It is that inner change of mind which rests on sorrow for sin and will issue in a better life, but which is, in itself, simply "a coming to ourselves."

The New Testament word which expresses the change of life into which paravota eventuates is noτpog, translated in the English version by "conversion." The noun occurs but once, Acts xv. 3, where Paul and Barnabas declare the "conversion," the "turning to [God]" of the Gentiles; but the corresponding verb is tolerably frequent. Its relation to ustavośw may be gathered from a passage in Luke, which has already been quoted (xvii. 4). Our Saviour, in commanding forgiveness of an injuring brother, says, "Even if seven times a day he sin against thee, and seven times turn (noτpén) saying, 'I repent' (peravo@), thou shalt forgive him." Here the change of mind in the peravo is the ground of the turning to the injured brother. The same relation holds good of repentance in its fullest technical sense, as Acts iii. 17 may advise us, "Repent ye, therefore, and turn." Perhaps this is made even plainer in Acts xxvi. 20, where Paul declares that his whole ministry had been one long summons to men "to repent, and to turn to God by doing works worthy of repentance," if we may so resolve the participle. As, according to Luke iii. 8, "doing works worthy of repentance" is the fruit of repentance, so here toτpoyń, which is identified with the former, is represented as its fruit. The external character of this turning is perhaps illustrated by its relation to faith. The order is μετάνοια and faith, but faith and ἐπιστροφή. We read, "Repent and believe in the gospel" (Mark i. 15; cf. Matt. xxi. 32), but "believe and turn to the Lord" (Acts xi. 21). We need not press such phraseology beyond its capacity for bearing, but it seems at least to suggest the order μετάνοια, πίστις, ἐπιστροφή; that there is first a change within, then faith, and then a corresponding change without. In any event, we must set over against perάvota as the inward word its complement in entorpor as an outward word, denoting the changed course of life; àvarpocy standing for the course of life itself, àño-poçt, as in the LXX. of Isaiah xxx. 15, for that course of life as turned away from evil, and no-рogy for that course of life as turned unto God.

All this, now, is man's work. Men are exhorted both to μstávola and to enis-pogy: men are commanded to change their minds and their lives. Nevertheless, távota is declared to be the gift of God; Christ gives it to Israel (Acts v. 31); God to the Gentiles (Acts xi. 18); and he may give it in his grace even to those who are now opposing

his ministers (2 Tim. ii. 25). This already advertises that there is a divine side to the change described by these words, and leads us to its consideration.

II. As has been already intimated, the divine side of man's change is designated in the New Testament by a group of words which represent it as a renewing, a rebegetting, a quickening, a resurrection, and even as a re-creating of him. The Greeks had a word for " renewing," àvazawiw; but this occurs only once in the New Testament, and then apparently in a literal sense (Heb. vi. 6). Instead of it, Paul uses a cognate term, which he may have coined, àvazanów. This is once used in a quasi-literal sense, in 2 Cor. iv. 16, where Paul speaks of his outer man as being worn away by his sufferings, while his inner man is renewed daily; i. e., apparently given ever new strength and vigor. Elsewhere the verb, its derivative noun, and its cognate avavsów, are used in the full spiritual sense of renewal. We learn that this renewal takes place in the mind (Eph. iv. 23; Rom. xii. 2); that it eventuates in knowledge (Col. iii. 10); and that it is brought about by the action of the Holy Ghost (Titus iii. 5), but not so as men may not be exhorted to secure it (Eph. iv. 23; Rom. xii. 2). There is thus a synergism of the Holy Spirit as efficient agent and man in his own efforts to the production of an internal effect. The result is, in the highest sense of the term, a new man (Col. iii. 10), which we are on the one hand exhorted to put on after having put off the old man, and on the other hand told is created by God in righteousness and true holiness (Eph. iv. 24, and Col. iii. 10). In virtue of the latter fact, he is called a "new creation" (Gal. vi. 15; 2 Cor. v. 7), with reference to whom old things are passed away and all things have become new (2 Cor. v. 17). It is clear that in these representations we are dealing with a somewhat wide conception 1 -a conception which from the divine side correllates in general with peravota from the human. Both represent a complete inner change, which is the result of the co-activity of man and God, and which issues in a new life. But in the terms now before us we are made aware of how great a part the divine element plays in working this change, and that at some point in the line of its activity it is nothing less than cre ative in its potency, securing that the product is not only new, but a new creation.

In harmony with this idea of renewal the New Testament writers

'The dogmaticians recognize the breadth of the idea of "renewal." See Dr. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, III., 217, and Dr. W. Lindsay Alexander, Biblical Theology, II., 429.

make use of other terms, which describe God's act as a restoring of man to life. Thus both John and Paul employ the term oootedy in this connection. Parallel with it, the term "resurrection" is used in the same sense; for the quickening is always a quickening of what has died, and is therefore a revivification. It is along with Christ that we are made alive or raised again from our death in sin, and the conception seems to be that of reviving dead powers of well-doing within us consequent upon our union with him. His work furnishes the meritorious ground of our quickening, so that it is only as that work is made ours that his dying may be at the same time our dying, and his rising again our revival unto good works (2 Cor. v. 14, et seq.; Rom. vi. 8, et seq.). Faith is, therefore, the condition of our reception of life (Gal. iii. 22). No man can quicken himself; this is a thing the law is incapable of, and hence no good deed can obtain it for us (Gal. iii. 21). It is the Holy Ghost who is the efficient agent in the work (2 Cor. iii. 6; John vi. 63), but only as the efficient of the Father's will (Rom. viii. 11). Who are quickened is sovereignly determined by the Son (John v. 21); and the power involved in the act is the almighty power of God, such as was exerted in raising Christ from the dead (Eph. i. 20); for we were dead in trespasses and sins, and it is God who has quickened us and raised us up together with Christ (Eph. ii. 5, 6). Accordingly, again, we are even said to be "created" anew by God in this great change. The new man, which we are exhorted to put on, is not one which we can frame by our own powers, but one created by God in righteousness and holiness springing from the truth (Eph. iv. 24). And so little do we make for ourselves the change of life that is required of us by doing good works, that our salvation is in no sense the product of our acts, but as saved souls we are the workmanship, the made-product (zoiqua) of God, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God has afore prepared that we should walk in them (Eph. ii. 10). Thus along this line of advance also we come to see the Christian as a new creation (2 Cor. v. 17), in so radical a sense that the old things are gone, and all things have become new.

