do not belong to Time, are brought within the faith and apprehension of the meek and lowly; that these constitute that eternal inheritance which God has prepared for them that love Him. It has seemed to me that if instead of coming to this revelation to instruct me in the nature of God and Eternity, I go back to my own notion of endlessness, and attribute that to God, I must fall into Heathenism. This, I am sure, is the lesson which one learns from Augustin's Confessions; it is no less the doctrine of the great Greek Father who fought the battle both with Heathenism and Arianism. In his mind the two battles were intimately connected together. He felt that Arius, in attributing notions derived from Time to the only begotten Son, was in fact bringing back the old divided Pagan worship. Athanasius asserted the eternal generation of the Sonnot as a dry dogma but as a living principle, in which every child and peasant was interested-certainly not understanding Eternal to mean endless. If that force is given to it his doctrine means nothing every argument by which he defended it is untenable.

How a theologian like yourself can have overlooked facts so notorious as these I should be at a loss to explain, if I did not know how ready divines as well as common people are to think first of the blessedness which is in reserve for them, and to lay down certain conditions as necessary to that; then to apply them to the nature and being of Him in whom all blessedness dwells, and from whom alone it can be derived, to the creature. The bliss of heaven you think must be endless: only a reckless heretic or infidel would deny that. Therefore it is right and reverent to speak of God as the endless Being-nay, it is wrong to speak of Him otherwise. I am sure any one of our older and greater divines would have told you that we do not want that kind of security for the bliss of heaven which we want for earthly possessions. No saint in heaven has that bliss in fee; he never wishes so to have it. It is the misery of the fallen creature, that he seeks to keep his treasures upon this tenure, The redeemed creature holds his by continual dependence on a

*See note C at the end of the letter.

them; you are putting a new force upon them." He would understand me, I think, perfectly; he could not suppose that chronology had anything to do with the question. The Catechism does not teach me this interpretation of its doctrine; therefore to me it is a novelty.

But you complain that I have used vague language when I have spoken of "popular interpretations" to which I would not bind myself. I now answer without hesitation; by popular interpretations I understand the interpretations contained in your letter. I do not deny that you are at perfect liberty, holding your position as a dignitary of the Church and the head of a College, to maintain those interpretations. You may see the principles which our Formularies assert more clearly through these media than you could without them; you may see those principles much more clearly than I do. But these media would as utterly distort them for me, or hide them from me, as the doctrine of Paschasius, or that of Zwingle, would distort for me or hide from me the principle asserted in our Catechism concerning the Eucharist. This is no new conclusion of mine. If in the year 1846, when you asked me-I never solicited the office-to be come a teacher in the Theological Department then about to be established at King's College, you had stated your view of the word Eternal as you have stated it in your final letter, and had said, "I expect every professor in our College to agree in this view," I should have answered at once, "Then, sir, I can have nothing to do with your College;" and I should have proved to you, from books which I had published at that time, and from which I supposed you had acquired your knowledge of my orthodoxy and my competency, that I could not assent to such terms unless I contradicted all that I had tried to teach elsewhere.*

Your charges against me are two. First, my words "seem to throw an atmosphere of doubt on the simple meaning of the word Eternal." Secondly, "they convey a general notion of ultimate salvation for all." I will deal with each separately. 1. You intimate that you had been almost misled into a

See note B at the end of the letter.

belief of my orthodoxy by finding that I asserted very broadly the theological importance of the word Eternal, and the philological as well as the theological duty of giving it the same import when it is applied to punishment as when it is applied to life. But you have discovered that I was practising an imposition upon you. You used a test which instantly detected my duplicity; I did not like, you perceived, the word Everlasting as well as the word Eternal; I could bear the one, I stumbled at the other.

