PREDESTINATION.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 110, 11 May 1909, Page 4

PREDESTINATION.

o ADDRESS BY DR. HODGKIN. Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Hodgkin, Litt.D., -who is visiting the colonies, delivered an address on "Predestination," before the Conference of tho Society of Friends and the- interested public. The lecturer founded his dissertation on the text, "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained, that we should walk in them" (Eph. 11, 10). It could not be denied, began the speaker, that tho word Predestination and its cognate terms, Election and Reprobation, had lost much of the hold which they possessed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the minds of many Christian men. "I consider," said Dr. Hodgkin, "that it is now practically proved that -St. Paul, when he wrote the ■Epjstle to the Romans and Galatiana, was not speaking or thinking of the admittance to Heaven, or the damnation of Hell, of individual men or women, but of the choice of nations, preeminently of the Jewish nation, to be fellow-workers with God in the setting ud of 'His Kingdom upon earth, and of their reprobation when they failed to put their free-will afcngside of the foreordaining will of God, and to co-operate in iltjs gracious designs." If tho spiritual history of St. Paul were reviewed dispassionately, the speaker thought the undoubted difficulties which tho modern thinker finds in his writings woald disappear. When one- could look at Israel's election through the eyes of St. Paul, carried over by analogy some of the learned lessons of his bitter experience into the ecclesiastical questions of 10-day, one felt that there was not a word too much about Election and Predestination, and a load was lifted from the heart when one believed no thought ot the eternally pre-ordained damnation of individual fcouls ever crossed the mind of the great A-postle. The speaker emphasised on his aiidience that the nation which persistently refused to use the powers entrusted to it by God for tho purposes for which He designed them, became what St. Paul termed adokimos, O'- reprobate. Every true-hearted English patriot fhould very earnestly and constantly ask himself the question and .press it home to the hearts of his countrymen, "Are we falling in with the eternal counsels of God, who gave us this glorious nationality ; or are we, through sloth, or selfishness, or pride, or luxury, fairing short of our high calling, and in danger of being rejected?" To the mmd "of the speaker the thoxight of the human race, in the words* of Browning, as the tool-box of the 'Almighty, seemed more infinite, more helpful and truer than the old theological pchemes of Election and Damnation.

Mr. A. Warner, Stafford, N.Z,, writes : "A few months ago. while working in a store at Utikn, I had a severe attack of colic and diarrhoea. As I was steadily growing worse, I decided to try Chambeildin's Colii 1 , Cholera, and Dianhoca Remedy, and I was surprised to find that it only took a few doses 'to cure me. Since then I have never lost an opportunity to recommend it to any of my friends suffering from the same compiainL." — Advfc. Winter has come. So has Phosphol Emulsion— the finest cough euro of the centum. — Advt.