the references to the death of the individual. I suspect we might find the same paucity in the apostolic writings, and for the same reason. The mind of the Church in Israel corresponded greatly to the mind of the early Christian Church. The great object of expectation was the coming of the Lord. The salvation was ready to be revealed. The living generation might see it. Living men could take up the words of the apostle-“We that are alive and remain at His coming" (Thess. iv 15). Hence the death of the individual had not the significance which it has come to have among us. Our point of view is changed. We may look for the coming of the Lord; but, however certain in itself, its time is uncertain, while our own death, besides being certain, cannot be very far off. And, consequently, the death of the individual has now come to usurp the place which, both in Israel and in the early Christian Church, was held by the coming of the Lord.

(3) The conflict of the view of life with the fact of death. -Life, as has been said, was that which we name so, the existence of the person in all his parts, body and soul, in the fellowship of God. Death was a severance of the person from God's fellowship. Hence arose a conflict; and in the triumph of faith over the fact of death, lies largely the Old Testament contribution to the doctrine of immortality.

(a) Now, first, I suspect it must be admitted that sometimes, especially in the earlier periods, the Old Testament saint acquiesced in death; he accepted it even under the feeling that it was severance from God. One of the strangest things in the Old Testament is the little place which the individual feels he has, and his tendency to lose himself in larger wholes, such as the family or the nation. When in earlier times the individual approached death, he felt that he had received the blessing of life from God, and had enjoyed it in His communion. His sojourn with God had come to an end; he was old and full of days, and he acquiesced. However strange his acquiescence may seem to

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us, he consoled himself with the thought that he did not all die, the memory of the righteous was blessed. He lived, too, in his children and in his people; he saw the good of Israel; his spirit lived, and the work of his hands was established. The great subject was the people, the nation. Jehovah had made His covenant with the nation; the individual shared its blessings only in the second degree, through the prosperity of the people. And he was

content to lose himself in the larger whole; to have poured his little stream of life and service into the tide of national life, and in some degree swelled it. This was particularly the case in earlier times. But when the nation came to an end with the Captivity, and national religion and life no more existed, the individual rose to his proper place and rights; he felt his own worth and his own responsibility. Though the nation had fallen, God remained and religion remained; but it remained only in the heart of the individual. The religious unit, formerly the people, now became the individual person. With the fall of the nation, religion took a greater stride towards Christianity than it had done since the Exodus. Hence the problems of the individual life rose into prominence, particularly the problem of death.

The efforts of faith, as we have interpreted them, seem made on two lines: (a) First an appeal is taken, in a way not quite easy for us to understand, against the fact of death, a demand for not dying,-a protest against the fellowship of the living man here with God being interrupted. It is probable that the examples of this may be to be referred to particular circumstances, when death might be actually threatening; and this fact helps us somewhat to understand them. But the language used, the demand made for continuance of life, the lofty assurance expressed by faith, that from the relation of the person to God life cannot be interrupted, rise to the expression of principles, and are by no means merely an assurance that God would save the person from death on this particular occasion. They express what the religious mind demands; what it feels to be involved

in its relations to Jehovah absolutely and apart from all circumstances. (b) Secondly, we observe the faith of the Old Testament saints operating in a less ecstatic way, which to us is more comprehensible. The first was a protest against death, and a rising up to the enunciation of the principles involved in the relation of the living believer to God. This second is rather a protest that dying is not death; it is an analysis of the popular conception of death, and a denial of its truth. According to the popular conception, dying and the state after death were one: the dead person descended into Sheol, and was severed from God. Faith now reclaims against this view. The death of the saint is not this: he does not descend into Sheol, he overleaps the place of the dead.

