assumes that the soul must necessarily live for ever, and on that account he assumes that death must mean life in misery. He tries to prove one assumption by another assumption; and then he expects his readers to believe that each assumption makes the other a certainty; and, wonderful to say, it is by this kind of evidence that he expects us to be reconciled to the modern change in the meaning of ancient Bible words, and to believe in the pagan dogma of endless torments.

As Colonel B. says that his metaphysical argument is based upon what is called the immortality of the soul, it will not be out of place to examine it a little. The general division of all things in nature into spirit and matter may be here allowed. Spirit may dwell in matter, and act by matter, but it is spirit still; and matter may be animated by spirit, but it is matter still. These two natures may intermingle, but their substances remain distinct; though it would appear that matter is ever the vehicle through which spirit acts, and by which alone its actions can be recognised by us. The ground upon which the immateriality of the soul is argued is mostly that, as to substance, the spirit and the soul of man are one. Sometimes our opponents argue that the soul is immaterial because it is spiritual, and at other times they argue that it is spiritual because it is immaterial; thus inconclusively arguing in a circle, and taking for granted that soul and spirit are identical. Now he only who made us can fully understand our nature, and consequently his infallible word is our only sure guide on this point. In this word nephesh, psuche, or soul is invariably used for animal life and for no other life, except in the one case when it is used for vegetable life (Is. x. 13). The Bible makes as wide difference between what is psuchikos, of the soul in man, and what is pneumatikos, of the spirit, and it never confuses them; nor would they ever have been confused but for the necessities of man's theology. The soul is life, and is the production in man of the inbreathed Spirit of Jehovah, and they are as distinct, and must remain as distinct, as cause and effect. Life in man's body is part of that which makes the personality of man; but it is not itself a person-not itself an entity. Now whether we make this animal life of man immaterial or not, depends upon the definition we give of it. For ourselves, we profess our utter inability to define life, of any kind, in the abstract. We know its origin; we see its outcomings and manifestations; but we cannot tell what it is in itself. If immateriality is that which we cannot recognise by any of our senses, except by its operations, or effects, then the soul, or life of man, is immaterial; but on no other supposition. If that which is not spirit be material, then the soul, which is the product of spirit, is material. When, however, we speak of either spirit or matter, we speak of a real existence, and in the case of spirit, of a real living existence; but we cannot say the same of abstract life of any kind. Perhaps the inspiring Spirit applied nephesh, or soul, to vegetable life, in one instance, to enable ns the better to comprehend what life in the abstract is. Life is as real in the vegetable kingdom as in the animal. It may be a variety: it may continue longer or shorter, yet it is real life. The all-wise Maker has not designed vegetable life to remain for ever in one individual vegetable; nor animal life to remain for ever in one individual among the lower animals; though he did design this soul or animal life to remain for ever in man; and it would have remained for ever but for sin.

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Whether, however, life remains for long or short periods, it is life, real life, and in all cases it can come only from the one source of life-the great Spirit of Jehovah. Now is vegetable life, when looked at in itself, immaterial? If it is, that does not prove it to be immortal; or if it is material, that does not prove that it must necessarily come to an end. The continuance or dissolution of any created thing depends upon the will of the Creator, and not upon any intrinsic quality which belongs to it. The Gospel ensures eternal life to every believer in consequence of his union with God through Christ. Death came by sin, life through Jesus. Let the soul be proved to be immaterial, that will not prove it to be immortal. Let it be shown to be material, it might notwithstanding exist for ever. The human body of our blessed Lord is material, yet it will exist, and exist alive, for ever; and the same may be said of what shall be the glorified bodies of believers. If, therefore, the immortality of the soul is to be proved, it must be contested on grounds independent of immateriality. Again, how shall we class the electric fluid, which carries our messages with such amazing celerity? If it had a path, it would go round the globe in a moment of time. To call it a fluid expresses our knowledge of what it is not, rather than what it is; and we can as little conceive it to be material as immaterial. In itself we know not what it is we know it only by its effects and manifestations. Those who know most of the systems of psychology, formed apart from the Bible, whether ancient or modern, are those who best know their utter unsatisfactoriness. In fact, our only sure guide on the nature of man is the book of God, and that, as we have seen, denies the intrinsic immortality of the soul, though it ensures eternal life to the believer re-completed in and by Christ Jesus our Lord.