I am sorry you spent so much time in seeking for this test. I would have told you at once, if you had asked me, that the word Eternal seemed to me a better equivalent for the word alúvios than Everlasting. Since aetas is the obvious translation for alwv, the cognate Latin adjective seems peculiarly suitable to express the cognate Greek adjective. Since there is nothing that apparently corresponds to the Greek substantive in the Saxon adjective, it must, I should conceive, offer a less adequate substitute. The passages which you have collected to show how closely the use of air is connected in the New Testament with the use of alúvios greatly favour this conclusion. I was so convinced on this ground of the superiority of the Latin derivative, that I ventured to complain of our translators for joining with it the word Everlasting in Matthew xxv. 46. My main objection, indeed, was to the ambiguity which arises from the use of two words for one; still I had no doubt which ought to have been chosen, which thrown aside. Two of the apologies which you offer for the translators I am sure they would indignantly have repudiated. They never would have dared to think about the "rhythm" of a passage in which our Lord declares what He will do when He shall sit upon the throne of His glory and before Him are gathered all nations. They could never have taken a word merely because an old translator from the Vulgate, in the infancy of our language, had found no better. Your other rea son that they sought to connect the Saxon word with the Latin, offers a more valid-not, I think, a quite satisfactory

excuse for them. I conceive that they felt the value of the word Eternal; they shewed that they did by using it so frequently in spite of their fondness for Saxon. They were too well acquainted with the controversies of the fourth century, and with the history of theology, not to know how important it is that there should be a word expressing a permanent fixed state, not a succession of moments. The word alwv, or ætas, served this purpose. Like our own word "Period," it does not convey so much the impression of a line as of a circle. It does not suggest perpetual progress, but fixedness and completeness. The word alúvios, or Æternus, derived from these, seemed to have been divinely contrived to raise us out of our Time notions, to suggest the thought of One who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; to express those spiritual or heavenly things which are subject to no change or succession. The King James translators, therefore, hailed the word with which Tyndale or some one else had provided them, as a precious addition to the resources and powers of the language. And they wished, I conceive, to raise their own Saxon word Everlasting to its level. By using them indiscriminately, often together, they effected to a great extent this object. Even in colloquial language, much more in considerate books of human or divine science, Everlasting has acquired that impression of permanence which belongs to Eternal in virtue of its deri vation. I admit the Providence over our translators which you speak of; I see a very remarkable token of it in this instance: I still think that they would have acted more rightly and more safely if they had construed Christ's words more exactly.

In speaking of them I have replied to this part of your charge against me. If Everlasting is, as you say it is, and as I admit that it may be and ought to be, the exact synonym of Eternal, then I accept the one word in all the application in which I ac cept the other. I am glad, not sorry, for my own sake to find them used interchangeably in our Formularies, because thereby the inferior word has been rescued from its vulgar signification, and has acquired the force of the higher. But if I am

compelled to measure the word Eternal, which is confessedly the most exact equivalent of alúvios, by the word Everlasting, and not to measure Everlasting by Eternal, my reverence for Scripture, as well as the most sacred interests of theology, compel me to say, I will do no such thing. And this is what I find from the whole tenor of your letter that you desire me to do.

case.

You say, indeed, that you have not the least wish that I should mix Eternity with Time, but only with Duration; and you find great fault with my logic or my honesty for not recognizing this distinction. I have one short answer to make to your long argument on this subject. If you can separate Time from Duration, by all means do it. Then I cancel my assertion that our Lord carefully excludes Duration from the Eternity of which He speaks. I should still think, indeed, that you had established a sense of the word which is not justified by ordinary usage, or by etymology. But I should rejoice so much to discover that you recognise an eternity which is not subject to Time, or merely a negation of Time, that I should not stop to dispute about such trifles. Let us see how far this is the You say, "Setting aside what you must permit me to call this groundless cavil" (against our translators), "we are left to the full force of the argument derived from St. Matthew, c. xxv. v. 46. It lies in a small compass; and is very simple, but is not less convincing for that. Whatever our blessed Lord predicates of life, He predicates without the least distinction of punishment likewise; but that He speaks of the life of the blessed as never ending, relatively to the ever-living Being who shall be their portion for ever, particularly when the application of the same term alívios to God himself is remembered, no one but the most reckless heretic or infidel would deny; therefore, our blessed Lord speaks also of the punishment of the reprobate as never ending." I have quoted this passage simply for the sake of that clause which I have marked with italics. With the first clause and the last I do not meddle, because we are agreed that whatever the sense of alúvios is any of its uses, the same it must have in all of them.

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