one being alive and the other dead-we should shut out from the doors of Heaven probably 90 out of 100 struggling, praying, striving, falling, again rising, sincere but frail Christians, who, according to this hard-and-fast line of distinction, have been dead and alive again several times. Again, if there can be no eternal life for any man except for him who lives in Christ and Christ in him'—what are we to say of the lot ordained for the thousands of millions who have lived, now live, and yet will live on this earth, who have never even heard of the name of Christ? . . . No man's creed would seem to me either reasonable or Scriptural which should exclude for ever from the Golden Gates of the Eternal Life hereafter such men as Homer, Socrates, Aristides, Plato, &c., &c."

Devout though he was and profoundly reverent, Murray, although ready to accept articles of faith which were beyond his understanding, would never yield assent to those that were contrary to it.

"Belief is an act of the understanding, not of the will, and whatever amount of argument or apparent evidence might be presented to me to prove that God was unjust, or that two and two made five, I could not believe it by any effort of will. It is therefore useless for any human lawgiver or Church to endeavour to enforce a dogma upon any one whose conscience and understanding repudiate it. I think it has been an act of repre

hensible unwisdom on the part of the Church of England to oblige its ministers to read the socalled Athanasian Creed on stated days in church, seeing that it is a well-known fact that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the laity cannot understand it; and that nine out of ten of the better educated, who have examined and studied it, hold it in aversion. These last regard it as a creed composed by some unknown author three or four hundred years after the Christian era, in which, after a laboured and wordy attempt to fathom the unsearchable and define the incomprehensible, more than half the Christian world is consigned to perdition by the declaration, that whosoever does not faithfully believe it, cannot be saved."

To how many earnest worshippers must the same difficulty have occurred; but how few have the moral courage to face it!

It is impossible that any honest religious thinker in these times can refuse to examine the authority for the doctrine of everlasting punishment, which becomes the more repugnant to human ideas of justice in proportion as those ideas are based on the doctrines of Christ and permeated by the spirit of His teaching. One turns over the pages of these note - books, therefore, confident that Murray will have something to say about it, and curious to know how it presented itself to his frank and simple nature. He faces the problem boldly

enough he admits that we have exactly the same authority for believing in the eternity of punishment as in the eternity of bliss; he brushes aside all significance in the apparent distinction indicated in Christ's own words, "These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal" (Matt. xxv. 46), by showing that it is an arbitrary one created by the translators, the word in the original Greek—alúviov-being the same both for "everlasting" and "eternal"; and he discusses various authorities on both sides at considerable length.

The Hon. Sir Charles Murray to the Dowager Lady Castletown.

"THE GRANGE, OLD WINDSOR, Nov. 1, 1885.

"For myself, I shun all dogmatic utterances about a future state, even when they pretend to be founded on the book of Revelation, or other isolated texts of Scripture, as I think they come under the denomination of those curious questions which St Paul taught us to avoid. The holding of doctrines and dogmas has been the curse of Christianity since its foundation. Two

thirds of the heresies that divided the primitive Church were founded on the contested acceptation of single texts. Not to mention scores of minor heresies (so-called), the two great Churches of the East and of the West, with many millions

of followers attached to them, were separated, and have remained ever since irreconcilably separated, upon the question whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from God alone, or from God and Jesus Christ. Surely angels might weep to see Christians - nominally the followers of the holy and sinless Jesus-not only wasting their time for centuries, but shedding each other's blood, in disputing over verbal differences such as this! . . . I am a member of the Church of England, having been baptised in it, and I hold to it in preference to any other Church, . . . although there are several things in its Liturgy which seem to me serious errors; among others-compelling its clergy to read in church the so-called Athanasian Creed on stated occasions. I have no objection to any man, lay or clerical, who approves it and thinks he understands it, reciting it for himself; but I do not think that any Church, calling itself a Reformed Church, has a right to order its clergy to read as a creed necessary to salvation, a document written by some French or Spanish bishop five or six hundred years after the Christian era, dubbing it by the name of St Athanasius, and ending by the monstrous declaration that whoever does not believe it faithfully cannot be saved-words that exclude from salvation three-fourths at least of the Christian community on earth."es

sort

Sir Charles Murray, than whom no man ever gave more earnest thought to problems of which the solution lies beyond the grave, declined to

pronounce a definite opinion on them. Nevertheless, the tendency of his judgment is revealed in the following sentences from one of his notebooks:

"It is remarkable that Bishop Thirlwall, the profoundest English thinker and theologian of this age, never made this question the subject of one of his sermons or charges to his clergy. But there is a short letter of his extant to Professor Plumptre, in which he thanks him for his admirable sermon on the 'Spirits in Prison,' and terms it one of the most valuable gifts the Church has received in this generation.'1 Now that sermon of Plumptre's was directed forcibly and specially against the doctrine of eternal punishment. If Thirlwall be mistaken-mallem cum Platone errare!"

1 Thirlwall's Letters, p. 334.