VI. CHRIST'S TEACHINGS CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE…

VI. CHRIST'S TEACHINGS CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE

IN approaching the teachings of the Savior himself concerning the future fate of man, we should throw off the weight of creeds and prejudices, and, by the aid of all the appliances in our power, endeavor to reach beneath the imagery and unessential particulars of his instructions to learn their bare significance in truth. This is made difficult by the singular perversions his religion has undergone; by the loss of a complete knowledge of the peculiarities of the Messianic age in the lapse of the ages since; by the almost universal change in our associations, modes of feeling and thought, and styles of speech; and by the gradual accretion and hardening of false doctrines and sectarian biases and wilfulness. As we examine the words of Christ to find their real meaning, there are four prominent considerations to be especially weighed and borne in mind.

First, we must not forget the poetic Eastern style common to the Jewish prophets; their symbolic enunciations in bold figures of speech: "I am the door;" "I am the bread of life;" "I am the vine;" "My sheep hear my voice;" "If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." This daring emblematic language was natural to the Oriental nations; and the Bible is full of it. Is the overthrow of a country foretold? It is not said, "Babylon shall be destroyed," but "The sun shall be darkened at his going forth, the moon shall be as blood, the stars shall fall from heaven, and the earth shall stagger to and fro as a drunken man." If we would truly understand Christ's declarations, we must not overlook the characteristics of figurative language. For "he spake to the multitude in parables, and without a parable spake he not unto them;" and a parable, of course, is not to be taken literally, but holds a latent sense and purpose which are to be sought out. The greatest injustice is done to the teachings of Christ when his words are studied as those of a dry scholastic, a metaphysical moralist, not as those of a profound poet, a master in the spiritual realm.

Secondly, we must remember that we have but fragmentary reports of a small part of the teachings of Christ. He was engaged in the active prosecution of his mission probably about three years, at the shortest over one year; while all the different words of his recorded in the New Testament would not occupy more than five hours. Only a little fraction of what he said has been transmitted to us; and though this part may contain the essence of the whole, yet it must naturally in some instances be obscure and difficult of apprehension. We must therefore compare different passages with each other, carefully probe them all, and explain, so far as possible, those whose meaning is recondite by those whose meaning is obvious. Some persons may be surprised to think that we have but a small portion of the sayings of Jesus. The fact, however, is unquestionable. And perhaps there is no more reason that we should have a full report of his words than there is that we should have a complete account of his doings; and the evangelist declares, "There are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should every one be written, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books."

Thirdly, when examining the instructions of Jesus, we should recollect that he adopted, and applied to himself and to his kingdom, the common Jewish phraseology concerning the Messiah and the events that were expected to attend his advent and reign. But he did not take up these phrases in the perverted sense held in the corrupt opinions and earthly hopes of the Jews: he used them spiritually, in the sense which accorded with the true Messianic dispensation as it was arranged in the forecasting providence of God. No investigation of the New Testament should be unaccompanied by an observance of the fundamental rule of interpretation, namely, that the strident of a book, especially of an ancient, obscure, and fragmentary book, should imbue himself as thoroughly as he can with the knowledge and spirit of the opinions, events, influences, circumstances, of the time when the document was written, and of the persons who wrote it. The inquirer must be equipped for his task by a mastery of the Rabbinism of Gamaliel, at whose feet Paul was brought up; for the Jewish mind of that age was filled, and its religious language directed, by this Rabbinism. Guided by this principle, furnished with the necessary information, in the helpful light of the best results of modern critical scholarship, we shall be able to explain many dark texts, and to satisfy ourselves, at least in a degree, as to the genuine substance of Christ's declarations touching the future destinies of men.

Finally, he who studies the New Testament with patient thoroughness and with honest sharpness will arrive at a distinction most important to be made and to be kept in view, namely, a distinction between the real meaning of Christ's words in his own mind and the actual meaning understood in them by his auditors and reporters.1 Here we approach a most delicate and vital point, hitherto too little noticed, but destined yet to become prominent and fruitful. A large number of religious phrases were in common use among the Jews at the time of Jesus. He adopted them, but infused into them a deeper, a correct meaning, as Copernicus did into the old astronomic formulas. But the bystanders who listened to his discourses, hearing the familiar terms, seized the familiar meaning, and erroneously attributed it to him. It is certain that the Savior was often misunderstood and often not understood at all. When he declared himself the Messiah, the people would have made him a king by force! Even the apostles frequently grossly failed to appreciate his spirit and aims, wrenched unwarrantable inferences from his words, and quarrelled for the precedency in his coming kingdom and for seats at his right hand. In numerous cases it is glaringly plain that his ideas were far from their conceptions of them. We have no doubt the same was true in many other instances where it is not so clear. He repeatedly reproves them for folly and slowness because they did not perceive the sense of his instructions. Perhaps there was a slight impatience in his tones when he said, "How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?" Jesus uttered in established phrases new and profoundly spiritual thoughts. The apostles educated in, and full of, as they evidently were, the dogmas, prejudices, and

1 See this distinction affirmed by De Wette, in the preface to his Commentatio de Morte Jesus Christi Expiatoria. See also Thurn, Jesus und seine Apostel in Widerspruch in Ansehung der Lehre von der Ewigcn Verdamnniss. In Scherer's Schriftforsch. sect. i. nr. 4.

hopes of their age and land would naturally, to some extent, misapprehend his meaning. Then, after a tumultuous interval, writing out his instructions from memory, how perfectly natural that their own convictions and sentiments would have a powerful influence in modifying and shaping the animus and the verbal expressions in their reports! Under the circumstances, that we should now possess the very equivalents of his words with strict literalness, and conveying his very intentions perfectly translated from the Aramaan into the Greek tongue, would imply the most sustained and amazing of all miracles. There is nothing whatever that indicates any such miraculous intervention. There is nothing to discredit the fair presumption that the writers were left to their own abilities, under the inspiration of an earnest consecrating love and truthfulness. And we must, with due limitations, distinguish between the original words and conscious meaning of the sublime Master, illustrated by the emphasis and discrimination of his looks, tones, and gestures, and the apprehended meaning recorded long afterwards, shaped and colored by passing through the minds and pens of the sometimes dissentient and always imperfect disciples. He once declared to them, "I have many things to say unto you, but ye are not able to bear them." Admitting his infallibility, as we may, yet asserting their fallibility, as we must, and accompanied, too, as his words now are by many very obscuring circumstances, it is extremely difficult to lay the hand on discriminated texts and say, "[non ASCII characters]"

The Messianic doctrine prevalent among the Jews in the time of Jesus appears to have been built up little by little, by religious faith, national pride, and priestly desire, out of literal interpretations of figurative prophecy, and Cabalistic interpretations of plain language, and Rabbinical traditions and speculations, additionally corrupted in some particulars by intercourse with the Persians. Under all this was a central spiritual germ of a Divine promise and plan. A Messiah was really to come. It was in answering the questions, what kind of a king he was to be, and over what sort of a kingdom he was to reign, that the errors crept in. The Messianic conceptions which have come down to us through the Prophets, the Targums, incidental allusions in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the few other traditions and records yet in existence, are very diverse and sometimes contradictory. They agreed in ardently looking for an earthly sovereign in the Messiah, one who would rise up in the line of David and by the power of Jehovah deliver his people, punish their enemies, subdue the world to his sceptre, and reign with Divine auspices of beneficence and splendor. They also expected that then a portion of the dead would rise from the under world and assume their bodies again, to participate in the triumphs and blessings of his earthly kingdom. His personal reign in Judea was what they usually meant by the phrases "the kingdom of heaven," "the kingdom of God." The apostles cherished these ideas, and expressed them in the terms common to their countrymen. But we cannot doubt that Jesus employed this and kindred language in a purer and deeper sense, which we must take pains to distinguish from the early and lingering errors associated with it.

