(c) In the Pauline writings the most conservative exegesis reads a clear declaration of the Divine purpose that all men shall be saved, but denies that any certain hope as to the final issue can be built upon the fact. Here many will naturally diverge in judgment, and feel that they can raise their hope so securely nowhere else as upon the expressed purpose and will of God (Ro IP^, 1 Ti 23-4, cf. 2 P 39). When once the holy ivill of the Father, in its might and energy and Divine per- sistence, is realized, the Christian man may at least 'rest in hope' of an issue beyond our farthest vision. Martensen (Christian Dogmatics, Eng. tr. 474-484) is a type of those who regard Scripture as presenting two sides of the truth respecting future destiny which are at present unreconcilable ; but the antinomy which no doubt exists will largely disappear if the process of development in Apostolic and especially in Pauline thought be allowed for. In his earlier Epistles (1 and 2 Thess.), St. Paul is largely influenced by the apocalyptic ideas of traditional Judaism (1 Th 415-", 2 Th 2^-'">). But in the later stages of his writing a larger conception of the Divine purpose begins to find expression. In Ro 8^9 lie anticipates a glorious ' revelation of the sons of God' — and in IP^ he expresses the widest design in the Divine mind, determining all the mysterious process of redemption, as ' that he might have mercy upon all.' And, as' his thought matures, his hope expands under an enlarged sense of the central position of the ever-living
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Christ in this world and in all worlds, and under his feeling of the larger spaces in the Divine pur- pose and working — the 'ages upon ages' (Eph 2"^ 32'). In Col I"'- '^ the Son is declared to be the creator of all things visible and invisible. All things {to. TTCiVTa) find their cohesive principle in Him (avv^crrriKev), and their final consummation (eis avTov). In Eph 1'" He is the Head of all, in which the whole creative and redeeming process is to be summed upfdcafce^aXaioicraa-^at Tairdvra ev rip Xpioro;), and in Ph 2'" His is the Name at which the whole created universe is to bow with undivided acclama- tion. In Col 1'-" the blessings of redemption are extended to the whole system of things (cf. Eph r^'-2-), on which Toy {Judaism and Christianity, pp. 407-408) says : ' If we are to see here the con- ception of a final reconciliation between God and His creatures, a blotting out of evil in the sense that it shall be transformed into good, a complete harmonizing of the universe so that neither angel nor man shall be found to set himself .against the Divine etiiical order, then we must hold this view to spring out of a philosophical thought which does not find support elsewhere in the NT, and which did not afterward meet with wide approval in the Church.' And though this may be conceded, and though we must not be blind to the fact that the issues thus gloriously expressed were not fully thought out by the Apostle or applied to the ques- tion of Restoration, yet, based as they are upon the Person of Christ and supplemented by the principles of His teaching and revelation, they may be taken to express a sober and restrained hope- fulness for the ultimate issue, which shall never for a moment be suffered to lessen the evangelic urgency that ' Now is the accepted time ; now is the day of salvation ' (2 Co 6^).
The hope of a final completion of the Divine purpose in the restoration from sin's dominion of all mankind must derive much of its force from a contemplation of the alternatives ; from the diffi- culty of supposing a Divine purpose and will eternally active yet never attaining to its desire, or of conceiving of any human soul as eternally incapable of responding to the all-pervasive Love of God, or of thinking of any eternal felicity of the blessed which can be undisturbed by the know- ledge of living souls abiding in a hopeless doom. Alleviations of the idea of eternal punishment such as that of ' Conditional Immortality ' ott'end almost equally against the fundamental instincts of the human heart, which cannot think that the All- wise and All-loving has created any soul in His own image to prove but a waste and an abortion.
' Which else He made in vain — which must not be ! '
Such thoughts are in the human intuition, and
they are based upon the nature of God as made
known to us in Christ Jesus, and upon the eternal
Personality of Him ' who was dead, and is alive for
evermore ; and hath the keys of death and the
unseen Avorld ' (Rev P*). They are reinforced by
the human love for its own kind, which at its
highest finds voice in Browning {Saul) :
' Would I fain in my impotent yearninpr do all for thia man, And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?'
And on these rests the conviction that 'faith in the exceeding grandeur of reality shall never be confounded ' (Sir O. Lodge, Life and flatter).