knowledge of Christ by which the sanctification was secured was so limited and dim. But when the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ had taken place, the sword of the Spirit took its keenest edge, and spiritual conquests were won, outshining all previous experience. The Pentecost was a time of spiritual marvel, because the knowledge of Christ, extending to his self-sacrifice and resurrection, had been so largely increased. And this again will help to elucidate the passage, John xiv. 15-17, which has been made such use of in recent years. Because our Lord here says of the Spirit, "He dwelleth WITH you and shall be IN you," it is argued that in the previous dispensation there was no indwelling of the Spirit, but a mere companionship, which dominated souls so to speak ab extra. Old Testament sanctification has in consequence come in for considerable suspicion from "advanced" believers. It is little wonder that lay expositors fall into this idea, when men like MM. Guers and Tophel insist upon it. The former says:-- “Until then (i.e. Pentecost) he had been with them; but from this day he will be in them; these are the very words of the Saviour; now, I do not think that he had them thus shaded off (nuancées) without motive; they mean manifestly a modification real, important, and profound in the subsequent relations of the Holy Spirit with them. He will be in you, says Jesus; IN YOU! there is in this without doubt a very little word; but, all little as it is, it does not the less characterise an entire economy, that which had then commenced, and under which we have still to-day the privilege of living."1 M. Tophel states it thus : "In the Old Dispensation, the Holy Spirit wrought upon believers, but did not in His person dwell in believers, and abide permanently in them. He appeared unto men; He did not incarnate Himself in man. His action was intermittent; He went and came, like the dove which Noah sent forth from the ark, and which went to and fro, finding no rest; while in the New Dispensation He dwells, He abides in the heart, as the dove, His emblem, which John the Baptist saw descending and alighting upon the head of Jesus. Affianced of the soul, the Spirit went oft to see His betrothed, but was not yet one with her the marriage was not consummated, until the Pentecost, after the glorification of Jesus Christ." Now the insinuation here is that the Holy Spirit's operations before Pentecost were different in kind from His subsequent 1 M. Guers' Le Saint-Esprit, pp. 73-4; the whole section, pp. 70-79, is upon this point, but it is too long to translate here. M. Tophel's work ut supra, p. 39. Sanctification the same in kind in both Dispensations. 641 operations. We confess that this hazy doctrine is incomprehensible to us. We find from such passages as Num. xxvii. 18, and 1 Pet. i. 11, that the Holy Spirit was in men in Old Testament times just as well as in New Testament ones. So that the idea of a generic difference existing between the dispensations so far as the Spirit's operations are concerned must, we believe, be rejected. Besides, the context (John xiv. 15-16) seems to show that all our Lord meant on the occasion was that the Holy Spirit had been hitherto comforting them through the companionship of Christ; but, after our Lord's departure, He would by His own indwelling constitute Himself their comforter. But this throws no light upon the conditions of Old Testament sanctification. While maintaining, however, that there was no difference in kind in the Spirit's Old Testament and New Testament operations, we recognise a difference in degree. The fresh facts of our Lord's matchless history enabled the Spirit, by applying them, to work a wider and a deeper work in the heart of mankind. Pentecost was an awakening and revival proportional to the increased interest in and knowledge of Christ, which were then, as never before, possible. Its lesson to all generations is manifestly this: that in proportion as the attention of sinners is directed to Christ and him crucified, and now risen and reigning, as the only Saviour, the Spirit will own it to the conversion of sinners, and the quickening of believers. Pentecostal experiences will return again only when Christ crucified and risen becomes the all-absorbing theme with us, as it was with the apostles. Sanctification, then, as we have seen, is induced by the contemplation in the mirror of Revelation of God's glory in Jesus Christ. The perfect life can alone lift sinful lives into consecration. The consecration is not perfect yet; but it will gradually approach perfection as we humbly try to master the meaning of the perfect consecration of Christ. In this mastery, however, we feel we are hindered through indwelling sin, through infirmities of many kinds. The glory in the mirror is but a reflected glory; it is dim, like a daguerreotype, after all. Now, what we have in conclusion to notice is that we are passing onwards to the "beatific vision," when we shall see him, not in the mirror, but as he is, and face to face, and then our sanctification shall be perfect: "we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John iii. 2). Doubtless, we can form no adequate conception of such an experience; "it doth not yet appear what we shall be." To be free from sin, original and actual, to have the vision of faith exchanged for immediate perception, to be enabled to take in the glory, and not feel undone like Isaiah, or as one dead like John, and by the contemplation to be transfigured into his perfect image, is an experience which we can only in the faintest degree imagine. But one thing seems certain: that even in that heaven where all are sinless, the redeemed will not be gazing self-complacently upon themselves, but will occupy themselves with Jesus. In heaven, as on earth, the saints will continue to look away from self, and be absorbed in the Saviour. Mrs. Cousin has given this idea beautifully in the hymn she has put into the