232 THE ET. EEV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D., ON 



'* He ascended into Heaven," like the phrase '* He descended 

 into Hell," is metaphorical, but at least the metaphor enshrines 

 a vital truth. I have sometimes thought that, if Jesus Christ 

 was seen alive after His resurrection by His disciples as the 

 Gospels narrate, then no account of His passing from the earth 

 could be more probable than that of the simple words " A 

 cloud received Him out of their sight." At all events, the 

 Modernists, standing face to face with the orthodox faith and 

 creed of the Church, cannot justly maintain an attitude of 

 neutrality ; they cannot say, as Professor Gardner says in his 

 Exploratio Evangelica, that the open grave presents a 

 problem which objective criticism can never solve." For as the 

 Jewish people survive to attest the general truth of the Old 

 Testament, so the Christian Church survives to attest the general 

 truth of the New Testament. It is not the New Testament 

 but the Church which is the standing witness to Christianity. 

 The Church would exist if no single book of the New Testament 

 were existent to-day. Nay, the Church lies always behind the 

 New Testament, behind the Gospels themselves. For nothing 

 is more remarkable than that the faith, as appears in all the 

 New Testament, is always and everywhere the same; St. Paul 

 in his Epistles shows no need of recommendmg the faith in its 

 fundamental articles to his converts, wherever they may be; 

 but the faith is one and the Church is one everywhere, and there 

 is everywhere one and the same attitude of devotion to Jesus 

 Christ as Saviour and Lord. 



There is reason to think that Modernists tend to misrepresent 

 or at least to misunderstand the nature of the Scriptural lan- 

 guage, especially in the Old Testament. God is frequently de- 

 picted there under the conditions of human nature. It is perhaps 

 inconceivable during the childhood or youth of humanity that 

 He should be depicted in any other way. But the language 

 of such representation has long ceased to be literally accepted. 

 No intelligent Jew can have imagined that God rose from His 

 bed early in the morning ; no such Jew can have supposed the 

 mighty hand and the stretched-out arm of God to be other than 

 figurative expressions. Nobody can have taken the breath or the 

 fire of His nostrils to be a literal fact. Similarly in the New 

 Testament our Lord's Ascension into Heaven, like His descent 

 into Hades, was a phrase symbolical of a certain spiritual experi- 

 ence; it was not a physical reality. Even to-day it is no less 

 natural to speak of Heaven as over our heads, .and Hell as 

 beneath our feet, than it is to speak of the sun as rising in the 

 morning and setting in the evening. The doctrine which repre- 

 sents our Lord as sitting at His heavenly Father's side or at 

 His rio'ht hand no more implies that God possesses a side than 

 that He possesses a hand or an arm like a man. But if such 



