nent; Christ for us, that He may become Christ within us. Hence the error of Mr. Fiske's statement that the belief in the immanence of God must destroy the conception of His transcendence. In fact, the latter conception is equally necessary with the former, before we can have all the ethical ideas about God. There is a polytheistic immanence as well as a monotheistic. When the savage believes that hatchets have souls or when the ancient Arab idolater believed that the Deity dwelt in a boulder stone,' the soul and the Deity were regarded as immanent, but unmoral, just as, on the other hand, the transcendent gods of Epicurus were not moral nor immoral, but un-moral. Even the doctrine of the immanence of God we must combine with the language that embodies God's transcendence. Christ reveals the immanent God. He addresses Him as "Our Father," because immanent, but He adds, "which art in heaven," because the Father is transcendent. In both aspects God is personal. In this manner we can distinguish God's existence in us through the Spirit, from His existence in Christ. If it were not so, every immanent dwelling of God would be an incarnation. Hence the words of Kant are true and important: "The conception of God involves not merely a blindly operating Nature as the eternal root of things, but a Supreme Being, that shall be the Author of all things by free and understanding action." T. C. EDWARDS. 1 W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 189. 93 THE "CURSING OF THE GROUND" AND THE "REVEALING OF THE SONS OF GOD" IN RELATION TO NATURAL FACTS. III. THE RESTORATION. THE calamities produced by the Fall are not irretrievable. Man had been defeated in his first encounter with the serpent; but the fight was to be continued. The enemy would have to adopt new, base, and insidious tactics, his head in the dust; and, finally, a descendant of the beguiled woman will, though not without conflict and wounding, bruise his head. This protevangel, which is the key-note of the whole Bible, and the commission of the Saviour Himself, extends through the writings of prophets and psalmists down to the triumphant songs of the Apocalypse. For a time, however, little is said of the share of the lower creation, either in the defeat or the triumph. One note is struck in the blessing on Noah after the flood, referred to in the last article, which announces a removal of the curse, except that part of it which proceeds from "the evil imagination of man's heart." Here and there the subject is referred to in the book of Job, in the Psalms, in the prophecy of Ezekiel, and more fully in the remarkable passage in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, which paints. peace among the lower animals and a little child as leading them. The cherubie figures also continued to testify through all this time to the share of the lower creation in the benefit of man's redemption. It will be better, however, for our present purposes not to dwell on these passages, and to go on at once to the wonderful view of the relation of nature and man contained in the eighth chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which may be considered as the central and crowning testimony on the subject, Paul was not merely an apostle commissioned to preach to man the Gospel of salvation; he was a scholar saturated with the Old Testament literature, and fully alive to the aspects of nature and of man viewed from the broadest and most philosophical standpoint. All these stores of knowledge and culture he was inspired to bring to bear on this difficult subject, and to draw from it truth useful to every Christian. The kernel of the passage reads as follows in the revised version: "For the earnest expectation (outstretched neck) of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the Sons of God, for the creation was subjected to vanity (failure) not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together (with us) even until now." The setting of this passage shows us the purpose for which it was introduced. The time was one of suffering for Christians, but this suffering leads to a future of incomparable glory. Nor are Christians to be alone in this glory. All nature, doomed to "vanity" and "corruption by man's fall, is to be emancipated from this painful disability in his restoration, and this is linked with the fact that in man himself, not merely the soul and spirit, but the body also is to be redeemed. This accords with Paul's reasoning elsewhere as to the first and second Adam,1 with the prediction of Peter as to a new heaven and new earth,2 and with the glowing pictures of the restoration of Eden as the New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse. The germ of the same doctrine we, no doubt, also have in the teaching of Christ.+ Let us now examine more closely the testimony of St. Paul. It is not necessary to discuss the many and often 1 1 Cor. xv. 20, et seq. 3 Rev. xxi. 2 2 Pet. iii. grotesque notions which have been held respecting the word "creation" (Tious). Many of these arise from entire failure to appreciate the fact that the Apostle is dealing not with man alone, but with nature as a whole. The word can mean nothing less than all created things, especially when it has prefixed to it the adjective "whole"-" the whole creation."1 More especially, no doubt, he refers to the animal creation as that which can best express its sufferings; but there is a sense also in which vegetation and even inanimate things can mutely complain of the wrong done them, or rejoice in the favour of God and give glory to Him. May we not, therefore, suppose that to thoughtful and inspired men, and to God Himself, creation has been all along lamenting its losses by the Fall? 2 This creation, then, is represented as "waiting with outstretched neck," or "groaning and travailing in pain." The pain is not, however, that of dissolution, but that of birth, a very expressive figure, pointing to that failure of fulfilment of promise and progress to which the world was doomed by the fall of man. It is as if at the introduction of man the creation had come to the birth of a glorious new era, but its parturition was arrested by the Fall, and it continues in travail until now, and must so continue until the revealing of the sons of God. Thus there is no pessimism in Paul's view. The travailing of creation is but an episode, a long-delayed birth-pang in the great programme of God's creation, which extends from the first introduction of life to the final consummation. All through the geological ages there had been more or less of suffering and death, but these were in the interest of the greater happiness of the greater number, and for the sake of the onward progress of the whole. So even the aggravated sufferings of the lower creatures, by the sin of man, are the travail-pains of a new 1 See also verse 29 of the same chapter. 2 Isa. xxiv. 4, et seq.; Ps. xix. 1, cxlvi. 1. birth. Our sufferings also look toward the glory following, and our groans are the impatient longings for a promised redemption. The practical lesson, therefore, to us is not one of despair, but of faith and hope. The "vanity" to which nature has been subjected by man's sin is literally failure or unprofitableness, a falling short of its purpose, just as in the case of a plant which puts forth its leaves but withers away before producing its flowers or fruit, and finally falls into "corruption" or decay without fulfilling the main purpose of its existence. Nature was subjected to this "vanity," not by any fault of its own, but "because of him who subjected it," that new head of creation who, failing in his obligations to God, fell from his first estate and was the cause of putting back the clock of the world by a whole age. Creation suffers in some sense even more severely than man, as the soldiers of an army may suffer more severely than the leader who, by folly or wickedness, has subjected them to danger and defeat. The animal creation more particularly suffers, not only directly, but indirectly, through the tyranny and cruelty of man himself. It cannot, like man, have a promise and a hope, nor can it have the support of the indwelling Spirit to sustain it, nor can it experience the full benefits of the redemption, for it has not the immortal life and individuality of man; and its past generations have all fallen in the wilderness; only the final survivors can share the liberty of the restoration. This distinction Paul expresses by speaking of nature as a whole, not as individuals, and by characterizing its deliverance as one from bondage into the liberty which it will attain when the children of God, as individual heirs of glory, shall attain to their inheritance. Just as, after the deluge, there was some mitigation of the original curse, so now under the Christian dispensation there may be some alleviation of the woes of creation. The merciful man is merciful to his beast, and enlightened |