Upon the threshold of our subject we meet with predictions of a second coming of Christ from heaven, with power and glory, to sit on his throne and judge the world. The portentous imagery in which these prophecies are clothed is taken from the old prophets; and to them

we must turn to learn its usage and force. The Hebrews called any signal manifestation of power especially any dreadful calamity a coming of the Lord. It was a coming of Jehovah when his vengeance strewed the ground with the corpses of Sennacherib's host; when its storm swept Jerusalem as with fire, and bore Israel into bondage; when its sword came down upon Idumea and was bathed in blood upon Edom. "The day of the Lord" is another term of precisely similar import. It occurs in the Old Testament about fifteen times. In every instance it means some mighty manifestation of God's power in calamity. These occasions are pictured forth with the most astounding figures of speech. Isaiah describes the approaching destruction of Babylon in these terms: "The stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall give no light; the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not shine, the heavens shall shake, and the earth shall remove out of her place and be as a frightened sheep that no man taketh up." The Jews expected that the coming of the Messiah would be preceded by many fearful woes, in the midst of which he would appear with peerless pomp and might. The day of his coming they named emphatically the day of the Lord. Jesus actually appeared, not, as they expected, a warrior travelling in the greatness of his strength, with dyed garments from Bozrah, staining his raiment with blood as he trampled in the wine vat of vengeance, but the true Messiah, God's foreordained and anointed Son, despised and rejected of men, bringing good tidings, publishing peace. It must have been impossible for the Jews to receive such a Messiah without explanations. Those few who became converts apprehended his Messianic language, at least to some extent, in the sense which previously occupied their minds. He knew that often he was not understood; and he frequently said to his followers, "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." His disciples once asked him, "What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" He replied, substantially, "There shall be wars, famines, and unheard of trials; and immediately after the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with great power. And he shall sit upon the throne of his glory, and all nations shall be gathered before him, and he shall separate them one from another." That this language was understood by the evangelists and the early Christians, in accordance with their Pharisaic notions, as teaching literally a physical reappearance of Christ on the earth, a resurrection, and a general judgment, we fully believe. Those ideas were prevalent at the time, are expressed in scores of places in the New Testament, and are the direct strong assertion of the words themselves. But that such was the meaning of Christ himself we much more than doubt.

In the first place, in his own language in regard to his second coming there is not the least hint of a resurrection of the dead: the scene is confined to the living, and to the earth. Secondly, the figures which he employs in this connection are the same as those used by the Jewish prophets to denote great and signal events on the earth, and may be so taken here without violence to the idiom. Thirdly, he expressly fixed the date of the events he referred to within that generation; and if, therefore, he spoke literally, he was grossly in error, and his prophecies failed of fulfilment, a conclusion which we cannot adopt. To suppose that he partook in the false, mechanical dogmas of the carnal Jews would be equally irreconcilable with the common idea of his Divine inspiration, and with the profound penetration and spirituality of his own mind.

He certainly used much of the phraseology of his contemporary countrymen, metaphorically, to convey his own purer thoughts. We have no doubt he did so in regard to the descriptions of his second coming. Let us state in a form of paraphrase what his real instructions on this point seem to us to have been: "You cannot believe that I am the Messiah, because I do not deliver you from your oppressors and trample on the Gentiles. Your minds are clouded with errors. The Father hath sent me to found the kingdom of peace and righteousness, and hath given me all power to reward and punish. By my word shall the nations of the earth be honored and blessed, or be overwhelmed with fire; and every man must stand before my judgment seat. The end of the world is at the doors. The Mosaic dispensation is about to be closed in the fearful tribulations of the day of the Lord, and my dispensation to be set up. When you see Jerusalem encompassed with armies, know that the day is at hand, and flee to the mountains; for not one stone shall be left upon another. Then the power of God will be shown on my behalf, and the sign of the Son of Man be seen in heaven. My truths shall prevail, and shall be owned as the criteria of Divine judgment. According to them, all the righteous shall be distinguished as my subjects, and all the iniquitous shall be separated from my kingdom. Some of those standing here shall not taste death till all these things be fulfilled. Then it will be seen that I am the Messiah, and that through the eternal principles of truth which I have proclaimed I shall sit upon a throne of glory, not literally, in person, as you thought, blessing the Jews and cursing the Gentiles, but spiritually, in the truth, dispensing joy to good men and woe to bad men, according to their deserts." Such we believe to be the meaning of Christ's own predictions of his second coming. He figuratively identifies himself with his religion according to that idiom by which it is written, "Moses hath in every city them that read him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day." His figure of himself as the universal judge is a bold personification; for he elsewhere says, "He that believeth in me believeth not in me, but in Him that sent me." And again, "He that rejecteth me, I judge him not: the word that I have spoken, that shall judge him." His coming in the clouds of heaven with great power and glory was when, at the destruction of Jerusalem, the old age closed and the new began, the obstacles to his religion were removed and his throne established on the earth.2 The apostles undoubtedly understood the doctrine differently; but that such was his own thought we conclude, because he did sometimes undeniably use figurative language in that way, and because the other meaning is an error, not in harmony either with his character, his mind, or his mission.

This interpretation is so important that it may need to be illustrated and confirmed by further instances: "When the Son of Man sits on the throne of his glory, and all nations are gathered before him, his angels shall sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." A few such picturesque phrases have led to the general belief in a great world judgment at the end of the

2 Norton, Statement of Reasons, Appendix.

appointed time, after which the condemned are to be thrown into the tortures of an unquenchable world of flame. How arbitrary and violent a conclusion this is, how unwarranted and gross a perversion of the language of Christ it is, we may easily see. The fact that the old prophets often described fearful misfortunes and woes in images of clouds and flame and falling stars, and other portentous symbols, and that this style was therefore familiar to the Jews, would make it very natural for Jesus, in foretelling such an event as the coming destruction of Jerusalem, in conflagration and massacre, with the irretrievable subversion of the old dispensation, to picture it forth in a similar way. Fire was to the Jews a common emblem of calamity and devastation; and judgments incomparably less momentous than those gathered about the fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the self boasted favorites of Jehovah were often described by the prophets in appalling images of darkened planets, shaking heavens, clouds, fire, and blackness. Joel, speaking of a "day of the Lord," when there should be famine and drought, and a horrid army of destroying insects, "before whom a fire devoureth, and behind them a flame burneth," draws the scene in these terrific colors: "The earth shall quake before them; the sun and moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining; and the Lord shall utter his voice before his terrible army of locusts, caterpillars, and destroying worms:" Ezekiel represents God as saying, "The house of Israel is to me become dross: therefore I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem: as they gather silver, brass, iron, tin, and lead into the midst of the furnace to blow the fire upon it, so will I gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, and ye shall be melted in the midst thereof." We read in Isaiah, "The Assyrian shall flee, and his princes shall be afraid, saith the Lord, whose fire is in Zion and his furnace in Jerusalem." Malachi also says, "The day cometh that shall burn as a furnace, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble, and shall be burned up root and branch. They shall be trodden as ashes beneath the feet of the righteous." The meaning of these passages, and of many other similar ones, is, in every instance, some severe temporal calamity, some dire example of Jehovah's retributions among the nations of the earth. Their authors never dreamed of teaching that there is a place of fire beyond the grave in which the wicked dead shall be tormented, or that the natural creation is finally to be devoured by flame. It is perfectly certain that not a single text in the Old Testament was meant to teach any such doctrine as that. The judgments shadowed forth in kindred metaphors by Christ are to be understood in the light of this fact. Their meaning is, that all unjust, cruel, false, impure men shall endure severe punishments. This general thought is fearfully distinct; but every thing beyond all details are left in utter obscurity.

In the august scene of the King in judgment, when the sentence has been pronounced on those at the left hand, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels," it is written, "and they shall go away into everlasting punishment." It is obvious to remark that the imagery of a fiery prison built for Satan and the fallen angels, and into which the bad shall be finally doomed, is poetical language, or language of accommodation to the current notions of the time. These startling Oriental figures are used to wrap and convey the assertion that the wicked shall be severely punished according to their deserts. No literal reference seems to be made either to the particular time, to the

special place, or to the distinctive character, of the punishment; but the mere fact is stated in a manner to fill the conscience with awe and to stamp the practical lesson vividly on the memory. But admitting the clauses apparently descriptive of the nature of this retribution to be metaphorical, yet what shall we think of its duration? Is it absolutely unending? There is nothing in the record to enable a candid inquirer to answer that question decisively. So far as the letter of Scripture is concerned, there are no data to give an indubitable solution to the problem. It is true the word "everlasting" is repeated; but, when impartially weighed, it seems a sudden rhetorical expression, of indefinite force, used to heighten the impressiveness of a sublime dramatic representation, rather than a cautious philosophical term employed to convey an abstract conception. There is no reason whatever for supposing that Christ's mind was particularly directed to the metaphysical idea of endlessness, or to the much more metaphysical idea of timelessness. The presumptive evidence is that he spoke popularly. Had he been charged to reveal a doctrine so tremendous, so awful, so unutterably momentous in its practical relations, as that of the endless close of all probation at death, is it conceivable that he would merely have couched it in a few figurative expressions and left it as a matter of obscure inference and uncertainty? No: in that case, he would have iterated and reiterated it, defined, guarded, illustrated it, and have left no possibility of honest mistake or doubt of it.