This repristination of man is given further expression under the figure of "regeneration," and that primarily in such a way as to emphasize the initial stages of "renewal." We have been rebegotten, says Peter (1 Pet. i. 3, 23), not out of corruptible seed, but incorruptible, by means of the word of the living and enduring God,' who has begotten us unto a living hope by means of the resurrection of Jesus

Christ from the dead. Here is a renewal of which the efficient agent is God, the means his word, including the proclamation of the resurrection of Christ, and the result, the awakening in the soul of the graces of the Christian life, hope and love. Again we are looking at the divine act in the gift of ueravota, and are made pointedly aware of the intensity of the divine action necessary to its gift by its comparison to a rebegetting, issuing in a new birth. Hence we become the children of God, God's sons--a prevailingly Pauline locution (Rom. viii. 14, 19; ix. 26; 2 Cor. vi. 18; Gal. iii. 26; iv. 6, 7,)-by the inner operation of the Spirit and the exercise of faith. We learn most of this divine sonship, however, in the aspect in which it is now before us, from the writings of John.' We are told that it is the result of a true begetting from God, independent of the activity of the human will, "not from blood, nor from the will of the flesh, nor from the will of man, but from God" (John i. 13; cf. 1 John iii. 9). It is the indispensable condition, not only of doing righteousness (1 John ii. 29), but also of the birth of Christian love (1 John iv. 7), and even of faith in Christ (1 John v. 1,) in the heart; while, on the other hand, it inevitably produces in its recipient righteous conduct (1 John iii. 9; v. 18), and the overcoming of the world through faith (1 John v. 4). In the conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus himself reveals to us the essential nature of the new birth. It is the indispensable prerequisite to entrance into the kingdom of God (John iii. 5), without which no one can "see" that kingdom (John iii. 3). Its source is defined as "water and the Spirit" (John iii. 5), by which is perhaps meant, not "baptism and the Holy Ghost," but the Holy Spirit in his purifying activities symbolized by water. It eventuates in the spiritualizing of our antecedently fleshly nature, so that, as born of the Spirit, we are no longer flesh, but spirit (John iii. 6). And its advent upon the soul is unobserved, its process inscrutable, and its reality only to be known as an inference from its effects; it is like the wind, of which we know nothing, except lo! it is here! (John iii. 8.) It is very evident that in these statements we are brought much nearer to an understanding of how God gives us that change of mind and heart which, on the human side, we call petávota, and on the divine, broadly, "renewal." No doubt he is active all through the process-the passages before considered leave no room to doubt that but clearly he is active in an especial way at its inception; and it is the character of his activity here which gives most fully to the process the right to be called a new birth, a regeneration, and

1 Cf. Candlish, Fatherhood of God, (ed. 5, 1870,) pp 151, et seq.

the product the right to be called a son of God. Paul does not use the phrase revvá vode, which John so fully explains by the record of Christ's conversation with Nicodemus, nor yet Peter's cognate term dvayswáo; but in one place he employs a somewhat similar term, aireventa, in the phrase, "Not out of works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy he saves us, by means of the washing of regeneration and renewing from the Holy Ghost" (Titus iii. 5). As the word occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, it is impossible confidently to fix its exact shade of meaning. But whether it refers to the initiation or to the whole course of renewal, it at least emphasizes God's hand in man's great change to the exclusion of man's. That we are saved does not spring out of our works done in righteousness. It is a matter of mercy, of grace, of the rich outpouring of the Holy Spirit, whose work is an again-begetting and a renewal.

If now we bring these results together in recapitulation, it is plain that avazai wars expresses both a broad and a radical process; it is broad enough to cover the whole process of our inner renewing, inclusive of what we now technically speak of as regeneration, conversion and sanctification, all of which it ascribes to God; and it is radical enough to represent this process as resulting in a totally new creature, full of good works. Avayevjots is narrower, but no less radical; it apparently includes only the opening stages of avazatvwats, inclusive of what we now should call regeneration and conversion, which it represents as a work of God begetting us into a new conscious life by the word, "of his own will bringing us forth by the word of truth" (James i. 18). It is thus a sovereign act, as well as an efficacious one. It is also a composite act, including an action on the soul and an action of the soul. John's record of our Lord's discourse to Nicodemus cuts to the roots here, and analyzes this composite act still further, speaking of the originating act of the new birth, separate even from its first conscious results, as an action on the soul prerequisite to its own holy activity, a direct and sovereign and inscrutable act of the Spirit as the precondition of the influence of the word.

The scriptural phraseology thus lays before us as its account of man's great change a process, and a process which has two sides. It is on the one side a change of heart and mind issuing in a new life. It is on the other a renewing from on high issuing in a new creation. There is thus a true synergism indicated. Man works out his own salavation with fear and trembling, knowing it is God who is working