The limits of our article will not allow us to follow Colonel Bell in some other groupings of texts on the soul, and in his observations on death and destruction. They are as illogical and unscriptural as those which have been examined. Whether time can be secured for another article may be questioned; if it can, perhaps it may follow this. Ashchurch Rectory. H. S. WARLEIGH.

TABLE TALK AT HILLSTEAD HOUSE.
ILLSTEAD.

It is very kind of you, my friends, to leave your homes in this melancholy fog, and I am glad you have found, or felt, your way to Hillstead House in safety. Be assured my wife and I tender you a loving welcome.

MRS. H. All the more so, that it seemed cruel to expect you on such an evening as this.

ARNOLD. Locomotives are blind, and consequently run as comfortably in fog as in sunshine. Besides, it is ample compensation for three or four miles of London mist to reach such a haven as this, where the comforts of a warm room are crowned by the welcoming smiles of our kind friends who reside-O dear! I almost covet their house, and thus break the commandment !

HOLTON. You need not do that. There are more to be had on the

sides of this gentle hill, from every part of which the view is extensive and beautiful.

ARNOLD. Bating the fog.

LENNY. Of course; yet it strikes me that fog does not obliterate, it only obscures for the time, the fields on which it rests. And there is fog on more things than our friend's park-fog on politics, fog on science, fog on theology, fog on

HILLSTEAD. Hold! dear Lenny. You will get us all in a gloomy mood and spoil the evening. Let us take one thing at a time, and try to clear it from the murky clouds you speak of. What shall it be? Theology?

MRS. H. In that we are more interested than in anything else, and I cherished the hope that it would form the subject of conversation this evening.

LENNY. Mrs. Hillstead's hope, thus revealed, must be considered by us all as equal to a command; and though I do not profess myself a theologian, I have a deep impression, that there are certain points popularly accepted as integral parts of Christanity, of which the writers. of our sacred books knew nothing. It may be dangerous to take one's intuitions as oracles to be depended on; but when certain things are proclaimed by the pulpit as revealed declarations against which moral consciousness protests, as utterly at variance with the essential character of an infinitely perfect Being, I do not think that the feeling is either sinful or rebellious. Certainly, if I thought so, I should even try to silence the protest, for I wish to be loyal to Him in whom I live; but in that case, I should be plunged in mystery, which would make reason itself a gift of very doubtful value.

HARRIS. I suppose none of us are strangers to the impression referred to by our friend. It will come at times, and occasionally with great force, causing much perplexity; and I have observed that the devout and loyal, the men who are above all things anxious to honour God, are most liable to be cast down by it. As by a kind of loving jealousy for his glory, they feel depressed when things are said about him, and that too, seemingly, on his own authority,-the most distant approach to which in the case of any human ruler would cause the whole world to cry out against him. But I am satisfied by a careful personal examination of the Scriptures, that they contain no doctrine whatever but such as commends itself to the understanding of the wise and the heart of the loving. The man, whoever he was, who first invented the non-natural sense as the canon of interpretation for the Scriptures, launched a doctrine upon Christendom which has wrought amazing and incalculable mischief. I am sometimes lost in painful astonishment when I think on this subject, and I am positively glad to shake it off. Words by this monstrous non-natural sense-which is ridiculously called "spiritualising"-have been forced to change their meaning; and as words carry doctrines, these too have necessarily been changed, and upon the perverted doctrines schoolmen and theologians have built up elaborate "systems of divinity," which have hidden the sublime simplicity of Heaven's truth from the eyes of men, as completely as a dense fog hides an exquisite landscape. If death had been allowed to mean death, and life life, we should have understood the Bible on

these subjects, and, consequently, have had revelation instead of a perplexing riddle of non-natural definitions which define nothing, and make obscurity more hopelessly obscure.

HILLSTEAD. We are really obliged to the weather, after all! Why, it has helped us wonderfully!

OWEN. Our brother might have added, whilst exposing the mischievous absurdity of the non-natural scheme, that if our theological leaders would only allow us to understand Jew, Israel, Judea, Zion, Jerusalem, the Church, the coming of the Lord, and other words and phrases, as meaning just what the words and phrases literally and obviously mean, we should be able to read the Scriptures intelligently, and know a great deal more about the future. Places, persons, things, the Church and the kingdom, prophecy and doctrine, parable and literal fact, have been

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perplexingly mingled and muddled, that, regarding the plainest atterances of Scripture, the Christian man is troubled with the question -"What does this mean ?" An illustrative case occurs to memory. A humble brother, in the world's sense, but for all that, one of God's nobility, said to me, not long since, "I wish you would help me to understand a passage I have been reading: And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north and half of it toward the south.' Now I should like to know what these figures or metaphors mean.”

