the departure of the principle which secures the cohesion of the body, leaving it to laws of disorder and ruin, why may not the death of the soul be the ceasing of those spiritual exercises which constitute the true life of a being made in the image of God, and the subjection of it to those sinful causes which breed spiritual disorder and anarchy, and result in spiritual ruin? And this leads me to observe,

2. That the annihilation theory is contradicted by every true conception of the soul's life, as given by reason or described in the discourses of our Saviour. Death is a negative idea, and means the departure or ceasing of life. Hence, to understand death we must understand life; and to know the meaning of the death threatened to the wicked we must know the meaning of the life promised to the righteous, over against which it stands as a terrible warning.

In ascertaining the idea conveyed by the word life, we notice that it varies with the subject, meaning more or less according to the place in the scale of being occupied by that of which it is affirmed. But we notice even before this that it always means something more than bare existence. It is never applied to denote that idea alone. What, for instance, has a more certain and real existence than a rock or mountain? and yet, though that existence has been maintained for centuries, we never say that the rock or mountain is alive. We can conceive that God should create millions of worlds, systems on systems of vast material orbs of rock and earth and water and gas, and should perpetuate their existence for countless ages, and yet there be absolutely no life in all that universe. We may find it difficult to state with precision what life is, but we know that it is more than existence, and implies a higher conception in the mind and an advanced step in creation, such as geology assures us was made when, after dreary centuries of gaseous, aqueous, igneous, and petrean condition, our earth received from its Maker plant and animal; suffice it to say, that life implies the performance of certain peculiar and characteristic functions, and instrumentally the use of certain organs or faculties; and that in material organizations it is indicated by such facts as development, growth, reproduction, motion, and sensation, while in higher orders of being, from rudimentary up to perfect mind, it manifests itself by desire,

knowledge, memory, imagination, reason, love, and will. Thus, while life has a generic meaning common to all that is vital, it differs specifically with each subject. Plants have the lowest form, and then come various gradations of animal life. from the radiata, up through the mollusca, the fishes, the reptiles, and the birds, to the mammalia. Finally, in man we have a yet higher order of life, growing out of the exercise of a nobler range of powers, as found in the reason, the sensibility, and the free will.

Hence, if one speaks of life we must know to what living being he refers before we can understand his meaning; and the same is necessarily true of death. Life and death mean something different in animals from what they do in plants, and something far different still in spiritual beings from what they do in mere animals. Life and death stand related to the end for which the being was made. While it fulfills that end in the exercise of its peculiar powers or functions, it lives; when it fails so to do, it dies.

For what now was man made, and in what does the true and real life of a soul consist? Man was created in the divine image for this one end: that he might know, love, obey, enjoy, and be like God forever. All his powers stand related to this single object, and were given for that purpose only. He was made for God, and finds his life only as he is in a state of voluntary union with God, filled with the Holy Spirit, developing a pure character, making God the center of his thoughts, affections, and will. Nothing but this is life when we speak of a soul. Something less is life for lower orders of being; but this only when we speak of one made in God's image.

And therefore death for a soul is not ceasing to be, but is eternal separation from God, from his knowledge and love and enjoyment; the cessation of all true spiritual functions, which are the really vital exercises. It is to fall out of union with God, to lose him from mind and heart, to be unloosed from our center, and to rush away into sin and consequent misery. This is the undoing, the destruction, the death of a soul as such; and the great misfortune or fault of the annihilationists is, that they do not rise to the only true conception of soullife, of which the lower forms of animal existence are only

faint shadows or dim types, according to the intention of the Creator, who has made the realm of nature for the use of spirit, and filled it with marvelous analogies, which are faint hints of the grand truths above them.

