THEOLOGY UNDER ITS CHANGED CONDITIONS. 185 



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 fulfill- 

 ment of the general hope of immortality which Israel had long enter- 

 tained. 



This hope of immortality was grounded on the connection of man 

 with God, and espacially with his moral nature ; and consequently, 

 after the confirmation it received by the assurance of Christ's resur- 

 rection, it became a kind of passionate certitude. The history of the 

 Church, however, shows how such a passion may become a great dan- 

 ger and source of corruption ; and we may expect that the theolo- 

 gians 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 pres- 

 ent 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 redemp- 

 tion, 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 pe- 

 culiar 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 prin- 

 ciple 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 depart- 

 ments, 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 



