the Scriptures, and as we are not attempting to teach logic, we pass on to

the remaining subdivisions.

The fourth division of names is into those which are positive and those

which are negative.  It must be remembered that some names which are positive

in form are negative in reality, and vice versa.  The word 'unpleasant' is

negative in form, but positive in meaning, for it signifies positive

painfulness.  The word 'idle' is positive in form but negative in meaning.

We must be careful to distinguish negative names from privative* names.  True

negatives are expressed by the word 'not'.  A private name supposes the one -

time possession of an attribute now lost.  For example, the word 'blind' is

not a negative of 'seeing', for it suggests that, by reason of his class, the

sufferer whom the word describes did have, or should have, the faculty of

sight.  We could not call a tree or a stone 'blind' for this reason.

*

Privative = indicating lack or absence.

Relative and absolute names are the next division.  Such names as

'father' and 'son' are relative, not absolute.  Much of the evil teaching

that denies the Deity of Christ is due to failure to realize that the titles

'Father' and 'Son' are relative.  As a father a man is only as old as his

eldest child, although as a man he may be thirty years older.  This is true

wherever applied, if true at all, and God Himself could not bear the name of

'Father' until He had a 'Son' or a child.  Men continually attempt to

disprove the Deity of Christ by emphasizing the subordinate relations of Son

to Father, but such reasoning is false:

'A name is relative, when, being the name of one thing, its

signification cannot be explained but by mentioning another'.

God is self -existent, and, in His essence and absoluteness,

independent of creation or time.  It will be discovered that all we know of

God is relative, and our reasoning must, accordingly, be governed by this

limitation.  As in the case of the titles 'Father' and 'Son', so 'Jehovah',

'Elohim', 'Shaddai' are all relative, and do not comprehend absolute Deity,

of which we know nothing.

The last division of names is that of univocal and equivocal:

'A name is univocal, or applied univocally, with respect to all things

of which it can be predicated in the same sense; it is equivocal, or

applied equivocally, as respects those things of which it is predicated

in different senses'.

'"File", meaning a steel instrument, and "file" meaning a line

of soldiers, have no more title to be considered one word,

because written alike, than "grease" and "Greece" have, because

pronounced alike.  They are one sound appropriated to form two

different words'.

Some of our readers will be aware that while the fact of the existence

of 'two seeds' is maintained as a Scriptural doctrine, it is fatal to the

doctrine of universal reconciliation, whatever differences there may be as to

what constitutes these 'seeds'.  It is, therefore, clear that the advocates

of universal reconciliation must offer some explanation to account for

'Giants', the 'Rephaim' and other like beings mentioned in Scripture.