judgment of all who lived in the first age, and terminates with the
second death of those who had no part in the first resurrection. When
it is said of the Creator of heaven and earth, that He is "from
everlasting to everlasting" (_apo tou aionos meos tou aionos su ei_,
Ps. xc. 2), and that "He liveth for ever and ever" (_ho zon eis tous
aionas ton aionon_, Rev. x. 6), the word _aion_ is not used to signify,
as in the instances of the two "ages" just mentioned, an interval
having beginning and ending, but is to be taken in an abstract sense,
derived from our ordinary perception of the existence and quality of
time, and from the faculty which, as said before, we possess of
thinking of time as indefinitely extended. The first of the cited
passages affirms what in these days we should express by saying that
God is necessarily and essentially self-existent, and the other, what
we mean by saying that He is necessarily and essentially a _living_
God. But {98} Scripture uses no such terms as these, because it is
written on the principle of employing in an abstract sense only such
terms as are rendered intelligible by personal sensation and
observation, and by experience drawn under actual conditions from the
outer world. It is thus that the word "age" acquired its primary
meaning, before it was susceptible of the abstract application just
mentioned.

There is also to be said, as a reason for accepting this doctrine
respecting our relation to time, that Scripture teaches analogous
doctrine respecting our relation to _space_. When our Lord astonished
his disciples by saying that the passage of a camel through the eye of
a needle is not an impossibility, he explained that "this is impossible
with men, but not with God; for with God all things are possible" (Mark
x. 25-27). By this saying he asserted that space, and the mutual
relations of body and space, are such as they are by the will and power
of God, and by the same power might be changed. Considering,
therefore, that "the new heavens and the new earth" constitute a "new
creation," it is quite in accordance with the above inference from our
Lord's words to find it said of "the new Jerusalem, the holy city,"
that "the length, and the breadth, and the height of it are equal"
(Rev. xxi. 16). For a city to be such as to conform to this
description, it is plain that material substance and space must {99} be
related to each other in an entirely new manner, unrecognizable by