and yet it did not come. Barbe began to speak | she had heard his testimony to the grace and love of going without it; but the idea was intolerable of Jesus-she had heard of him in his Word-— to me. What had I now to tie me, but the dear she could not read herself—and she rested upon old home, where all life could hold for me of him. She is with him now. Of that I am preciousness had been mine? but the three graves side by side in the little churchyard? It was Conrad's wish and my father's that I should go to Munich; but, oh, not yet, not yet, I moaned. So we stayed on, Barbe, old Pierre, and I, in that great lonely house. Victoire had gone to the mother of her François; Blaise-poor, awkward, true-hearted Blaise-to swell one of the new raw armies whose fate Conrad had foreboded so sadly. Heavy tidings reached us from without of the horrors and desolation that were spreading over our hapless country. I heeded them not, but Barbe mourned them sorely. Dear, dear, truehearted Barbe! Did I value your presence and tenderness as I ought, those weeks? Did the tears for the loss of my dearest friends blind my eyes to the worth of the one left? No; I think not. I know she was as a mother to me. And my one sweet memory of that melancholy time is the earnestness with which she listened to the words I read to her from Conrad's little Bible, translated into French for her benefit. I rarely used the one he had given me e-the one that had cost him his life to bring me. I loved his own best. For it was not only to please me she listened. Firmly as she clung to her old faith, her heart had, I am sure, received Him whom to know is life everlasting. Especially she loved to hear of him as the Good Shepherd, or of his people as his sheep. Again and again I read to her the passages and chapters up and down the Word where these figures are used. Her father had been a shepherd on the sunny southern slopes of the Cevennes; there her youth had been passed among the flocks; often she had even tended them herself. This, and a picture of the Lord Jesus as the Good Shepherd, bearing a lamb in his arms, and tenderly looking back after the rest, which she had once seen and vividly remembered, enabled her to grasp the full beauty of this aspect of truth. Often have I seen the tears coursing down her wrinkled cheeks as I read of these things. Yet she tenaciously clung to the rites and superstitions of her old creed. But she had seen Conrad die sure. My other memories are all of weary, listless days. Hours of bitter weeping-others of dull, heavy, heart-crushing grief-grief too deep for tears some spent, when the wet wintry weather permitted, in the little graveyard-some in my father's room, or study-most in my old seat by the bed that had been Conrad's. Alone! oh, so utterly alone! Dear, good, homely Barbe, with all her worth and love, could not reach the aching void within earth was so unutterably dreary; heaven so far away. The receipt of that letter decided Barbe; Dr. Duprât too urged my leaving scenes in which so many sad memories overwhelmed me. And it was Conrad's wish. After all, time and place could make no real change to me. Those haunting memories would go with me everywhere, I knew. And did I wish to leave them? They were all I lived for then. So I yielded. Barbe's plan was to leave Pierre in charge of the house, while she accompanied me, and then to return until the close of the war should enable some arrangement to be made as to the disposal of it. For we all tacitly acknowledged it could be my home no longer. But it was not to be. I needed more than change of scene,- -a baptism of blood and fire to rouse me from my desponding torpor, and seal me for my life-work. One leaden December morning I had gone to the little churchyard-alone, as usual. Only a few days remained now before our purposed journey. It is difficult to realize that little more than three weeks had passed since the day my Conrad had been laid in his early grave. To me it seemed a lifetime. Days might well have had given me that most precious gift, but to measured for years. That morning I stood leaning against the great old chestnut-tree beneath which my dead all slumbered, and read the inscriptions on the simple wooden crosses which marked my father's grave and his, contrasting strangely with the white marble one bearing my mother's name. I could not bear to leave them unmarked; and they had been placed there but the day before. I read the record of my father's ripe years with quiet sadness; that grief seemed so old a one, so natural, separated by a great gulf from the other. Then I turned to the rudely-cut letters on that last made mound : CONRAD VON EDELSTEIN. Nothing more. But it told me all. A great wave of bitterness swept over my sinking heart; and I threw myself prostrate on the cold turf, clasping it passionately in my arms. I forgot everything then, except that Conrad had been-had been mine-that he was not. And wildly, presumptuously, desperately, I questioned the love, the wisdom, the right even of Him who take it back when I most prized, most needed it. I knew death lurked in the cold damp earth on which I lay; but it was death I sought. I might have found it had not some one raised me, and kindly but gravely bade me go home. It was Father Fontaine. He had seen me from the windows of his little room, which alone overlooked the churchyard. He pointed to the road, and to my surprise I found it filled with soldiers. And now I was aware all was hurry and confusion in the village street beyond. I had been deaf to all before. The soldiers were French. One glance showed me the way I must pass homeward was crowded with them. Father Fontaine took me by the hand, and climbing with some difficulty the low wall that bounded the churchyard, assisted me to do the same, then hurried me quickly across the sloping