man with consolations and hopes that will cause him to triumph over death and the grave. Would the assurance, "To-day shalt thou be with me in the under-world" have produced this effect?. The early Christians also understood by paradise the region of perfect bliss. Tertullian held to the doctrine of an intermediate state, and yet he maintains that the martyrs, by reason of their preeminent piety, at death are taken at once to the abode of the blessed, which he calls paradise, and says that in this particular point they enjoyed an advantage over other Christians. (Hag. His. Doc. V. 1. S. 77.) Says Huidekoper: "That paradise was never located by the early Christians in the under-world, I should deem too obvious for argument, were not the contrary advanced in such a work as the doctrinal history of Crucius and Hase." The Assembly's Catechism quotes this passage, "To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise," in proof that the righteous shall at death "immediately pass into glory." Moreover, this dogma of an intermediate state, retaining the essential idea of a common receptacle for the souls of the departed, cannot be made to harmonize with numerous other declarations of the New Testament respecting the destination of the souls of the righteous and wicked at death. We refer especially to such passages as the following: "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Cor. v. 8). "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with. Christ, which is far better" (Phil. i. 21, 23). "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth" (Rev. xiv. 13). From henceforth, àπáρτi, from now on, from the present instant. Now we submit it: Is it not the natural and almost irresistible sense of this language, that the moment of death, with the righteous, is the moment of his introduction into heaven? Do not such declarations sustain the conclusion: "At death the souls of the righteous, being made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies." So, also, we believe the doctrine of the New Testament to be, that at death "the souls of unbelievers are cast into hell, where they remain in torment and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the last day." This seems to us the unavoidable inference from such scriptures as the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke xvi.), and the passage in Jude v. 6, 7. Now, whatever may be our theory respecting the time when the soul is to be clothed with its resurrection body, although we may think that, in the case of a large majority of our race, it will not be until a period long after death, yet we have no reason to suppose the reception of the body will change the place of the departed, or essentially change their state. The scriptures, indeed, do not necessarily imply that the glorified body will not be the instrument of enhancing the bliss of the righteous. No more do we understand them to teach that the moment of the resurrection, whenever it may be, will mark the cessation of the saints' progress in knowledge and joy. The inspiring and, as we believe, the scriptural view is, that the saint, at death, enters upon an endless career of development and attainment; that his course is from strength to strength, from glory to glory, forever; that the child of God, in the circling ages of eternity, may, in knowledge and blessedness, pass the limit at which Gabriel has now ar rived, ever approximating, but never reaching, the Infinite. We are prompted to ask, why call the interval between death and the resurrection, whatever that interval may be, an intermediate place or state, any more than the interval between the resurrection and the point at which Gabriel now stands? We might adduce still other arguments in favor of the belief that the place and state of the good and bad, immediately after death, will be essentially the same as their ultimate place and state. But we trust we have established our point, that to interpret this passage in favor of the dogma of an intermediate state, a common repository of the dead, is to oppose the general drift and scope of the teachings of the New Testament. Nor, again, can we - believe the Apostle uses this language by accommodation,— that he panders to the mistaken notions of those whom he addresses; for the moment we do this, we transfer the standard of truth and error from the pages of revelation to our own minds; we bend the Bible to our own opinions and judgments, when we should conform our opinions to the Bible. Indeed, we become, to all intents and purposes, infidels, and open the door to an entirely unrestrained liberty with the Divine Word. Sad havoc are the abettors of this theory of accommodation making of the most important truths of scripture. "The doctrines of the Trinity, of the divine Sonship of the Messiah, of the Atonement, of the personality of the Holy Spirit, of a corporeal resurrection, and of a final judgment, have all been swept away by them, and even the idea of Christianity being, in any peculiar sense, a revelation from heaven, has been sometimes represented merely as a mode of speech suited to the time of its appearance." (Fair. Her. Man.) We are to remember Peter was an inspired teacher. It was not his mission to please men, and fall in with and confirm