The Greek word [non-ASCII characters], and the same is true of the corresponding Hebrew word, translated "everlasting" in the English Bible, has not in its popular usage the rigid force of eternal duration, but varies, is now applied to objects as evanescent as man's earthly life, now to objects as lasting as eternity.3 Its power in any given case is to be sought from the context and the reason of the thing.

Isaiah, having threatened the unrighteous nations that they "should conceive chaff and bring forth stubble, that their own breath should be fire to devour them, and that they should be burnt like lime, like thorns cut up in the fire," makes the terror smitten sinners and hypocrites cry, "Who among us can dwell in devouring fire? Who among us can dwell in everlasting burnings?" Yet his reference is solely to an outward, temporal judgment in this world. The Greek adjective rendered "everlasting" is etymologically, and by universal usage, a term of duration, but indefinite, its extent of meaning depending on the subjects of which it is predicated. Therefore, when Christ connects this word with the punishment of the wicked, it is impossible to say with any certainty, judging from the language itself, whether he implies that those who die in their sins are hopelessly lost, perfectly irredeemable forever, or not, though the probabilities are very strongly in the latter direction. "Everlasting punishment" may mean, in philosophical strictness, a punishment absolutely eternal, or may be a popular expression denoting, with general indefiniteness, a very long duration. Since in all Greek literature, sacred and profane, [non-ASCII characters] is applied to things that end, ten times as often as it is to things immortal, no fair critic can assert positively that when it is connected with future punishment it has the stringent meaning of metaphysical endlessness. On the other hand, no one has any critical

3 See Christian Examiner for March, 1854, pp. 280-297.

right to say positively that in such cases it has not that meaning. The Master has not explained his words on this point, but has left them veiled. We can settle the question itself concerning the limitedness or the unlimitedness of future punishment only on other grounds than those of textual criticism, even on grounds of enlightened reason postulating the cardinal principles of Christianity and of ethics. Will not the unimpeded Spirit of Christ lead all free minds and loving hearts to one conclusion? But that conclusion is to be held modestly as a trusted inference, not dogmatically as a received revelation.

Another point in the Savior's teachings which it is of the utmost importance to understand is the sense in which he used the Jewish phrases "Resurrection of the Dead" and "Resurrection at the Last Day." The Pharisees looked for a restoration of the righteous from their graves to a bodily life. This event they supposed would take place at the appearance of the Messiah; and the time of his coming they called "the last day." So the Apostle John says, "Already are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time." Now, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, clothed in his functions, though he interpreted those functions as carrying an interior and moral, not an outward and physical, force. "This is the will of Him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son and believeth on him should have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day." Again, when Martha told Jesus that "she knew her brother Lazarus would rise again in the resurrection at the last day," he replied, "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This utterance is surely metaphorical; for belief in Jesus does not prevent physical dissolution. The thoughts contained in the various passages belonging to this subject, when drawn out, compared, and stated in general terms, seem to us to be as follows: "You suppose that in the last day your Messiah will restore the dead to live again upon the earth. I am the Messiah, and the last days have therefore arrived. I am commissioned by the Father to bestow eternal life upon all who believe on me; but not in the manner you have anticipated. The true resurrection is not calling the body from the tomb, but opening the fountains of eternal life in the soul. I am come to open the spiritual world to your faith. He that believeth in me and keepeth my commandments has passed from death unto life, become conscious that though seemingly he passes into the grave, yet really he shall live with God forever. The true resurrection is, to come into the experience of the truth that 'God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.' Over the soul that is filled with such an experience, death has no power. Verily, I say unto, you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead, the ignorant and guilty, buried in trespasses and sins, shall hear these truths declared, and they that believe shall lay hold of the life thus offered and be blessed. The Father hath given me authority to execute judgment, that is, to lay down the principles by which men shall be judged according to their deserts. All mankind shall be judged in the spiritual state by the spirit and precepts of my religion as veritably as if in their graves the generations of the dead heard my voice and came forth, the good to blessedness, the evil to misery. The judgment which is, as it were, committed unto me, is not really committed unto me, but unto the truth which I declare; for of mine own self I can do nothing." We believe this paraphrase expresses the essential meaning of Christ's own declarations concerning a resurrection and an associated judgment. Coming to bring from the Father authenticated tidings of immortality, and to reveal the laws of the Divine judgment, he declared that those who believed and kept his words were delivered from the terror of death, and, knowing that an endless life of blessedness was awaiting them, immediately entered upon its experience. He did not teach the doctrine of a bodily restoration, but said, "In the resurrection," that is, in the spiritual state succeeding death, "they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of heaven."

He did not teach the doctrine of a temporary sleep in the grave, but said to the penitent thief on the cross, "This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise:" instantly upon leaving the body their souls would be together in the state of the blessed.

It is often said that the words of Jesus in relation to the dead hearing his voice and coming forth must be taken literally; for the metaphor is of too extreme violence. But it is in keeping with his usage. He says, "Let the dead bury their dead." It is far less bold than "This is my body; this is my blood." It is not nearly so strong as Paul's adjuration, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." It is not more daringly imaginative than the assertion that "the heroes sleeping in Marathon's gory bed stirred in their graves when Leonidas fought at Thermopyla; or than Christ's own words, "If thou hadst faith like a grain of mustard seed, thou couldst say to this mountain, Be thou cast into yonder sea, and it should obey you." So one might say,

"Where'er the gospel comes, It spreads diviner light; It calls dead sinners from their tombs And gives the blind their sight."

And in the latter days, when it has done its work, and the glorious measure of human redemption is full, liberty, intelligence, and love shall stand hand in hand on the mountain summits and raise up the long generations of the dead to behold the completed fruits of their toils. In this figurative moral sense Jesus probably spoke when he said, "Thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just." He referred simply to the rewards of the virtuous in the state beyond the grave. The phraseology in which he clothed the thought he accommodatingly adopted from the current speech of the Pharisees. They unquestionably meant by it the group of notions contained in their dogma of the destined physical restoration of the dead from their sepulchres at the advent of the Messiah. And it seems perfectly plain to us, on an impartial study of the record, that the evangelist, in reporting his words, took the Pharisaic dogma, and not merely the Christian truth, with them. But that Jesus himself modified and spiritualized the meaning of the phrase when he employed it, even as he did the other contemporaneous language descriptive of the Messianic offices and times, we conclude for two reasons. First, he certainly did often use language in that spiritual way, dressing in bold metaphors moral thoughts of inspired insight and truth. Secondly, the moral doctrine is the only one that is true, or that is in keeping with his penetrative thought. The notion of a physical resurrection is an error borrowed most likely from the Persians by the Pharisees, and not belonging to the essential elements of Christianity. The notion being prevalent at the time in Judea, and being usually expressed in certain appropriated phrases, when Christ used those phrases in a true spiritual sense the apostles would naturally apprehend from them the carnal meaning which already filled their minds in common with the minds of their countrymen.

The word Hades, translated in the English New Testament by the word "hell," a word of nearly the same etymological force, but now conveying a quite different meaning, occurs in the discourses of Jesus only three several times. The other instances of its use are repetitions or parallels. First, "And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be brought down to the under world;" that is, the great and proud city shall become powerless, a heap of ruins. Second, "Upon this rock I will found my Church, and the gates of the under world shall not prevail against it;" that is, the powers of darkness, the opposition of the wicked, the strength of evil, shall not destroy my religion; in spite of them it shall assert its organization and overcome all obstacles.

