while
enjoyment is the gift of God and the fruit of conformity to his
law. To receive the instructions of Christ and obey them with the
whole heart, walking after his example, is to be quickened from
that deadly misery into this living blessedness. The inner life of
truth and goodness thus revealed and proposed to men, its personal
experience being once obtained, is an immortal possession, a
conscious fount springing up unto eternity through the beneficent
decree of the Father, to play forever in the light of his smile
and the shadow of his arm. Such are the great component elements
of the Christian doctrine of life and death, both present and
eternal.

The purely interior character of the genuine teachings of
Christianity on this subject is strikingly evident in the
foregoing epitome. The essential thing is simply that the hate
life of error and sin is inherent alienation from God, in slavery,
wretchedness, death; while the love life of truth and virtue is
inherent communion with God, in conscious freedom and blessedness.
Here pure Christianity leaves the subject, declaring this with
authority, but not pretending to clear up the mysteries or set
forth the details of the subject. Whatever in the New Testament
goes beyond this and meddles with minute external circumstances we
regard as a corrupt addition or mixture drawn from various Gentile
and Pharisaic sources and erroneously joined with the authentic
words of Christ. What we maintain in regard to the apostles and
the early Christians in general is not so much that they failed to
grasp the deep spiritual principles of the Master's teaching, not
that they were essentially in error, but that, while they held the
substance of the Savior's true thoughts, they also held additional
notions which were errors retained from their Pharisaic education
and only partially modified by their succeeding Christian culture,
a set of traditional and mechanical conceptions. These errors, we
repeat, concern not the heart and essence of ideas, but their form
and clothing. For instance, Christ teaches that there is a heaven
for the faithful; the apostles suppose that it is a located region
over the firmament. The dying Stephen said, "Behold, I see the
heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of
God." Again: Christ teaches that there is a banishment for the
wicked; the apostles suppose that it is into a located region
under the earth. In accordance with the theologica