wicked in their prosperity, but to look to God as their portion ; they were led to say, " Whom have I in heaven but thee ? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee ; " and " I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness." In the Old Testament, the right- eous are always represented as strangers and pilgrims upon the earth, whose home and whose reward are not in this world ; that their portion is in another world, and, therefore, that it is better to be the humblest and most afflicted of God's people than to be the most prosperous of the wicked. The judgments of God are repre- sented as falling on the wicked in a future state, and thus effect- ually vindicating the justice of God in his dealings with men. The Psalmist said, he was envious at the foolish, when he saw the prosperity of the wicked, until he went into the sanctuary of God and understood their end. In contrasting his own state and
prospects with theirs, he said, " I am continually with thee
Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory." (Ps. lxxiii. 23, 24.) Such is the drift and spirit of the Old Testament Scriptures. Their whole tendency was to raise the thoughts of the people from the present and turn them towards the future ; to make men look not at the things seen, but at the things unseen and eternal.
4. The dead in the Old Testament are always spoken of as going to their fathers, as descending into " Sheol," i. e., into the invisible state, which the Greeks called Hades. Sheol is repre- sented as the general receptacle or abode of departed spirits, who were there in a state of consciousness ; some in a state of misery, others in a state of happiness. In all these points the pagan idea of Hades corresponds to the Scriptural idea of Sheol. All souls went into Hades, some dwelling in Tartarus, others in Elysium. That the Hebrews regarded the souls of the dead as retaining their consciousness and activity is obvious from the practice of necromancy, and is confirmed by the fact of the appearance of Samuel to Saul, as recorded in 1 Samuel xxviii. The represen- tation given in Isaiah xiv. of the descent of the King of Babylon, when all the dead rose to meet and to reproach him, takes for granted and authenticates the popular belief in the continued conscious existence of departed spirits.
5. In several passages of the Old Testament, the doctrine of a future life is clearly asserted. We know upon the authority of the New Testament that the Sixteenth Psalm is to be understood of the resurrection of Christ, with which, the Apostle teaches us,
718 PART IV. Ch. L- STATE OF SOUL AFTER DEATH.
that of his people is inseparably connected. His soul was not to be left in Sheol ; nor was his body to see corruption. In Psalm xvii. 15, after having described the cruelty and prosperity of the wicked, the Psalmist says, in regard to himself : " I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." Isaiah xxvi. 19, says : " Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust, for my dew is as the dew of herbs, ?*nd the earth shall cast out the dead." (Dan. xii. 2.) " And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake ; some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting con- tempt. And they that be wise, shall shine as the brightness of the firmament ; and they that turn many to righteous- ness, as the stars forever and ever." These prophetic declara- tions are indeed often explained as referring to the restoration of the nation from a state of depression to one of prosperity and glory. But the language employed, the context in which there is clear reference to the Messianic period, and the sanction given by Christ and his Apostles to the doctrine taught by the literal sense of the words here used, are considerations decisive in favour of the ordinary interpretation, which is adopted by Delitzsch,1 Hengstenberg,2 Oehler,8 and many others of the modern inter- preters. Even Mr. Alger, in his elaborate work on the doctrine of a future life, concedes the point so far as the passage in Daniel is concerned. u No one," he says, " can deny that a judgment, in which reward and punishment shall be distributed according to merit, is here clearly foretold."4 Those German writers whose views of inspiration are so low as to enable them to interpret each book of the Bible as the production of an individual mind, and to represent the several writers as teaching different doc- trines, in many cases take the ground that in the early books of the Scriptures, the simple fact of a future life is taken for granted, but not taught, and that nothing was made known as to the nature of that life. Thus Schultz says, " That all the books of
1 Commentar uber den Psalter, Leipzig, 1860, vol. ii. p. 420.
2 Commentar uber die Psalmen, Abhandlung No. 7. Berlin, 1847, vol. iv. part 2, p. 273 ff.
« Veteris Testamenti Sententta de Rebus post Mortem Futuris. G. F. Oehler, Stuttgart, 1846, p. 50.
< A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, with a Complete Bibliography of the Subject. By William Rounseville Alger. Philadelphia, 1846, p. 149. The Appendix, an instructive volume, being "A Catalogue of Works relating to the Nature, Origin, and Destiny of the Soul. The Titles classified and arranged chronologically, with Notes and Indexes of Authors and Subjects. By Ezra Abbot," is a marvel of ability and learning.