field that alone separated the chateau from it. He left me when I had passed through the little gate into the garden, bidding me to run quickly into the house, and staying until he saw me do so. Lost in the surprise, hurry, and confusion of the present, I did so with no thought of the past. It was the last time! THE BLESSED HOPE. SUNG AT FUNERALS IN THE DISTRICT OF ALSACE. TILL, beloved, be your sighings, All His promises are true,- Sleeps the casket, broken, buried, But the soul will yet resume Onward quick that day is winging, Corpses now in ashes sleeping Heavenward through the azure sky, Living, never more to die. Dead to-day beneath the furrow, Therefore, Earth, our common mother, Nursling, wearied, needing rest; Once, a work of skill unbounded,— Christ the Lord, in whom we trust, Rest, thee, therefore; rest thee, brother, On the bosom of thy mother; He who made thee son and heir,— He will not forget thee there. Thou, when Christ in clouds descendeth, Studies in the Old Testament. BY PROFESSOR DAVIDSON, D.D. A THE OLD TESTAMENT VIEW OF DEATH AND IMMORTALITY. GOOD deal of obscurity hangs over the whole way in which the Old Testament saints thought and felt about Death and the things that follow it; and this obscurity has appeared to many all the greater and the more surprising from the contrast between it and the very clear light of the New Testament. But it is possible that a change in the position from which the New Testament has been observed, or of the medium through which it has been looked at, may have given to its light an intensity not properly belonging to it. Perhaps at all times beliefs concerning eternal life and the things beyond the grave have been much more largely composed of emotion and presentiment than of clear, naked conceptions. And it may be considered certain that our present current feelings about these things are not primary and identical with those of the early Church; they are secondary, having flowed from our prevalent doctrinal teaching, while those of earlier times flowed from the simple facts of Christianity. And if any one who had made himself familiar with the feelings expressed by Old Testament believers on such subjects, and sympathized in them, should suddenly pass to a comparison of the expressions made use of by believers in the New Testament, he might be surprised to find that they did not seem to him to differ from one another so widely as he had been led to believe; and he would probably conclude that either the darkness of the Old Testament or the light of the New had been exaggerated. A certain amount of the darkness surrounding these questions belongs to the nature of the subject itself, and could hardly have been dispelled by any statements, however precise. For it may not be possible to explain either what life is or what death is, nor even what the body is, not to speak of the soul; and certainly these are questions of a kind which Scripture is as far as possible from considering it its part to raise. Scripture uses here, as on all other subjects, that way of speaking which we call the language of common sense; but this very usage, though it might seem to have the opposite effect, contributes considerably to the obscurity which overhangs the whole question, because we do not know with what degree of strictness we are entitled to take such language. The late Dr. Duncan used to aver that the strongest evidence to him of the existence of matter was the assumption of its existence in Scripture. But there are probably not many to whom such a thing would be any evidence at all; most men would reason in precisely the opposite manner, and conclude the assumed existence of matter in Scripture, so far from being an independent testimony to its existence, to be due to the ordinary way of thinking and speaking among men, which in all such matters Scripture habitually follows. Any question concerning death and immortality and resurrection must be preceded by questions relating to the nature of man. For death being, in some sense, a dissolution, and that which is simple being incapable of separation into parts, the nature of man must be compound; and some understanding is required of its elements, the dissolution of which is death, and the continued separation of which is the state of the dead, and the reunion of which is resurrection. But there is no question of Biblical theology more obscure than the question of the nature of man. Not only is there no certain information regarding it furnished in the Old Testament, but the New seems to leave it involved in similar uncertainty. That man possesses a soul and a body, is clearly enough assumed; and that these two are separated in death and remain dissevered during death, and that when the man lives again they are reunited, or when they are reunited he lives again,-these are also general assumptions of Scripture which shine out perspicuously from every page. But within these larger statements there lie concealed a number of minor problems. With regard to the body, except in the matter of its resurrection, where the inquiry, what the body in its simplicity is, becomes of importance, there is not much complication. But on the side of the soul there is such a variety of terms employed, and statements apparently so irreconcilable are made concerning it, that certainty can hardly be expected from any investigation. The first and most prominent fact is that Scripture constantly uses two words for this side of human nature----soul and spirit. These two terms it does not employ indiscriminately, but seems to use the latter to describe something primary, the union of which with body gives rise to soul. But whether this soul, that so arises by union of spirit with body, be itself something distinct from the spirit, the union of which with the body gave rise to it, or whether