mouth of Samuel Rutherfurd : "The bride eyes, not her garment, But her dear Bridegroom's face ; I will not gaze at glory, But on my King of grace : Not at the cross He giveth, But on His piercéd hand; The secret of sanctification is, then, as we have found, the outlook of the soul to the perfect Christ, as given to us in the mirror of Revelation. This outlook, by the Spirit's blessing, is made effectual in inducing in us a sense of sin and shortcoming, a deep penitence for the sinful and "common" character of our by-past lives, and an earnest resolve to follow our Lord's example in the matter of present consecration. This consecration is only approximate; it cannot be perfect, until, amid sinless conditions, we fully appreciate the Master's example; but we advance towards perfection daily, in the assurance that it is no impracticable ideal, but one which we shall reach at last. Patiently we advance, and at the last, life's long effort is crowned with perfect consecration when we exchange faith for beatific vision, and the Book for its Hero Himself. Progressive sanctification on earth, perfect consecration in heaven, this is the ethical programme of Christianity, and we have nothing to be compared with it in the ethics of the schools. ROB. M'CHEYNE EDGAR. Scotland rich in Antiquities. 643 ART. III.—Recent Contributions to the Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland. THE THE Scottish people ought to be a nation of antiquarians. For in whatever else it may be poor, Scotland is rich, surpassing rich in antiquities. The present Keeper of the National Museum of the Antiquaries of Scotland assures his countrymen that they are the possessors of a series of sculptured monuments, unique in their character and possessed of singular merit as works of art, constituting a wealth of material such as has not fallen to the lot of any other nation of Northern Europe. And this wealth, of which any nation might be proud, is not confined to prehistoric monuments. Scotland is rich in structural remains; rich in relics, such as books and bells, crosiers and reliquaries; rich in decorative metal work; rich in old carved woodwork. With all this store of structural, monumental, and artistic remains, have the people of Scotland displayed appreciation of its value-have Scottish antiquarians contributed largely to archæological literature? The verdict must be in the negative if the authorities in Scotland itself are to be the judges. Writing in the Quarterly Review for June 1849, Joseph Robertson has a heavy indictment to prefer against Scottish archæologists in the matter of architectural antiquities. He complains that little had been done in this department, and that what little had been accomplished was the work of strangers, of such an one, for example, as the Englishman Billings, of whose Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland twenty-seven parts had then been published; and he writes of "the callous North" as only "shamed into some kind of interest in the architectural monuments of its elder time," when her own Scott had begun to rekindle the decaying embers of nationality. As regards ecclesiastical remains in Scotland, Mr. Robertson affirms that at the date of his writing, the materials for even a meagre sketch are scanty and indigested, that Argyll is the only county the ecclesiology of which had been explored, while of the papers in which this was done, by a member of the Cambridge Camden Society, even the name was unknown to some of the best antiquaries of Edinburgh. As it was thirty-three years ago even so is it in our day, if we are to accept the finding of Joseph Anderson. In all his Rhind Lectures, but more especially in those of the second series, this accomplished archæologist complains bitterly of Scottish apathy and neglect in respect of the materials for the pursuit of his favourite science. The affluence of relics which his country possesses for the illustration of Celtic art and national history is left, he asserts, to decay and perish, scattered in neglected graveyards, unprotected and weather-beaten on lonely hillsides, built into dikes by roadsides, broken up as building materials or as macadamising for roads. Even with the schoolmaster abroad and a school-board in every parish, Dr. Anderson considers our education completely fails to show us the relation in which the ancient products of the culture and art of Scotland stand to the ripening culture of which they were the early blossom and far off promise; and he seems wellnigh to despair of a time ever coming when the weather-worn and wasting, the maltreated and mutilated remnants of Scottish antiquities will be gathered into the capital, and there, within the walls of the Antiquarian Museum, be so arranged and catalogued as to form a gallery of art materials in the country to which they are indigenous, although it would be an epoch in the history of art were such a gallery ever to be formed. When he comes to treat of the Ruthwell Cross, Dr. Anderson becomes pathetic over "its pitiable story." Surveying it demolished, broken, buried, restored and reconstructed by private enterprise, deciphered and demonstrated to be of national interest and importance, he supposes it would have fared better with this literary and historic monument had it been covered with Assyrian bilinguals or African hieroglyphics, for in that case, he sardonically conjectures, the chances are all in favour of its being acquired at great expense and brought to this country in triumph with much public rejoicing over its acquisition. Now, whatever force there may be in the representations of the Quarterly reviewer of 1849 regarding the state of matters in his day, we do think the lecturer of 1882 takes a pessimist view of things as they now are. Surely within the last thirty years a great advance has been made in Scottish archæology, and a large addition been made to the literature of the science. The "callous North" has become fervid; it is |