yi, land, ground, territory, the earth, as distinguished from the heavens. The sense is purely physical. (2) olcovyeévy, which is a participle, meaning inhabited, with yh, earth, understood, and signifies the earth as the abode of men; the whole inhab- ited world. See on Matt. xxiv. 14; Luke ii. 1. Also in a phys- ical sense, though used once of “the world to come” (Heb. ii. 5). (8) aiev, essentially time, as the condition under which all created things exist, and the measure of their existence: @ period of existence ; a lifetime ; a generation ; hence, a long space of time; an age, era, epoch, period of a dispensation. On this primary, physical sense there arises a secondary sense, viz., all that ewists in the world under the conditions of tume. From this again develops a more distinctly ethical sense, the course and current of this world’s affairs (compare the expres- sion, the times), and this course as corrupted by sin; hence the evil world. So Gal. i.4; 2 Cor. iv. 4. (4) «éopos, which follows a similar line of development from the physical to the ethical sense; meaning (a) ornament, arrangement, order (1 Pet. iii. 3); (b) the sum-total of the material universe considered as a system (Matt. xiii. 85; John xvii. 5; Acts xvii. 24; Philip. ii. 15). Compare Plato. ‘He who is incapable of commun- ion is also incapable of friendship. And philosophers tell us, Callicles, that communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heaven and earth and gods and men, and that this universe is therefore called Cosmos, or order, not disorder or misrule” (“ Gorgias,” 508). (c) That universe as the abode of man (John xvi. 21; 1 John iii. 17). (a) The sum-total of humanity in the world ; the human race (John i. 29; iv. 42). (e) In the ethical sense, the sum-total of human life in the ordered world, considered apart Srom, alien- ated from, and hostile to God, and of the earthly things which seduce from God (John vii. 7; xv. 18; xvii. 9, 14; 1 Cor. i. 20,21; 2 Cor. vii.10; Jas. iv. 4).
This word is characteristic of John, and pre-eminently in this last, ethical sense, in which it is rarely used by the Synoptists ; while John nowhere uses aiév of the moral order. In this latter sence the word is wholly strange to heathen literature, since the heathen world had no perception of the opposition between God