it be not the spirit itself in this state of union and under all the relations incidental to it-the naked essence being called spirit, and the same essence in vital union with the body being named soul—is a question to which very divergent answers have been returned. Moreover, in regard to this spirit itself, its relation to God's nature is very obscurely set forth in the Scriptures; for it is sometimes called his-he gives it and men live, he takes it away and men die; it returns to God who gave it; he is the Father of our spirits and sometimes it is called man's. And we are at some loss to know the exact cause why the spirit, which is called man's, is also called God's. Thus there are two really difficult questions raised in the Bible account of man's nature-the one is: What is the relation of man's spirit to man's soul? Are the two substantially distinct, or are the two terms merely descriptive of one thing in different relations? And the other is: What is the relation of man's spirit to God? Are man's spirit and God's numerically distinct; or is the same spirit called man's because possessed by him, and God's because given by him and coming from him? These are questions not uninteresting in themselves, and they have acquired a fresh interest from the attention bestowed on them by writers on the doctrines of the Old Testament, and their bearing on the questions of death and immortality also adds considerably to their importance. And it is in this last connection only that any allusion is made to them here. There are certain statements in the New Testament that might seem, and by many have been held, undeniably to establish a distinction be tween soul and spirit of a kind that must be named substantial. In 1 Thess. v. 23 occur the words: "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly and I pray God your whole spirit, and soul, and body, be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." The commentary of a writer, not undeserving of attention, on this passage is as follows: "The position of the epithet shows that the prayer is not that the whole spirit, soul, and body, the three associated together, may be preserved, but that each part may be preserved in its completeness. Not mere associated preservation, but preservation in an individually complete state, is the burden of the apostle's prayer. The prayer is, in fact, threefold: first, that they may be sanctified by God, the God of peace,-for sanctification is the condition of outward and inward peace,-wholly, in their collecttive powers and constituents; next, that each constituent may be preserved to our Lord's coming; and lastly, that each so preserved may be com plete and entire in itself, not mutilated or disintegrated by sin; that the body may retain its yet uneffaced image of God, and its unimpaired aptitude to be a living sacrifice to its Maker ; the appetitive soul, its purer hopes and nobler aspirations; the spirit, its ever-blessed associate, the holy and eternal Spirit of God." * This New Testament passage certainly names three constituent elements of human nature, names them all co-ordinately, and speaks of each as needing sanctification and capable of preservation. And it might not unfairly be argued that, as the three are specially named, there is as good reason for consider Ellicott, "Destiny of the Creature," p. 107. ing the spirit distinct from the soul, as there is for considering the body distinct from either. But this reasoning would be admitted to go further than it ought; and on the other side it may plausibly enough be represented that the apostle's language does not require, to justify it, a distinction of organs or substances, but may be accounted for from a somewhat fervid conception of one substance in different relations. were correct, according to which a division is In Heb. iv. 12 there occurs a similar passage: "For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." The word of God has four attributes assigned to it: it is quick-that is, living; it is powerful-that is, active; it is sharp; and it reaches even to the dividing that is, so far as to divide soul and spirit. The word “ dividing" means rather the act of dividing than the place of division. The meaning does not seem to be that the word of God, like a two-edged sword, enters so deep as to reach the place of division of soul and spirit, the boundary-line between them, where the two meet, where the line of division runs between them; but that it goes so deep as to divide the soul and spirit, to effect a division of them. Yet this is left ambiguous, whether the sharp word of God, which enters so deep that it divides, effects this division between the soul and spirit, the joints and marrow, or within them; whether it separates between the two, or cuts asunder each-dissects, as we might say, both the soul and the spirit, both joints and marrow. But to the question whether the soul and spirit be distinct things, this other question is of less consequence. The passage recognizes two things, one called soul and another called spirit; these are so substantial and independent, that either they may be separated by something introduced between them-an operation delicate enough, but one which the word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, is qualified to accomplish-out, might have described his moral sensations by or each of them may be severally divided and cut open into its own elements. Probably that view which considers the division to be made, not between the two elements soul and spirit, but within each of them, is the true one. If the other view A new saying that he felt himself sometimes on the side of good, and sometimes on the side of evil. But the apostle was not sometimes one kind of man and sometimes another; he was two men, or there were two men within him. There was an |