the happiness of their souls. In due time their bliss was to be consummated by a resurrection. For this end a great prophet Saoshyant (Soshyos), a supernatural son of Zarathustra, was to be born, who should awaken and judge the dead and slay death and destroy all the works of devils. Thenceforth the world will never grow old or die; 'life and immortality will come and the world will be restored at its wish' (Zamyâd Yasht 89 f.; S. B. E. xxiii. 306 f.).

From this rapid sketch it will be evident that Zarathustra is not wholly unworthy to be placed as a Gentile by the side of Abraham. But there is this essential difference between them. Abraham in obedience to the Divine call broke completely with the idolatrous worship of his fathers and threw himself wholly upon the unseen. Zarathustra endeavoured to purify and use the natural emblems to which his countrymen were attached. As a natural result Abraham became the father of the faithful to the end of time, the first in a long line of interpreters of the Divine will. Zarathustra enveloped his message in a service which tended continually to overpower it (comp. Yasna xix. 6; S. B. E. xxxi. 261), and no successor arose to carry forward in its loftiest form a work which he had already brought down to earth.

CHAPTER VI.

PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN

SOLUTION.

Chris

ALL religion, as we have seen, assumes the existence of self, the world, and GOD, and deals with the problems to which these three ultimate elements of our knowledge give rise. tianity, in this following Judaism which was its special preparation, makes three assumptions as to these existences, and claims that the assumptions are justified by the intuitions and experience of men. It assumes, that the world was made by GOD (Gen. i. 1): that man was made in the image of GOD (Gen. i. 27): that man by self-assertion has broken his rightful connexion with GOD (Gen. iii. 9-24). It follows from these assumptions that the world is for the Christian in all its parts an expression of the will of GOD: that man can hold fellowship with GOD: that

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Three assumptions

man needs the help of GOD for the fulfilment of his destiny, in the sense that he requires not only growth but restoration.

These assumptions, are found, I believe, to receive the amplest justification in life. They form the adequate basis for a comprehensive and harmonious view of the facts which fall within our knowledge. But they are made subject to all the limitations which belong to us as men. They leave the difficulties which in the last place necessarily beset all human thought unremoved. All our conceptions are defined by conditions of time and space, which belong only to beings such as we are now, and are obviously provisional. We cannot, for example, as has been already noticed, form a clear idea of time or space as either limited or unlimited. We cannot again reconcile in the way of reason the cöexistence of the finite and the infinite. We cannot explain the origin of evil. These ultimate and insoluble difficulties remain. As men on earth we cannot escape from them. They set their mark upon all our thoughts as human thoughts. And under these limitations, these imperfections of vision, our views of things are necessarily shaped.

In Christianity then it is assumed, I repeat,

with a full recognition of these fundamental and final difficulties, that GOD made and rules the world in righteousness. It is assumed that man can hold personal converse with GOD. It is assumed that the completeness of this potential communion between GOD and man has been marred by sin, the act of man as a responsible agent, which yet is not irremediable.

These propositions are everywhere taken for granted in the Bible as expressing truths which each man is able to recognise as truths when they are presented to him in an intelligible form. They are not explained or justified, but summarily affirmed or more frequently implied. They are not presented as elements of a specific revelation, but they are taken as the basis of all revelation. They are put forward, so to speak, as the Preface to the whole record of Holy Scripture, which is itself in its fulness the record of the gradual unfolding of the Divine counsel and work. They are indeed literally the Preface to the Bible; for in this respect the opening chapters of Genesis, which have been most unhappily obscured by a flood of irrelevant controversy, bring out the fundamental conditions which make revelation at once possible and necessary.

We go back therefore to a beginning' in our endeavour to grasp the full import of the Christian

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How the assumptions

message. From this point of view the whole narrative of the Creation and the Fall, and not one isolated verse, contains, when rightly apprehended, the real Protevangelium, the primitive Gospel of the world. That narrative presents in a vivid form the truths which stand out more or less distinctly in all the following Books. But it differs from most other parts of Scripture in this, that the lessons which it conveys do not lie in the details of the narrative but in the general ideas which the narrative embodies.

It would probably be quite impossible for us, (or for man, as he is, at any time) to apprehend the exact circumstances of Creation, or of the original constitution of man, or of the Fall. Language must be to the last inadequate to express the results of perfect observation. But that which it concerns us to know as to the religious import of the origin and destiny of finite being is written in the cardinal sentences which sum up the contents of our divine Book of Origins.

In the beginning GOD created the heaven and the earth...And GOD saw every thing that He had made, and behold it was very good. Gen. i. 1, 31 a.

And God said Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion... So GOD created man in His own image, in the