The remaining example of the Savior's use of this word is in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The rich man is described, after death, as suffering in the under world. Seeing the beggar afar off in Abraham's bosom, he cries, "Father Abraham, pity me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame." Well known fancies and opinions are here wrought up in scenic form to convey certain moral impressions. It will be noticed that the implied division of the under world into two parts, with a gulf between them, corresponds to the common Gentile notion of an Elysian region of delightful meadows for the good and a Tartarean region of blackness and fire for the bad, both included in one subterranean kingdom, but divided by an interval. 4

The dramatic details of the account Lazarus being borne into bliss by angels, Dives asking to have a messenger sent from bale to warn his surviving brothers rest on opinions afloat among the Jews of that age, derived from the Persian theology. Zoroaster prays, "When I shall die, let Aban and Bahman carry me to the bosom of joy."5 And it was a common belief among the Persians that souls were at seasons permitted to leave purgatory and visit their relatives on earth.6 It is evident that the narrative before us is not a history to be literally construed, but a parable to be carefully analyzed. The imagery and the particulars are to be laid aside, and the central thoughts to be drawn forth. Take the words literally, that the rich man's immaterial soul, writhing in flames, wished the tip of a finger dipped in water to cool his tongue, and they are ridiculous. Take them figuratively, as a type of unknown spiritual anguish, and they are awful. Besides, had Christ intended to teach the doctrine of a local burning hell, he surely would have enunciated it in plain words, with solemn iteration and explanatory amplifications, instead of merely insinuating it incidentally, in metaphorical

4 See copious illustrations by Rosenmuller, in Luc. cap. xvi. 22, 23. "Hic locus est partes ubi se via findit in ambas: Dextera, qua Ditis magni sub moenia tendit; Hac iter Elysium nobis: at lava malorum Exercet poenas, et ad impia Tartara mittit."

5 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 408.

6 Ibid. s. 410.

terms, in a professed parable. The sense of the parable is, that the formal distinctions of this world will have no influence in the allotments of the future state, but will often be reversed there; that a righteous Providence, knowing every thing here, rules hereafter, and will dispense compensating justice to all; that men should not wait for a herald to rise from the dead to warn them, but should heed the instructions they already have, and so live in the life that now is, as to avoid a miserable condemnation, and secure a blessed acceptance, in the life that is to come. By inculcating these truths in a striking manner, through the aid of a parable based on the familiar poetical conceptions of the future world and its scenery, Christ no more endorses those conceptions than by using the Messianic phrases of the Jews he approves the false carnal views which they joined with that language. To interpret the parable literally, then, and suppose it meant to teach the actual existence of a located hell of fire for sinners after death, is to disregard the proprieties of criticism.

"Gehenna," or the equivalent phrase, "Gehenna of fire," unfortunately translated into our tongue by the word "hell," is to be found in the teachings of Christ in only five independent instances, each of which, after tracing the original Jewish usage of the term, we will briefly examine. Gehenna, or the Vale of Hinnom, is derived from two Hebrew words, the first meaning a vale, the second being the name of its owner. The place thus called was the eastern part of the beautiful valley that forms the southern boundary of Jerusalem. Here Moloch, the horrid idol god worshipped by the Ammonites, and by the Israelites during their idolatrous lapses, was set up. This monstrous idol had the head of an ox and the body of a man. It was hollow; and, being filled with fire, children were laid in its arms and devoured alive by the heat. This explains the terrific denunciations uttered by the prophets against those who made their children pass through the fire to Moloch. The spot was sometimes entitled Tophet, a place of abhorrence; its name being derived, as some think, from a word meaning to vomit with loathing, or, as others suppose, from a word signifying drum, because drums were beaten to drown the shrieks of the burning children. After these horrible rites were abolished by Josiah, the place became an utter abomination. All filth, the offal of the city, the carcasses of beasts, the bodies of executed criminals, were cast indiscriminately into Gehenna. Fires were kept constantly burning to prevent the infection of the atmosphere from the putrifying mass. Worms were to be seen preying on the relics. The primary meaning, then, of Gehenna, is a valley outside of Jerusalem, a place of corruption and fire, only to be thought of with execration and shuddering.

Now, it was not only in keeping with Oriental rhetoric, but also natural in itself, that figures of speech should be taken from these obvious and dreadful facts to symbolize any dire evil. For example, how naturally might a Jew, speaking of some foul wretch, and standing, perhaps, within sight of the place, exclaim, "He deserves to be hurled into the fires of Gehenna!" So the term would gradually become an accepted emblem of abominable punishment. Such was the fact; and this gives a perspicuous meaning to the word without supposing it to imply a fiery prison house of anguish in the future world. Isaiah threatens the King of Assyria with ruin in these terms: "Tophet is ordained of old, and prepared for the king: it is made deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it." The prophet thus portrays, with the dread imagery of Gehenna, approaching disaster and overthrow. A thorough study of the Old Testament shows that the Jews, during the period which it covers, did not believe in future rewards and punishments, but expected that all souls without discrimination would pass their shadowy dream lives in the silence of Sheol.

Between the termination of the Old Testament history and the commencement of the New, various forms of the doctrine of future retribution had been introduced or developed among the Jews. But during this period few, if any, decisive instances can be found in which the image of penal fire is connected with the future state. On the contrary, "darkness," "gloom," "blackness," "profound and perpetual night," are the terms employed to characterize the abode and fate of the wicked.

Josephus says that, in the faith of the Pharisees, "the worst criminals were banished to the darkest part of the under world." Philo represents the depraved and condemned as "groping in the lowest and darkest part of the creation. The word Gehenna is rarely found in the literature of this time, and when it is it commonly seems to be used either simply to denote the detestable Vale of Hinnom, or else plainly as a general symbol of calamity and horror, as in the elder prophets.

But in some of the Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures, especially in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, we meet repeated applications of the word Gehenna to signify a punishment by fire in the future state.7 This is a fact about which there can be no question. And to the documents showing such a usage of the word, the best scholars are pretty well agreed in assigning a date as early as the days of Christ. The evidence afforded by these Targums, together with the marked application of the term by Jesus himself, and the similar general use of it immediately after both by Christians and Jews, render it not improbable that Gehenna was known to the contemporaries of the Savior as the metaphorical name of hell, a region of fire, in the under world, where the reprobate were supposed to be punished after death. But admitting that, before Christ began to teach, the Jews had modified their early conception of the under world as the silent and sombre abode of all the dead in common, and had divided it into two parts, one where the wicked suffer, called Gehenna, one where the righteous rest, called Paradise, still, that modification having been borrowed, as is historically evident, from the Gentiles, or, if developed among themselves, at all events unconnected with revelation, of course Christianity is not involved with the truth or falsity of it, is not responsible for it. It does not necessarily follow that Jesus gave precisely the same meaning to the word Gehenna that his contemporaries or successors did. He may have used it in a modified emblematic sense, as he did many other current terms. In studying his language, we should especially free our minds both from the tyranny of pre Christian notions and dogmas and from the associations and influences of modern creeds, and seek to interpret it in the light of his own instructions and in the spirit of his own mind.

We will now examine the cases in which Christ uses the term Gehenna, and ask what it means.

First: "Whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou vile wretch! shall be in danger of the fiery Gehenna." Interpret this literally, and it teaches that whosoever calls his brother a

7 Gesenius, Hebrew Thesaurus, Ge Hinnom.

wicked apostate is in danger of being thrown into the filthy flames in the Vale of Hinnom. But no one supposes that such was its meaning. Jesus would say, as we understand him, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil, the law; to show how at the culmination of the old dispensation a higher and stricter one opens. I say unto you, that, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The conditions of acceptance under the new order are far more profound and difficult than under the old. That said, Whosoever commits murder shall be exposed to legal punishment from the public tribunal. This says, An invisible inward punishment, as much to be dreaded as the judgments of the Sanhedrim, shall be inflicted upon those who harbor the secret passions that lead to crime; whosoever, out of an angry heart, insults his brother, shall be exposed to spiritual retributions typified by the horrors of yon flaming valley. They of old time took cognizance of outward crimes by outward penalties. I take cognizance of inward sins by inward returns more sure and more fearful."

Second: "If thy right eye be a source of temptation to thee, pluck it out and fling it away; for it is better for thee that one of thy members perish than that thy whole body should be cast into Gehenna." Give these words a literal interpretation, and they mean, "If your eyes or your hands are the occasions of crime, if they tempt you to commit offences which will expose you to public execution, to the ignominy and torture heaped upon felons put to a shameful death and then flung among the burning filth of Gehenna, pluck them out, cut them off betimes, and save yourself from such a frightful end; for it is better to live even thus maimed than, having a whole body, to be put to a violent death." No one can suppose that Jesus meant to convey such an idea as that when he uttered these words. We must, then, attribute a deeper, an exclusively moral, significance to the passage. It means, "If you have some bosom sin, to deny and root out which is like tearing out an eye or cutting off a hand, pause not, but overcome and destroy it immediately, at whatever cost of effort and suffering; for it is better to endure the pain of fighting and smothering a bad passion than to submit to it and allow it to rule until it acquires complete control over you, pervades your whole nature with its miserable unrest, and brings you at last into a state of woe of which Gehenna and its dreadful associations are a fit emblem." A verse spoken, according to Mark, in immediate connection with the present passage, confirms the figurative sense we have attributed to it: "Whosoever shall cause one of these little ones that believe in me to fall, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were plunged into the midst of the sea;" that is, in literal terms, a man had better meet a great calamity, even the loss of life, than commit a foul crime and thus bring the woe of guilt upon his soul.

