact and not by a Speculation; by Christ, and not by any theological construction of his work." "It is not the doctrine of the death of Christ that atones for human sin, but the death itself; it has such a wonderful power, that it inspires faith in God, and purifies the heart, though the doctrine of the atonement be unknown or denied. The power of the great sacrifice for the sins of the world lies in itself, and not in our explanations of it. Even when the doctrine of the Church has been most corrupt, the death of Christ has continued to appeal to the hearts of men with unique and all but irresistible force." gregational Union Lecture.) "In a sense never to be explained Christ was an unspeakable gift;' a gift for which there are no words, no theories, no creeds, good enough,—his work is a power to be felt in the heart, not to be measured out in words; subtle as a dream, mighty as a law, anonymous, infinite, unspeakable." (181.) (Con If we understand Dr. Parker aright, we would say that his view is that the various views taken upon this great question are in themselves true but do not embrace all the truth. It might to some appear, from the quotations we have given, that our author almost supposed that there was no such thing as absolute truth, but that truth was simply the aspect in which different minds regarded any specific statement of Scripture. Such is, however, not his view, as we understand him. Reviewing the various theories, allowing that each has its aspect of truth, he concludes that if a certain amount of an expression derived rather from heathen than Scriptural sources be excluded from our definitions of the "Expiatory Theory" of the Atonement, there is in that theory "a strength, a moral completeness and grandeur, a foundation, not to be had in any other theory of the work of Christ." (262.) HENRY CONSTABLE. TRUTH THROUGH REVELATION. "By revelation he made known unto me the mystery."-EPH. iii. 3. |