ment economy of salvation related to Christ and Christianity? This, as we have said, is one of the most difficult subjects in whole range of theology. Some hold that the substance of Judaism, or its saving con tents, was the same in kind with Christianity, and that the two differ only in degree. This solves the problem in an easy way. But is not this substantially the old Ebionitic heresy, which refused to see the new in Christianity, and proposed, by Christianity merely to continue Judaism, and to complete it on its own plane? This theory, in the sphere of theology, is precisely analogous to that scheme in physics which regards the cosmogony as presenting a process of development in which the highest order of plant passes into the lowest animal, and the highest order of animal is developed into the lowest order of man. As this view of the genesis of the world is found to be at war with the ruling facts of the world, as well as with the truths of revelation, so this kindred theory in the sphere of revelation strikes at the root of Christianity it self, requiring it to be reduced from its high and peculiar substance to a lower plane. most true. To say that Judaism was a preparation for Christianity, is So is it true that in the cosmogony the lower or ders are ever a preparation for the higher; but this is not to admit that the lower pass over into the higher in their own nature and character. When man appeared at the head of creation, he did not there appear as a development out of the lower, but as a new creature of God. (Gen. i. 26, 27; ii. 7.) So when Christianity appears, it appears, it is true, as that toward which Judaism struggled in its inmost life, but it ap pears at the same time as a new creation in Christ Jesus. To say that Judaism was a preparation for the coming of the Saviour, does not explain how the Old Testament believers could ⚫ be saved before the Saviour came. How can a hungry man be really satisfied by a prospective feast? If we take the view that our salvation rests ultimately only on a moral union with Christ, then we can easily see how the Old Testament believers, instructed by the prophets and the law, could be led to an endeavor to conform their lives to the same precepts which Christ afterwards taught, only in a clearer manner; but this requires us to hold that Christianity itself was, and continues to be, only a moral system. Then we are upon ground on which no orthodox Christian is content to stand. The New Testament clearly teaches that salvation is only possible where there is a union with the divine-human life of Christ-that salvation has its ground, and only ground, in his union with our humanity-that by his own divine-human perfecting in our nature he "became the author of eternal salvation" (Heb. iv. 8, 9.)-and that that union with him which is the foundation of our salvation is effected by the Holy Ghost, who only came after Christ's glorification (John vii. 39.) and by means of the sacraments and ordinances instituted by him. (Col. ii, 12; 1 Cor. x. 16; John vi. 48–58.) Does not this seem to shut out the Old Testament believers from positive, actual Christian salvation, at least until Christ actually united himself with our nature, in it obtained victory over sin, death and hell, was himself glorified, and secured the advent of the Holy Ghost (John vii. 39), so that we might realize "the mystery which hath been hid from ages, and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: which is Christ in you. the hope of glory." (Col. i. 26, 27.) Not only do these ruling principles in the peculiar nature of Christianity involve this vast difference between the two systems of Judaism and Christianity, but the clear teachings of the New Testament likewise make this difference marked and broad. John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament prophets, and the greatest then born of woman, is less than the least in the New Testament kingdom. (Matth. xi. 11; Luke vii. 28.) The entire inadequacy of the old economy for the ends of salvation is plainly stated in 2 Cor. iii. 6-11; and Heb. viii. 6-13. To the Galatians, who had been "bewitched" to believe that they must become Jews first in order to become Christians, St. Paul shows that the Old Testament itself looked forward to find its own saving substance in the New. "Before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith." (Gal. iii. 23, 24.) So again : "The law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did." (Heb. vii. 19.) “For there is verily disannulling of the commandant going before, for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof." (v. 18) If possible, still stronger is the passage Heb. x. 1-4, 14, 19. Of the Old Testament worthies it is said: "These all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better things for us, that they without us should not be inade perfect." (Heb. xi. 39, 40.) If this passage looks, as some hold, to the second coming of Christ, and contains the sense that the Old Testament believers can not come to their final state of redemption and glory till the whole body of the church is consummated, it only for that reason the more strongly includes the sense, that they could not come into that fellowship with Christ which has its ground in his first coming in the