The phrase, "their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched," is a part of the imagery naturally suggested by the scene in the Valley of Hinnom, and was used to give greater vividness and force to the moral impression of the discourse. By an interpretation resulting either from prejudice or ignorance, it is generally held to teach the doctrine of literal fire torments enduring forever. It is a direct quotation from a passage in Isaiah which signifies that, in a glorious age to come, Jehovah will cause his worshippers to go forth from new moon to new moon and look upon the carcasses of the wicked, and see them devoured by fire which shall not be quenched and gnawed by worms which shall not die, until the last relics of them are destroyed.

Third: "Fear not them that kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna." A similar use of figurative language, in a still bolder manner, is found in Isaiah. Intending to say nothing more than that Assyria should be overthrown and crushed, the prophet bursts out, "Under the glory of the King of Assyria Jehovah shall kindle a burning like the burning of a fire; and it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in one day, and shall consume the glory of his forest and of his fruitful field, both soul and body." Reading the whole passage in Matthew with a single eye, its meaning will be apparent. We may paraphrase it thus. Jesus says to his disciples, "You are now going forth to preach the gospel. My religion and its destinies are intrusted to your hands. As you go from place to place, be on your guard; for they will persecute you, and scourge you, and deliver you up to death. But fear them not. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master; and if they have done so unto me, how much more shall they unto you! Do not, through fear of hostile men, who can only kill your bodies and are not able in any wise to injure your souls, shrink from danger and prove recreant to the momentous duties imposed upon you; but be inspired to proclaim the principles of the heavenly kingdom with earnestness and courage, in the face of all perils, by fearing God, him who is able to plunge both your souls and your bodies in abomination and agony, him who, if you prove unfaithful and become slothful servants or wicked traitors, will leave your bodies to a violent death and after that your souls to bitter shame and anguish. Fear not the temporal, physical power of your enemies, to be turned from your work by it; but rather fear the eternal, spiritual power of your God, to be made faithful by it."

Fourth: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and, when he is made, ye make him twofold more a child of Gehenna than yourselves." That is, "Ye make him twice as bad as yourselves in hypocrisy, bigotry, extortion, impurity, and malice, a subject of double guilt and of double retribution."

Finally, Jesus exclaims to the children of those who killed the prophets, "Serpents, brood of vipers! how can ye escape the condemnation of Gehenna?" That is to say, "Venomous creatures, bad men! you deserve the fate of the worst criminals; you are worthy of the polluted fires of Gehenna; your vices will surely be followed by condign punishment: how can such depravity escape the severest retributions?"

These five are all the distinct instances in which Jesus uses the word Gehenna. It is plain that he always uses the word metaphorically. We therefore conclude that Christianity, correctly understood, never implies that eternal fire awaits sinners in the future world, but that moral retributions, according to their deeds, are the portion of all men here and hereafter. There is no more reason to suppose that essential Christianity contains the doctrine of a fiery infernal world than there is to suppose that it really means to declare that God is a glowing mass of flame, when it says, "Our God is a consuming fire." We must remember the metaphorical character of much scriptural language. Wickedness is a fire, in that it preys upon men and draws down the displeasure of the Almighty, and consumes them.

As Isaiah writes, "Wickedness burneth as the fire, the anger of Jehovah darkens the land, and the people shall be the food of the fire." And James declares to proud extortioners, "The rust of your cankered gold and silver shall eat your flesh as it were fire."

When Jesus says, "It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city" which will not listen to the preaching of my kingdom, but drives my disciples away, he uses a familiar figure to signify that Sodom and Gomorrah would at such a call have repented in sackcloth and ashes. The guilt of Chorazin and Bethsaida was, therefore, more hardened than theirs, and should receive a severer punishment; or, making allowance for the natural exaggeration of this kind of language, he means, That city whose iniquities and scornful unbelief lead it to reject my kingdom when it is proffered shall be brought to judgment and be overwhelmed with avenging calamities. Two parallel illustrations of this image are given us by the old prophets. Isaiah says, "Babylon shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah." And Jeremiah complains, "The punishment of Jerusalem is greater than the punishment of Sodom." It is certainly remarkable that such passages should ever have been thought to teach the doctrine of a final, universal judgment day breaking on the world in fire.

The subject of our Lord's teachings in regard to the punishment of the wicked is included in two classes of texts, and may be summed up in a few words. One class of texts relate to the visible establishment of Christianity as the true religion, the Divine law, at the destruction of the Jewish power, and to the frightful woes which should then fall upon the murderers of Christ, the bitter enemies of his cause. All these things were to come upon that generation, were to happen before some of them then standing there tasted death. The other class of texts and they are by far the more numerous signify that the kingdom of Truth is now revealed and set up; that all men are bound to accept and obey it with reverence and love, and thus become its blessed subjects, the happy and immortal children of God; that those who spurn its offers, break its laws, and violate its pure spirit shall be punished, inevitably and fearfully, by moral retributions proportioned to the degrees of their guilt. Christ does not teach that the good are immortal and that the bad shall be annihilated, but that all alike, both the just and the unjust, enter the spiritual world. He does not teach that the bad shall be eternally miserable, cut off from all possibility of amendment, but simply that they shall be justly judged. He makes no definitive reference to duration, but leaves us at liberty, peering into the gloom as best we can, to suppose, if we think it most reasonable, that the conditions of our spiritual nature are the same in the future as now, and therefore that the wicked may go on in evil hereafter, or, if they will, all turn to righteousness, and the universe finally become as one sea of holiness and as one flood of praise.

Another portion of Christ's doctrine of the future life hinges on the phrase "the kingdom of heaven." Much is implied in this term and its accompaniments, and may be drawn out by answering the questions, What is heaven? Who are citizens of, and who are aliens from, the kingdom of God? Let us first examine the subordinate meanings and shades of meaning with which the Savior sometimes uses these phrases.

"Ye shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." No confirmation of the literal sense of this that is afforded by any incident found in the Gospels. There is every reason for supposing that he meant by it, "There shall be open manifestations of supernatural power and favor bestowed upon me by God, evident signs of direct communications between us." His Divine works and instructions justified the statement. The word "heaven" as here used, then, does not mean any particular place, but means the approving presence of God. The instincts and natural language of man prompt us to consider objects of reverence as above us. We kneel below them. The splendor, mystery, infinity, of the starry regions help on the delusion. But surely no one possessing clear spiritual perceptions will think the literal facts in the case must correspond to this, that God must dwell in a place overhead called heaven. He is an Omnipresence.

"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you for my sake: rejoice, for great is your reward in heaven." This passage probably means, "In the midst of tribulation be exceeding glad; because you shall be abundantly rewarded in a future state for all your present sufferings in my cause." In that case, heaven signifies the spiritual world, and does not involve reference to any precisely located spot. Or it may mean, "Be not disheartened by insults and persecutions met in the cause of God; for you shall be greatly blessed in your inward life: the approval of conscience, the immortal love and pity of God, shall be yours: the more you are hated and abused by men unjustly, the closer and sweeter shall be your communion with God." In that case, heaven signifies fellowship with the Father, and is independent of any particular time or place.

"Our Father, who art in heaven." Jesus was not the author of this sentence. It was a part of the Rabbinical synagogue service, and was based upon the Hebrew conception of God as having his abode in an especial sense over the firmament. The Savior uses it as the language of accommodation, as is evident from his conversation with the woman of Samaria; for he told her that no exclusive spot was an acceptable place of worship, since "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." No one who comprehends the meaning of the words can suppose that the Infinite Spirit occupies a confined local habitation, and that men must literally journey there to be with him after death. Wherever they may be now, they are away from him or with him, according to their characters. After death they are more banished from him or more immediately with him, instantly, wherever they are, according to the spirit they are of.