"My good brother," I said, "they are not figures or metaphors, whoever may have taught so. The words very plainly and distinctly, in the most literal sense, describe the actual facts, as they will occur when the Lord comes. By no language, could I tell you what the words mean better than by simply repeating them. Feet mean feet; the Mount of Olives means the Mount of Olives; Jerusalem means Jerusalem, and so forth to the end." You should have seen the beam of joy that danced across my friend's face! "Now," he exclaimed, "I shall understand prophecy for myself. What a blessed light this is!"

But I have spoken too long. I merely meant to give, as my small contribution to the evening's conversation, a thought that has taken up its abode with me. It is this, that whenever we think there is anything about God's government concerning which we had better be silent, we may be sure there is something wrong in our reading. If we hold a dogma which we do not like to see the light, the sooner we drag it to light to be consumed, the better !

HOLTON. A fruitful thought. The fair logic of it is that, as the Great Ruler cannot, from the perfection of his nature, do wrong to any creature, when any supposed revelation of his shocks our moral sensibilities, we may conclude that there is no such revelation, or that we have misunderstood the oracle in question.

HILLSTEAD. I understand the thought; but it must be guarded. Is there no danger of setting up our moral consciousness as a standard for the Divine government? or of judging beforehand what revelation ought to be? Criminals hate the law that punishes them, and the magistrate who puts it in force.

OWEN. True enough. But the feeling of criminals is not in question here. I refer, and so no doubt does our brother Holton, exclusively to loyal, God-fearing, Christian men, whose consciences are enlightened, and whose moral nature has been purified by grace-men, in a word, who know so much personally of the Father's marvellous love in Christ that they are anxious to know all that he has said respecting the future, both of the loyal and the impenitent. Now, knowing what God is to them, and remembering that they were by nature children of wrath, even as others, they cannot conceive it possible that he will exact more of the unsaved than the strictly defined penalty of his own law, which is death. The introduction of the idea of torture or torment is an additional element not contained in the penalty; and men who know and love God feel that that is at variance with his character. That is my meaning, and that gives the guarding limit for which Mr. Hillstead justly pleads. Besides, we are overlooking in the argument that which belongs to its essence, namely, that out of Christ men are merely mortal.

HILLSTEAD. This is perfectly satisfactory to my mind. Wisdom is justified of her children; and if men will to do the Father's will, they shall know of the doctrine.

ARNOLD. Eternal life only in Christ is certainly a glorious doctrine, the very soul of the Christian revelation; and the whole Church, though as yet she knows not the fact, is under heavy obligation to those good and fearless men who have lately risked all to bring the priceless doctrine to the light of day. Their hearts should be cheered and their hands strengthened, for, amidst numberless difficulties, they are doing a work of incalculable value, the results of which it is impossible to predict.

HARRIS. For myself, I am deeply thankful that the chief weapon of infidelity has at last been taken out of its hands by loyal Christian men. Nothing so remarkable has occurred for many generations. No wonder that those who understand it are so grateful to the Lord!

ELFORD. Those who have patiently examined this great subject, with the necessary qualifications of learning and piety, and have shown as the result that the Church has for many ages been under a terrible delusion, deserve something better of their countrymen than to have their names cast out as evil. To be forsaken and ostracised is a poor reward for services which have rolled a dark cloud from the Christian system, robbed infidelity of its formidable argument, and added fresh glory to the Divine character. But though profoundly sorry that men who love truth better than life should suffer for their loyalty, I am not surprised. I shared the prejudice against these devoted brethren, and, I regret to say, united with others in calling them by hard names. But after a while conscience took me to task, and suggested that to condemn unheard was neither Christian nor manly. So I ordered several books and pamphlets on the subject, together with the Magazine that has fought so brave a battle, that I might see and judge for myself. At the first mention of the thing you would think that Christian people would hail with joy the faintest suggestion that the Bible teaches that sin and suffering are not to be eternal. But this is a mistake. The chief opponents of this great doctrinal reformation are sincere Christians. The fact is easily understood. They have-we all have-been educated