flesh till he had actually come; and that thus they could "not be made perfect" until that "better thing," which came to us in his incarnation, had been "provided" by God. It is generally held, even by those who claim that the old economy afforded salvation to its believers alike in kind with that at once attained unto by believers under Christianity, that the former dispensation stood related to the latter as shadow and substance. But is it well considered what this involves? Shadow and substance are not the same in kind, nor is the one merely a higher degree of the other; though they go together they are essentially different things. The shadow, produced by the substance, is at best only a witness that the substance exists, and that it is near by; but it can not possibly furnish that which the substance is adapted to bestow. So far as we can see, the problem as to the salvation of the Old Testament believers can only be solved in one of two ways—either we must solve it in connection with eschatology. or by a deeper Christology. The greater number of those who have earnestly wrestled with the problem in the latest theological inquiries, have been disposed to find an eschatological solution. It is held that Christ's redeeming work extended into Hades, so far as those are concerned who previous to his incarnation believed on him, and sincerely sought to know him-that while his body laid under the power of death during three days, he still pursued the curse of sin unto the place of departed spirits, triumphing there over the utmost of this death as the penalty of sin, releasing the Old Testament believers from the power of death, effecting their full union with his resurrection life, and securing their glorification with him. It is held that passages like the following demand such a view, and that their apparent obscurity is all removed when this truth is admitted to lie in them as their true sense and meaning. (Matth. xxvii. 52;* 1 Pet. iii. 20; iv. 6; Eph. iv. 8-10; Acts ii. 26-34; Rev. i. 18; 1 Cor. xv. 20; Col. i. 18; Heb. xi. 19, 20. †) It is worthy of profound consideration, whether the crass eschatology which has been developed in the Roman church has not had a tendency to lead Protestant theologians to swing to the opposite extreme, so that in rooting out the tares of error some of the wheat of truth has been carried away with it. At any rate, it must be admitted, in no part of the general system has theology as yet furnished less satisfactory results than in the department of eschatology. The field is still open to earnest inquiries; and though it is a difficult one to till, as involving much of what is still future, yet the seeds of the harvest of interesting truth it must some day yield to the church, must already lie in the soil of the divinely inspired record. Nor would it be at all strange, but in full accordance with the nature of revelation, if the future of redemption should be found in this particular also to illumine its past. We are inclined to think, however, that a deeper Christolo gy alone will illumine eschatology itself; and that, therefore, * See Lange's Commentary in loco. + Sce Dr. Ebrard in Olshausen's Commentary. Kendrick's Ed. vol. vi. pp. 555, 556. the problem under discussion must primarily find its solution in Christology. We would humbly suggest whether there must not have been more than a merely outward, official, delegated, representative relation-more than a merely ethical union-of the Son of God with humanity before his actual incarnation? Is there a relation of the Second Person in the Trinity to our nature deeper than this, and which was actual before his incarnation-one which would furnish ground for a real, if not a full, union of him as Saviour with the believing in the bosom of Judaism? On this point we would reverently present some thoughts. Did he, the divine Son of God, by his incarnation become anything substantially different from what he was as the second hypostasis in the Godhead? Was his assumption of our nature an essential change in his previous form and character of being? This, of course, can not be predicated; because it would involve a change in divinity itself. Then, we state further, it can not be conceived that the Second Person in the Trinity united himself, in his incarnation, with a nature absolutely foreign to his own peculiar eternal being, but rather with a nature allied to his own, though of course, a crented one, and infinitely beneath himself. For such a thought the divine record affords us clear data. Man, with whose nature he united, was made in the "image" and "likeness" of God, which was also the image of the Son; for he is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature." (Col. i. 15.) Thus, as the Son of God, the begotten of the Father before all worlds, he had that image which was the same image in which man was made. As "the firstborn" he was the archetype of man. Hence in his image, as it was that image once the image of God and the image of man, he was eternally allied to the nature of man. This nature of man, therefore, is not something foreign to the Eternal Son. He is its ideal. To actualize this ideal in himself, as he did in his incarnation, therefore, involves no change in his primal divine being, but is a free and natural |