(c) Further, it is evident that in analysing the idea of death, and concluding that in the case of the righteous it did not imply descent into the place of dead persons, there was also an analysis of the human being into elements. Death made this analysis inevitable. The body fell into decay, and faith was only able to assure itself that the person was taken by God. There is no means of knowing what view was entertained of the condition of the person. It may be doubtful if, with the strong view had of life, as the full existence of the person in the unity of all his parts, body and soul, they would regard the condition, even of those whom they described as taken by God, as properly to be called life. Faith needed to supplement itself. This it did by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. It was chiefly the prophets who brought up this side; and the idea of resurrection is presented first as the raising up of the dead nation, as in Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones of Israel. There is, however, one very beautiful passage where the idea occurs in connection with the individual (Job xiv.). As has been said, Job regarded his malady as proof of God's estrangement from him. Further, he regarded his malady as mortal; God's estrangement would endure to the end of his life. With these feelings in his mind the thought suddenly presented itself, that this life

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on earth might not be the only one-life might be renewed; out of Sheol and the grave he might be called by God's returning favour to a second life. "O that Thou wouldest hide me in Sheol till Thy wrath be past; that Thou wouldest appoint a set time, and remember me!" But while pursuing the thought he becomes conscious of what is involved in it-If a man die, shall he live again? But, without answering the objection, he pursues his original dream of a second life: "All the days of my appointed time would I wait till my change came. Thou wouldst call, and I would answer Thee; Thou wouldst yearn after the work of Thine hands."

11. The Moral Meaning of Death.

We have drawn attention to a number of passages in the Old Testament with the view of exhibiting the way in which the Hebrew mind regarded death and the state of the dead. These passages are to a large extent popular, some of them poetical, and therefore not fitted to bear the weight of dogmatic inferences being built upon them. But they are sufficiently plain to enable us to reach the popular way of thinking regarding death. It may be of use now to indicate the views given of the moral meaning of death and its opposite. Much depends here on the method on which we approach the investigation of Scripture on such questions. In a work entitled The Christian Doctrine of Sin, by the late Principal Tulloch of St. Andrews, the following statements are made, among others, on this question of immortality: "But what of physical death? it may be asked-Is not this also immediately connected with sin as its consequence? Is it not so specially in St. Paul's Epistles? What then are we to make of this? To the modern mind, death is a purely natural fact. It comes in course of time as the natural issue of all organism, which by its very life spends itself, and hastens towards dissolution as an inevitable end. We cannot conceive any individual life perpetuated under the existing laws of the

external world. . . . The physical fact of death therefore cannot be traced to sin as its sole cause. Nor can Paul be said to do this. Even when he speaks of death as the dissolution of the body, it is not only this dissolution that he means, but death with all its adjuncts of pain and sadness and spiritual apprehension" (p. 163). "Death as a

Its

simple physical fact is unaffected by moral conditions. character may be greatly altered, and no doubt has been greatly altered, by the fact of sin; but its incidence is natural, and lies in the constitution of things. . . . Physical dissolution did not directly follow the act of sin, and is not connected with it as immediate cause and effect" (pp. 76-77). "The dissolution of the physical system is nowhere in St. Paul nor in Scripture represented as solely the result of sin. The death of Adam, the death of sin, in St. Paul is always something more than mere physical death. It may include the death of the body—it does this plainly and prominently in the passage before us [Rom. v. 12], but it always includes more; . . . It is beyond doubt that death itself in the mere sense of decay is inherent in all organism; that the conditions of life, in short, are death; and that infant organic structures consequently should die when weak or imperfect or ready to vanish away, is no more remarkable than that any other organism should perish" (p. 188).

These passages are specimens of many others in the volume. It may strike one that the consistency of some statements in the extracts with others is not apparent at once. For example, it is said that the "dissolution of the physical system," i.e. natural death, " is nowhere in St. Paul represented as solely the result of sin"; and yet immediately after it is admitted that in Rom. v. 12, where Paul says, "As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," the death of the body is "plainly and prominently " included. It is added that more is always included; but it is hard to see how the inclusion of more excludes this. And in another passage the writer says: "If the apostle's view of the consequences of sin included dean as an