Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/197

Rh assured that he was not lost but gone before. He will, with St. Paul, take the assurance that Christ was alive after his passion as the fulfillment of the general hope of immortality which Israel had long entertained.

This hope of immortality was grounded on the connection of man with God, and espaciallyespecially [sic] with his moral nature; and consequently, after the confirmation it received by the assurance of Christ's resurrection, it became a kind of passionate certitude. The history of the Church, however, shows how such a passion may become a great danger and source of corruption; and we may expect that the theologians of the future will substitute the "words thrown out at a great subject" for the certitude and definitions of the past. Immortality will be to them a great background of hope beyond the scene of present duty.

5. The theology of sin and redemption. This is the department of theology in which a kind of ideal dogmatism has most interfered with truth. The ideal characters of the wicked and the just, as they are described in Scripture, have been taken as literally existing; and, since men can not be ranked with the ideally righteous, they have been taken in the mass as belonging to the ideally wicked. Each action has been regarded as a conscious and open-eyed contradiction of a revealed standard of right, a contradiction which is described in the Gospel as a sin against the Holy Ghost. The false judgments, the mutual condemnations, the hypocrisy, the strange theories of redemption, the readiness to believe in eternal torments, the ascetic practices and unreal life which have resulted from this, could hardly be traced out in a lifetime. The reconstruction which will be required will need great labor. But in no department will the results be more fruitful. They will bring theological ethics into closer alliance with general science and practice. They will enable Christian teachers to treat all men as brothers, and make Christianity the means by which the state of men generally may be ameliorated.

6. The notion of the Church, the study of Church history, and the practice of church-life will be profoundly modified when once men realize that the Church is not necessarily a society held apart from the rest of mankind by having different pursuits as its object, and a peculiar form of government enjoined upon it. The Church will be simply that section of mankind in which the Christian spirit reigns; its history will be the history of the working out of the Divine principle in human society, with all its blessed results. The Church of the future will make its worship bear upon the higher ends of life; or, rather, it will teach that the true ritual is a holy life in all its departments, and thus it will merge itself more and more in general society, being ready, in the true spirit of its Lord, to lose itself that it may save mankind.

If we ask, in conclusion, what the prospects are as to the actual