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, but in heaven." In other words, Be not absorbed in efforts to accumulate hoards of gold and silver, and to get houses and lands, which will soon pass away; but rather labor to acquire heavenly treasures, wisdom, love, purity, and faith, which will never pass from your possession nor cease from your enjoyment.

"I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also." To understand this text, we must carefully study the whole four chapters of the connection in which it stands. They abound in bold symbols. An instance of this is seen where Jesus, having washed his disciples' feet, says to them, "Ye are clean, but not all. For he knew who should betray him. Therefore said he, Ye are not all clean." The actual meaning of the passage before us may be illustrated by a short paraphrase of it with the context: "Let not your hearts be troubled by the thought that I must die and be removed from you; for there are other states of being besides this earthly life. When they crucify me, as I have said to you before, I shall not perish, but shall pass into a higher state of existence with my Father. Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know: my Father is the end, and the truths that I have declared point out the way. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice because I say that I go to the Father. And if I go to him, if, when they have put me to death, I pass into an unseen state of blessedness and glory (as I prophesy unto you that I shall,) I will reveal myself unto you again, and tell you. I go before you as a pioneer, and will surely come back and confirm, with irresistible evidence, the reality of what I have already told you. Therefore, trouble not your hearts, but be of good cheer."

"There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." The sentiment of this Divine declaration simply implies that all good beings sympathize with every triumph of goodness; that the living chain of mutual interest runs through the spiritual universe, making one family of those on earth and those in the invisible state.

"Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father." "Cling not to me, detain me not, for I have not yet left the world forever, to be in the spiritual state with my Father; and ere I do this I must seek my disciples, to convince them of my resurrection and to give them my parting commission and blessing." He used the common language, for it was the only language which she whom he addressed would understand; and although, literally interpreted, it conveyed the idea of a local heaven on high, yet at the same time it conveyed, and in the only way intelligible to her, all the truth that was important, namely, that when he disappeared he would still be living, and be, furthermore, with God.

When Christ finally went from his disciples, he seemed to them to rise and vanish towards the clouds. This would confirm their previous material conceptions, and the old forms of speech would be handed down, strengthened by these phenomena, misunderstood in themselves and exaggerated in their importance. We generally speak now of God's "throne," of "heaven," as situated far away in the blue ether; we point upward to the world of bliss, and say, There the celestial hosannas roll; there the happy ones, the unforgotten ones of our love, wait to welcome us. These forms of speech are entirely natural; they are harmless; they aid in giving definiteness to our thoughts and feelings, and it is well to continue their use; it would be difficult to express our thoughts without them. However, we must understand that they are not strictly and exclusively true. God is everywhere; and wherever he is there is heaven to the spirits that are like him and, consequently, see him and enjoy his ineffable blessedness.

Jesus sometimes uses the phrase "kingdom of heaven" as synonymous with the Divine will, the spiritual principles or laws which he was inspired to proclaim. Many of his parables were spoken to illustrate the diffusive power and the incomparable value of the truth he taught, as when he said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which becomes a great tree;" it is "like unto leaven, which a woman put in two measures of meal until the whole was leavened;" it is "like a treasure hid in a field," or "like a goodly pearl of great price, which, a man finding, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it." In these examples "the kingdom of heaven" is plainly a personification of the revealed will of God, the true law of salvation and eternal life. In answer to the question why he spoke so many things to the people in parables, Jesus said to his disciples, "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto them it is not given;" that is, You are prepared to understand the hitherto concealed truths of God's government, if set forth plainly; but they are not prepared.

Here as also in the parables of the vineyard let out to husbandmen, and of the man who sowed good seed in his field, and in a few other cases "the kingdom of heaven" means God's government, his mode of dealing with men, his method of establishing his truths in the hearts of men. "The kingdom of heaven" sometimes signifies personal purity and peace, freedom from sensual solicitations. "There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

Christ frequently uses the term "kingdom of heaven" in a somewhat restricted, traditional sense, based in form but not in spirit upon the Jewish expectations of the Messiah's kingdom. "Be ye sure of this, that the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you;" "I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also;" "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Christ was charged to bear to men a new revelation from God of his government and laws, that he might reign over them as a monarch over conscious and loyal subjects. "Many shall come from the East and the West, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness." The sense of these texts is as follows. "God is now offering unto you, through me, a spiritual dispensation, a new kingdom; but, unless you faithfully heed it and fulfil its conditions, you shall be rejected from it and lose the Divine favor. Although, by your position as the chosen people, and in the line of revelation, you are its natural heirs, yet, unless you rule your spirits and lives by its commands, you shall see the despised Gentiles enjoying all the privileges your faith allows to the revered patriarchs of your nation, while yourselves are shut out from them and overwhelmed with shame and anguish. Your pride of descent, haughtiness of spirit, and reliance upon dead rites unfit you for the true kingdom of God, the inward reign of humility and righteousness; and the very publicans and harlots, repenting and humbling themselves, shall go into it before you."

To be welcomed under this Messianic dispensation, to become a citizen of this spiritual kingdom of God, the Savior declares that there are certain indispensable conditions. A man must repent and forsake his sins. This was the burden of John's preaching, that the candidate for the kingdom of heaven must first be baptized with water unto repentance, as a sign that he abjures and is cleansed from all his old errors and iniquities. Then he must be baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire, that is, must learn the positive principles of the coming kingdom, and apply them to his own character, to purge away every corrupt thing. He must be born again, born of water and of the Spirit: in other words, he must be brought out from his impurity and wickedness into a new and Divine life of holiness, awakened to a conscious experience of purity, truth, and love, the great prime elements in the reign of God. He must be guileless and lowly. "Whosoever will not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein."

The kingdom of heaven, the better dispensation which Christ came to establish, is the humility of contrite hearts, the innocence of little children, the purity of undefiled consciences, the fruit of good works, the truth of universal laws, the love of God, and the conscious experience of an indestructible, blessed being. Those who enter into these qualities in faith, in feeling, and in action are full citizens of that eternal kingdom; all others are aliens from it.

Heaven, then, according to Christ's use of the word, is not distinctively a world situated somewhere in immensity, but a purely spiritual experience, having nothing to do with any special time or place. It is a state of the soul, or a state of society, under the rule of truth, governed by God's will, either in this life or in a future. He said to the young ruler who had walked faithfully in the law, and whose good traits drew forth his love, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." It is evident that this does not mean a bounded place of abode, but a true state of character, a virtuous mode of life "My kingdom is not of this world." "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." That is, "My kingdom is the realm of truth, the dominion of God's will, and all true men are my subjects." Evidently this is not a material but a moral reign and therefore unlimited by seasons or places. Wherever purity, truth, love, obedience, prevail, there is God, and that is heaven. It is not necessary to depart into some distant sphere to meet the Infinite Holy One and dwell with him. He is on the very dust we tread, he is the very centre of our souls and breath of our lives, if we are only in a state that is fitted to recognise and enjoy him. "He that hath sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone, for I always do those things which please him." It is a fair inference from such statements as this that to do with conscious adoration and love those things that please God is to be with him, without regard to time or place; and that is heaven. "I speak that which I have seen with my Father," God, "and ye do that which ye have seen with your father, the devil." No one will suppose that Jesus meant to tell the wicked men whom he was addressing that they committed their iniquities in consequence of lessons learned in a previous state of existence with an arch fiend, the parent of all evil. His meaning, then, was, I bring forth in words and deeds the things which I have learned in my secret soul from inspired communion with infinite goodness and perfection; you bring forth the things which you have learned from communion with the source of sin and woe, that is, foul propensities, cruel passions, and evil thoughts.

