all that the passage in question clearly teaches. Men may doubt and differ as to what Christ did during the three days of his so- journ in the invisible world. They may differ as to who the spirits in prison were to whom he preached, or, rather, made proclamation (iKrjpv£ev) ; whether they were the antediluvians ; or, the souls of the people of God detained in Sheol ; or, the mass of the dead of all antecedent generations and of all nations, which is the favorite hypothesis of modern interpreters. They may differ also as to what the proclamation was which Christ made to those imprisoned spirits ; whether it was the gospel ; or his own tri- umph ; or deliverance from Sheol ; or the coming judgment. However these subordinate questions may be decided, all that remains certain is that Christ, after his death upon the cross, en- tered the invisible world, and there, in some way, made procla- mation of what He had done on earth. All this is very far from teaching the doctrine of a " Limbus Patrum," as taught by the Jews, the Fathers, or the Romanists.
It is a great mistake in interpretation of the New Testament, to bring down its teachings to the level of Jewish or Pagan ideas. Because the Jews expected the Messiah to establish an earthly kingdom, it is inferred that the kingdom of God, as proclaimed by Christ and his Apostles, was to be realized in this life. Be- cause they expected that the Messiah was to deliver the souls of their fathers from Sheol, it is assumed that this was the work ac- tually effected by Christ. Because the Jews regarded imprison- ment in the under-world as the special penalty of sin, it is inferred that deliverance from that imprisonment was the redemption our Lord actually effected. This is to interpret the Scriptures by the Talmud and Cabala, and not Scripture by Scripture. This is historical interpretation " en outre." It is true that Christ proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand; but his kingdom was not of this world. It is true that He came to open the prison doors and proclaim liberty to the captives ; but the prison was not Sheol, and the captives were not the souls of de- parted patriarchs. It is true that He came to redeem his people ; but the redemption which He effected was from the curse of God's violated law, and not deliverance from the gloomy land of Shades.
"We all know that the great evil with which the Apostles had to contend in the early Church, and the great source of corruption in the Church in after ages, was a Judaizing spirit. Most of the early Christians were Jews, and most of the converts from the Gentiles were proselytes imbued with Jewish doctrines. These
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738 PART IV. Ch. I. — STATE OF SOUL AFTER DEATH.
doctrines, moreover, were congenial with what the Apostle calls "the carnal mind." It is not wonderful, therefore, that they were transferred to the Christian Church, and proved in it a per- manently corrupting leaven. Modern critics are going back to the beginning, and doing in our day what the Judaizers did in the age of the Apostles. They are eliminating Christianity from the Gospel, and substituting Judaism, somewhat spiritualized, but still essentially Judaic.
It is notorious that the Jewish doctrines of the merit of works ; of the necessity and saving efficacy of external rites ; of a visible kingdom of Christ of splendour and worldly grandeur ; of an exter- nal church out of whose pale there is no salvation ; of the priestly character of the ministry ; and of a church hierarchy, soon began to spread among Christians, and at last became ascendant. This being the case it would be strange if the Jewish doctrine of Sheol, or of an intermediate state, had not been adopted by many of the fathers, together with the other elements of the corrupt Judaism of the apostolic age. We accordingly find that as the Jews, con- trary to the teaching of their own Scripture, held that the souls of those who died before the coming of the Messiah descended into Sheol, and there awaited the advent of the Redeemer, so the Christians began to believe, contrary to the teaching of their Scriptures, that the souls of believers at death, instead of passing into glory, are shut up in Hades, awaiting the second coming of Christ. It is true there were varying and inconsistent notions entertained of the nature of this intermediate state ; and the same is true also with regard to the views on this subject which long prevailed in the Church. There are two facts which stand out so plainly in the New Testament Scriptures that they could not be always overlooked or denied. The one is that Christ, forty days after his resurrection, ascended into heaven, and is now seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high. The other is that the souls of believers when absent from the body are present with the Lord. As many of the Jews, therefore, assumed that in Sheol there were two departments, Paradise and Gehenna, the one the abode of the righteous, the other of the wicked ; so the Chris- tians, in many cases, made the same distinction with regard to the intermediate state ; the souls of believers went to paradise ; the souls of the wicked into hell. And they often so exalted the blessedness *of the former as to make it a mere dispute about words whether they went to heaven or into an intermediate state. The real controversy, so far as any exists, is not as to whether