THE KING ’ S BUSINESS T . C . H O R TO N , Editor KEITH L. BROOKS, Managing Editor R. A.TORREY, D. D. FREDERIC W . FARR, D.D. J. H. HUNTER W . H . PIKE Contributing Editors
EDITORIAL
R e s u r r e c t i o n Said Calvin, “ Christ is our head, whose kingdom and glory have not yet appeared. If the members were to go before their head, the order of things would be inverted and preposterous; but we shall follow our Prince then, when He shall come in the glory of His Father, and sit upon the throne of His majesty. The Scripture uniformly commands us to look forward with eager expectation to the coming of Christ, and defers the crown of glory that awaits till that period.” Said Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, to More, the Roman Catholic, “ Ye, in putting departed souls in heaven, hell or purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection. What Hod doth with them, that shall we know, when we come to them. The true faith putteth the resurrection, which we be warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put that the souls ever live; and the Pope joineth the spiritual doctrines of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of the philosophers together—things so con trary that they cannot agree. . . . Again, if the souls he in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good a case as the angels be? and then what cause is there of a resurrection?” Said John Wesley in a sermon on Luke 16:31: “ It is indeed very generally supposed that the souls of good men, as soon as they are dis-. lodged from the body, go directly to heaven, but this opinion has not the least foundation in the oracles of God.” Dr. Macnight says, “ The apostles’ doctrine that believers are all rewarded together, and at the same time, is agreeable to Christ’s declaration, who told Has disciples that they were not to come to the place He was going away to prepare for them till He returned from heaven.” Says Dr. A. J. Gordon in Ecce Venit, “How deplorably, therefore, do they lower the standard of redemption who fix our anticipations upon our departures through the gates of the grave, instead of lifting them to Christ’s return through the gates of glory. If we make Death our hope, let us not be surprised, if others learn to make him their hero. . . . Pagan phil osophy infused its own notions of a future life into ecclesiastical theology. It deftly substituted the Platonic doctrine of th e .immortality of the soul for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In.harmony with this change came the notion of judgment being administered immediately after death, in the disembodied state, instead of being reserved till the coming of the Lord and the raising of the dead—a conception as character-
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