And this conception of life, which is self-evidently true to him who reflects upon what a soul is, and the end for which it was made, and to which all its functions are adapted, is that which obtains in the discourses of our Saviour. When he would rebuke those who pursued eagerly after wealth, he said, (Luke xii, 15,) "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth;" a statement in which the word "life" is plainly used in a higher sense than mere existence, even as regards this world and the ideas of the unregenerate, and signifies the proper value, use, and enjoyment of such an existence as man has received. The worldly imagine that "life consists" in sensual delight, in an existence made happy by earthly gratifications. Not so, exclaims the Saviour; there is no life whatever in such an experience. Man was made for a higher end, to resemble and to enjoy God, and therein is his life! To the same effect are those passages which speak of a state of sin as a state of death. Thus in the parable of the prodigal son the father rejoices over the returning wanderer, saying, "For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found;" where the latter clause as well as the drift of the story shows that reference is had to spiritual death and life, and not to a previous supposition by the father that his son had died in a literal sense in that "far country." So, also, when a professed disciple said to Jesus, "Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father," Jesus replied, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead;" that is, Let those who are dead in sin, whose souls have ceased to perform the spiritual functions of true being, and who have no anxiety respecting their character and destiny, let such at this critical hour bury their departed relatives, but do you embrace the favorable moment to make sure of salvation.

But even more decisive are the repeated declarations of Christ that eternal life commences in the present world, that it begins as soon as the sinner believes, and consists of a holy and blissful state of mind. Thus he said to Martha: "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth

in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." The meaning is clear: the soul that is spiritually dead shall immediately come to life if it believes or places faith in Christ, and the life thus commenced shall never end. Again, he said to the woman of Samaria: "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." To the Jews he said, with a similar meaning, (John v, 24; vi, 53,) "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life;" the last clause proving beyond doubt that he is not merely describing the future as though present by way of anticipation and because of its certainty, but is representing a present experience. Again we read: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." How evidently this refers to a life now nourished in the soul by faith in Christ as an indwelling Saviour! But, as though to remove all doubt, the Saviour has given us a definition of eternal life as a spiritual state of mind. In his affecting prayer before his betrayal, he said: "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." How perfectly coincident this is with the idea of soul-life which I have urged, must be evident to every reader. The true, experimental, spiritual, heart-knowledge of God and Christ is eternal life, is that for which the soul was originally created, and for which it was redeemed by the blood of Christ and regenerated by the Holy Spirit; a life commencing in every true believer here, and finding its perfection in heaven.*

*Though the plan of this discussion is confined to the teachings of Christ, and thus excludes much corroborative proof, the reader will be interested in comparing FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.-3

That eternal life does not then, as a Scriptural phrase, mean primarily, or principally, or characteristically, eternal existence or literal immortality of being, must be plain to every thoughtful hearer. It is predicated of the soul made in the divine image, and it is promised as the result of spiritual regeneration; which two facts ought of themselves to elevate our views above a literalism which clings blindly to the phenomena of material nature, and misunderstands and misinterprets even them.

And then our Saviour shows, by the whole drift of his teaching and the definiteness of his phraseology in many passages, that the religious use of the word life is in a spiritual sense, the promise of which opens to the believer a vision of something far transcending a literal immortality. Indeed, the promise of the latter would of itself be equivocal, and might announce a curse instead of a blessing; for who does not see that immortality, to be a blessing, must have something added to it that insures an experience of joy, and makes it a basis of good? Would immortality be a boon if it were connected with sore anguish and suffering? Does not the wretched suicide, borne down with the crushing weight of this life's misery, rush to the grave, hoping either to sink into annihilation or to reach an existence free from pain? What is endless existence in sorrow but an endless curse? Thus we are forced to suppose that the promise of life to the holy is properly a promise of that which renders existence a blessing, that which with the above the following words of Paul, as illustrating his use of the words "life" and "death:" "To be spiritually minded is life and peace." "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." "He that is dead is freed from sin." "Walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them." "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." "And you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins." "She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth." Such expressions prove that "life" and "death," when referring to the soul, customarily meant the continuance or destruction not of being but of certain spiritual experiences. Compare further Paul's statement of the nature of future reward and punishment in Romans ii, 6-10, where he uses "eternal life" as the synonym of the phrase, "glory and honor and immortality," which, according to the Hebraistic idiom of using nouns for adjectives, is equivalent to immortal glory and honor; while he makes the equivalent of "perishing" (compare verse 12) to be "indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish;" words which imply not annihilation but suffering.