"I come forth from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go unto the Father." "I go unto Him that sent me." Since it is declared that God is an Omnipresent Spirit, and that those who obey and love him see him and are with him everywhere, these striking words must bear one of the two following interpretations. First, they may imply in general that man is created and sent into this state of being by the Father, and that after the termination of the present life the soul is admitted to a closer union with the Parent Spirit. This gives a natural meaning to the language which represents dying as going to the Father. Not that it is necessary to travel to reach God, but that the spiritual verity is most adequately expressed under such a metaphor. But, secondly, and more probably, the phraseology under consideration may be meant as an assertion of the Divine origin and authority of the special mission of Christ. "Neither came I of myself, but He sent me;" "The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself;" "As the Father hath taught me, I speak these things." These passages do not necessarily teach the pre existence of Christ and his descent from heaven in the flesh. That is a carnal interpretation which does great violence to the genuine nature of the claims put forth by our Savior. They may merely declare the supernatural commission of the Son of God, his direct inspiration and authority. He did not voluntarily assume his great work, but was Divinely ordered on that service. Compare the following text: "The baptism of John, whence was it, from Heaven, or of men?" That is to say, was it of human or of Divine origin and authority? So when it is said that the Son of Man descended from heaven, or was sent by the Father, the meaning in Christ's mind probably was that he was raised up, did his works, spoke his words, by the inspiration and with the sanction of God. The accuracy of this interpretation is seen by the following citation from the Savior's own words, when he is speaking in his prayer at the last supper of sending his disciples out to preach the gospel: "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." The reference, evidently, is to a Divine choice and sealing, not to a descent upon the earth from another sphere.

That the author of the Fourth Gospel believed that Christ descended from heaven literally we have not the shadow of a doubt. He repeatedly speaks of him as the great super angelic Logos, the first born Son and perfect image of God, the instrumental cause of the creation. His mind was filled with the same views, the same lofty Logos theory that is so abundantly set forth in the writings of Philo Judaus. He reports and describes the Savior in conformity with such a theological postulate. Possessed with the foregone conclusion that Jesus was the Divine Logos, descended from the celestial abode, and born into the world as a man, in endeavoring to write out from memory, years after they were uttered, the Savior's words, it is probable that he unconsciously misapprehended and tinged them according to his theory. The Delphic apothegm, "Know thyself," was said to have descended from heaven:

"E coelo descendit [non ASCII characters]."

By a familiar Jewish idiom, "to ascend into heaven" meant to learn the will of God.8 And whatever bore the direct sancion of God was said to descend from heaven. When in these figurative terms Jesus asserted his Divine commission, it seems that some understood him literally, and concluded perhaps in consequence of his miracles, joined with their own speculations that he was the Logos incarnated. That such a conclusion was an unwarranted inference from metaphorical language and from a foregone pagan dogma appears from his own explanatory and justifying words spoken to the Jews. For when they accused him of making himself God, he replies, "If in your law they are called gods to whom the word of God came, charge ye him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world with blasphemy, because he says he is the Son of God?" Christ's language in the Fourth Gospel

8 Schoettgen, in John iii. 13.

may be fairly explained without implying his actual pre existence or superhuman nature. But it does not seem to us that John's possibly can be. His miracles, according to the common idea of them, did not prove him to be the coequal fac simile, but merely proved him to be the delegated envoy, of God.

We may sum up the consideration of this point in a few words. Christ did not essentially mean by the term "heaven" the world of light and glory located by the Hebrews, and by some other nations, just above the visible firmament. His meaning, when he spoke of the kingdom of God or heaven, was always, in some form, either the reign of justice, purity, and love, or the invisible world of spirits. If that world, heaven, be in fact, and were in his conception, a sphere located in space, he never alluded to its position, but left it perfectly in the dark, keeping his instructions scrupulously free from any such commitment. He said, "I go to Him that sent me;" "I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also." The references to locality are vague and mysterious. The nature of his words, and their scantiness, are as if he had said, We shall live hereafter; we shall be with the Father; we shall be together. All the rest is mystery, even to me: it is not important to be known, and the Father hath concealed it. Such, almost, are his very words. "A little while, and ye shall not see me; again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father." "Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am." Whether heaven be technically a material abode or a spiritual state it is of little importance to us to know; and the teachings of Jesus seem to have nothing to do with it. The important things for us to know are that there is a heaven, and how we may prepare for it; and on these points the revelation is explicit. To suppose the Savior ignorant of some things is not inconsistent with his endowments; for he himself avowed his ignorance, saying, "Of that day knoweth no man; no, not even the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." And it adds an awful solemnity, an indescribably exciting interest, to his departure from the world, to conceive him hovering on the verge of the same mystery which has enveloped every passing mortal, hovering there with chastened wonder and curiosity, inspired with an absolute trust that in that fathomless obscurity the Father would be with him, and would unveil new realms of life, and would enable him to come back and assure his disciples. He certainly did not reveal the details of the future state: whether he was acquainted with them himself or not we cannot tell.

We next advance to the most important portion of the words of Christ regarding the life and destiny of the soul, those parts of his doctrine which are most of a personal, experimental character, sounding the fountains of consciousness, piercing to the dividing asunder of our being. It is often said that Jesus everywhere takes for granted the fact of immortality, that it underlies and permeates all he does and says. We should know at once that such a being must be immortal; such a life could never be lived by an ephemeral creature; of all possible proofs of immortality he is himself the sublimest. This is true, but not the whole truth. The resistless assurance, the Divine inspiration, the sublime repose, with which he enunciates the various thoughts connected with the theme of endless existence, are indeed marvellous. But he not only authoritatively assumes the truth of a future life: he speaks directly of it in many ways, often returns to it, continually hovers about it, reasons for it, exhorts upon it, makes most of his instructions hinge upon it, shows that it is a favorite subject of his communion. We may put the justice of these statements in a clear light by bringing together and explaining some of his scattered utterances.

His express language teaches that man in this world is a twofold being, leading a twofold life, physical and spiritual, the one temporal, the other eternal, the one apt unduly to absorb his affections, the other really deserving his profoundest care. This separation of the body and the soul, and survival of the latter, is brought to light in various striking forms and with various piercing applications. In view of the dangers that beset his disciples on their mission, he exhorted and warned them thus: "Fear not them which have power to kill the body and afterwards have no more that they can do; but rather fear Him who can kill both soul and body;" "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it;" that is, whosoever, for the sake of saving the life of his body, shrinks from the duties of this dangerous time, shall lose the highest welfare of the soul; but whosoever loveth his lower life in the body less than he loves the virtues of a consecrated spirit shall win the true blessedness of his soul. Both of these passages show that the soul has a life and interest separate from the material tabernacle. With what pathos and convincing power was the same faith expressed in his ejaculation from the cross, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!" an expression of trust which, under such circumstances of desertion, horror, and agony, could only have been prompted by that inspiration of God which he always claimed to have.

Christ once reasoned with the Sadducees "as touching the dead, that they rise;" in other words, that the souls of men upon the decease of the body pass into another and an unending state of existence: "Neither can they die any more; for they are equal with the angels, and are children of God, being children of the resurrection." His argument was, that "God is the God of the living, not of the dead;" that is, the spiritual nature of man involves such a relationship with God as pledges his attributes to its perpetuity. The thought which supports this reasoning penetrates far into the soul and grasps the moral relations between man and God. It is most interesting viewed as the unqualified affirmation by Jesus of the doctrine of a future life which shall be deathless.

But the Savior usually stood in a more imposing attitude and spoke in a more commanding tone than are indicated in the foregoing sentences. The prevailing stand point from which he spoke was that of an oracle giving responses from the inner shrine of the Divinity. The words and sentiments he uttered were not his, but the Father's; and he uttered them in the clear tones of knowledge and authority, not in the whispering accents of speculation or surmise. How these entrancing tidings came to him he knew not: they were no creations of his; they rose spontaneously within him, bearing the miraculous sign and seal of God, a recommendation he could no more question or resist than he could deny his own existence. He was set apart as a messenger to men. The tide of inspiration welled up till it filled every nerve and crevice of his being with conscious life and with an overmastering recognition of its living relations with the Omnipresent and Everlasting Life. Straightway he knew that the Father was in him and he in the Father, and that he was commissioned to reveal the mind of the Father to the world.

He knew, by the direct knowledge of inspiration and consciousness, that he should live forever. Before his keen, full, spiritual vitality the thought of death fled away, the thought of annihilation could not come. So far removed was his soul from the perception of interior sleep and decay, so broad and powerful was his consciousness of indestructible life, that he saw quite through the crumbling husks of time and sense to the crystal sea of spirit and thought. So absorbing was his sense of eternal life in himself that he even constructed an argument from his personal feeling to prove the immortality of others, saying to his disciples, "Because I live, ye shall live also;" "Ye believe in God, believe also in me." Ye believe what God declares, for he cannot be mistaken; believe what I declare for his inspiration makes me infallible when I say there are many spheres of life for us when this is ended.