their false opinions and beliefs, but rather to instruct them, and guide them into the truth. Can we believe, then, Peter would have contributed to uphold and confirm in the minds of men so great an error as the dogma of a common underground repository of the dead? The words of Dean Trench, although originally applied to another point, are of exact appropriateness here: "For this error, if it was an error, was so little an innocuous one, that might have been safely left to drop naturally away, was, on the contrary, one which reached so far in its consequences, entwined its roots so deeply among the very ground truths of religion, that it could never have been suffered to remain at the hazard of all the misgrowths which it must needs have occasioned." We cannot, therefore, think this text favors the idea of the local descent of Christ's spirit to a subterranean realm, the temporary abode of the departed. In addition to the scriptural objections to this theory, we might, did our limits allow, refer to the metaphysical one, arising from a consid eration of the relation of spirit to space. The fundamental idea of the theory looks like a relic of heathenism, which, through ignorance or sectarian bias, as is the case with many other heathenish notions, has been foisted into the scriptures. The great prevalence of this dogma, and the fact that, at the present time, it seems to be gaining new adherents, especially from the advocates of a probationary state after death, have compelled us to go into such an extended discussion of it as leaves us little space for other interpretations. The gist only of one or two more prominent interpretations will we give. (2.) One of these is that which regards "the spirits in prison" as sinful men righteously condemned, the slaves and captives of satan, shackled with the fetters of sin, and cites in justification Isa. xlii. 6, 7: "I the Lord have called thee.. to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house." Christ's being "quickened in spirit" is taken to mean, that in consequence of his penal, vicarious, and expiatory sufferings. denoted by "put to death in flesh," he became spiritually alive and powerful, in a sense and to a degree in which he was not previously, and in which but for these sufferings he never could have become, full of life to communicate to dead souls, "mighty to save." Or as others express the same idea, Christ was quickened in reference to his great work, the salvation of mankind; quickened as to that efficacious agency by which this work was to be carried forward; an agency by which Christ made himself to be felt among men in his power to save; an agency which diffused new and mighty life through his body, the church, and, by means of his church thus vitalized, throughout the world. In the spirit, thus understood, he was straitened before his death, according to his own complaint (Luke xii. 50). After his death he was quickened; life flowed from him, filling his church with vitality, agreeably to his own forcible illustration (Jno. xii. 24): "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit"; agreeably also to his prediction (Jno. xii. 32): "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." The going and preaching of Christ, according to this scheme, describe not what our Lord did bodily (σαρκικῶς or σωματικώς), but what he did spiritually (πveνμatikŵs), not what he did personally, but what he did by the instrumentality of others. The preaching of Paul and the Apostles and of all their successors, all preaching addressed to sinners is the preaching of Christ to spirits in prison. Whatever Christ's disciples do in the discharge of their great commission, it is not they, but Christ by them. This interpretation is, for substance, adopted by Bishop Leighton, and many other expositors, and is advocated by Professor Brown of Edinburgh, in an Article of the Bib. Sac. for Nov. 1847. Of this scheme we remark: It is in many respects plausible, and it displays much ingenuity. Indeed, it is ingenious to a fault. So far as it relates to the phrase, "quickened in spirit," we adopt it as the true explanation, fully sustained by other passages of Scripture. But to make τοῖς πνεύμασι ἐν φυλακῇ (the spirits in prison), mean sinful men, seems to us unnatural, and by no means justified by the texts cited in its support, or by any texts which can be cited. That "prison" and "prisoners" in the passage of Isaiah referred to have a metaphorical sense, meaning spiritual captivity, and spiritually captive men, we have no doubt. But this is rather the usus loquendi of the Old than the New Testament. Sinners in the New Testament are called with great force servants, slaves, bondmen, but not prisoners. Their condition is described as servitude rather than imprisonment. Besides, we are not aware that the word veúμaσi (spirits) can be employed to designate men in the body. The result of our investigations is that this term invariably denotes disembodied spirits, or the spirit in distinction from the body. Nor, again, will the context allow us to understand by "spirits in prison," sinners of a time subsequent to the Christian Era. In the Greek a simple comma separates the 19th and 20th verses, and we should read: "In which spirit, he going, preached unto the |