has thus added another inexplicable phenomenon to the mystery of their original creation. Sin has appeared. Responsible creatures have become rebels against the law of Him from whom their responsibility was derived. The stream which, in the creating act, was seen to issue from impenetrable recesses, here resumes its subterranean channel, and when it reappears, has become strangely altered.
There is a third evolution of the mystery which pervades theology. God Himself has spoken to us of an extraordinary plan of restoration, of which the operation becomes apparent to us when the "alienated" are "reconciled." The created agent had carried his responsibility through the course of the original estrangement, and his responsibility is continued through the subsequent course of restoration. Yet the subjective process of estrangement commences with his birth, and the subjective process of reunion is conducted by the present living agency of the Holy Spirit. The phenomena of restoration in the spiritual world, displayed in the Church of God, thus, like the two preceding classes of related phenomena, rise out of a region into which the eye of the human understanding cannot penetrate.
A series of strange facts is unfolded in the history of this corner of the universe. Creation, sin, and salvation—the unfallen, the fallen, and the restored moral creature—are revealed to us in events which we may know, while each seems to emerge directly from an abyss whose depths we cannot fathom. Their appearance has been the signal for those controversies of theologians which