It was from the fulness of this experience that Jesus addressed his hearers. He spoke not so much as one who had faith that immortal life would hereafter be revealed and certified, but rather as one already in the insight and possession of it, as one whose foot already trod the eternal floor and whose vision pierced the immense horizon. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life." Being himself brought to this immovable assurance of immortal life by the special inspiration of God, it was his aim to bring others to the same blessed knowledge. His efforts to effect this form a most constant feature in his teachings. His own definition of his mission was, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." We see by the persistent drift of his words that he strove to lead others to the same spiritual point he stood at, that they might see the same prospect he saw, feel the same certitude he felt, enjoy the same communion with God and sense of immortality he enjoyed. "As the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will;" "For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given the Son to have life in himself;" "Father, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee; as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he might give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him: and this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." In other words, the mission of Christ was to awaken in men the experience of immortal life; and that would be produced by imparting to them reproducing in them the experience of his own soul. Let us notice what steps he took to secure this end.

He begins by demanding the unreserved credence of men to what he says, claiming to say it with express authority from God, and giving miraculous credentials. "Whatsoever I speak, therefore, as the Father said to me, so I speak." This claim to inspired knowledge he advances so emphatically that it cannot be overlooked. He then announces, as an unquestionable truth, the supreme claim of man's spiritual interests upon his attention and labor, alike from their inherent superiority and their enduring subsistence. "For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall be those things thou hast gathered?" "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life."

The inspiration which dictated these instructions evidently based them upon the profoundest spiritual philosophy, upon the truth that man lives at once in a sphere of material objects which is comparatively unimportant because he will soon leave it, and in a sphere of moral realities which is all important because he will live in it forever. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The body, existing in the sphere of material relations, is supported by material bread; but the soul, existing in the sphere of spiritual relations, is supported by truth, the nourishing breath of God's love. We are in the eternal world, then, at present. Its laws and influences penetrate and rule us; its ethereal tides lave and bear us on; our experience and destiny in it are decided every moment by our characters. If we are pure in heart, have vital faith and force, we shall see God and have new revelations made to us. Such are among the fundamental principles of Christianity.

There is another class of texts, based upon a highly figurative style of speech, striking Oriental idioms, the explanation of which will cast further light upon the branch of the subject immediately before us. "As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me;" that is, As the blessed Father hath inspired me with the knowledge of him, and I am blessed with the consciousness of his immortal love, so he that believes and assimilates these truths as I proclaim them, he shall experience the same blessedness through my instruction. The words. "I am the bread of life" are explained by the words "I am the truth." The declaration "Whoso eateth my flesh hath eternal life" is illustrated by the declaration "Whosoever heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me hath everlasting life." There is no difficulty in understanding what Jesus meant when he said, "I have meat to eat ye know not of: my meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." Why should we not with the same ease, upon the same principles, interpret his kindred expression, "This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die"? The idea to be conveyed by all this phraseology is, that whosoever understands, accepts, assimilates, and brings out in earnest experience, the truths Christ taught, would realize the life of Christ, feel the same assurance of Divine favor and eternal blessedness. "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him;" that is, we have the same character, are fed by the same nutriment, rest in the same experience. Fortunately, we are not left to guess at the accuracy of this exegesis: it is demonstrated from the lips of the Master himself. When he knew that the disciples murmured at what he had said about eating his flesh, and called it a hard saying, he said to them, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life. But there are some of you that believe not." Any man who heartily believed what Christ said that he was Divinely authorized to declare, and did declare, the pervading goodness of the Father and the immortal blessedness of the souls of his children, by the very terms was delivered from the bondage of fear and commenced the consciousness of eternal life. Of course, we are not to suppose that faith in Christ obtains immortality itself for the believer: it only rectifies and lights up the conditions of it, and awakens the consciousness of it. "I am the resurrection and the life: whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." We suppose this means, he shall know that he is never to perish: it cannot refer to physical dissolution, for the believer dies equally with the unbeliever; it cannot refer to immortal existence in itself, for the unbeliever is as immortal as the believer: it must refer to the blessed nature of that immortality and to the personal assurance of it, because these Christ does impart to the disciple, while the unregenerate unbeliever in his doctrine, of course, has them not. Coming from God to reveal his infinite love, exemplifying the Divine elements of an immortal nature in his whole career, coming back from the grave to show its sceptre broken and to point the way to heaven, well may Christ proclaim, "Whosoever believes in me" knows he "shall never perish."

Among the Savior's parables is an impressive one, which we cannot help thinking perhaps fancifully was intended to illustrate the dealings of Providence in ordering the earthly destiny of humanity. "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground and the seed should grow up; but when the fruit is ripe he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." Men are seed sown in this world to ripen and be harvested in another. The figure, taken on the scale of the human race and the whole earth, is sublime. Whether such an image were originally suggested by the parable or not, the conception is consistent with Christian doctrine. The pious Sterling prays,

"Give thou the life which we require, That, rooted fast in thee, From thee to thee we may aspire, And earth thy garden be."

The symbol shockingly perverted from its original beautiful meaning by the mistaken belief that we sleep in our graves until a distant resurrection day is often applied to burial grounds. Let its appropriate significance be restored. Life is the field, death the reaper, another sphere of being the immediate garner. An enlightened Christian, instead of entitling a graveyard the garden of the dead, and looking for its long buried forms to spring from its cold embrace, will hear the angel saying again, "They are not here: they are risen." The line which written on Klopstock's tomb is a melancholy error, engraved on his cradle would have been an inspiring truth: "Seed sown by God to ripen for the harvest."

Several fragmentary speeches, which we have not yet noticed, of the most tremendous and even exhaustive import, are reported as having fallen from the lips of Christ at different times. These sentences, rapid and incomplete as they are in the form in which they have reached us, do yet give us glimpses of the most momentous character into the profoundest thoughts of his mind. They are sufficient to enable us to generalize their fundamental principles, and construct the outlines, if we may so speak, of his theology, his inspired conception of God, the universe, and man, and the resulting duties and destiny of man. We will briefly bring together and interpret these passages, and deduce the system which they seem to presuppose and rest upon.

Jesus told the woman of Samaria that God was to be worshipped acceptably neither in that mountain nor at Jerusalem exclusively, but anywhere, if it were worthily done. "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." This passage, with others, teaches the spirituality and omnipresence of God. Christ conceived of God as an infinite Spirit. Again, comforting his friends in view of his approaching departure, he said, "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." Here he plainly figures the universe as a house containing many apartments, all pervaded and ruled by the Father's presence. He was about taking leave of this earth to proceed to another part of the creation, and he promised to come back to his followers and assure them there was another abode prepared for them. Christ conceived of the universe, with its innumerable divisions, as the house of God. Furthermore, he regarded truth or the essential laws and right tendencies of things and the will of God as identical. He said he came into the world to do the will of Him that sent him; that is, as he at another time expressed it, he came into the world to bear witness unto the truth. Thus he prayed, "Father, sanctify them through the truth: thy word is truth." Christ conceived of pure truth as the will of God. Finally, he taught that all who obey the truth, or do the will of God, thereby constitute one family of brethren, one family of the accepted children of God, in all worlds forever. "He that doeth the truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God;" "Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother;" "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house forever; but the son abideth forever. If the Son, therefore, make you free, ye shall be free indeed." That is to say, truth gives a good man the freedom of the universe, makes him know himself an heir, immortally and everywhere at home; sin gives the wicked man over to bondage, makes him feel afraid of being an outcast, loads him with hardships as a servant. Whoever will believe the revelations of Christ, and assimilate his experience, shall lose the wretched burdens of unbelief and fear and be no longer a servant, but be made free indeed, being adopted as a son.

The whole conception, then, is this: The universe is one vast house, comprising many subordinate mansions. All the moral beings that dwell in it compose one immortal family. God is the universal Father. His will the truth is the law of the household. Whoever obeys it is a worthy son and has the Father's approbation; whoever disobeys it is alienated and degraded into the condition of a servant. We may roam from room to room, but can never get lost outside the walls beyond the reach of the Paternal arms. Death is variety of scenery and progress of life:

"We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another golden chamber of the King's, Larger than this we leave, and lovelier."

Who can comprehend the idea, in its overwhelming magnificence and in its touching beauty, its sweeping amplitude embracing all mysteries, its delicate fitness meeting all wants, without being impressed and stirred by it, even to the regeneration of his soul? If there is any thing calculated to make man feel and live like a child of God, it would surely seem to be this conception. Its unrivalled simplicity and verisimilitude compel the assent of the mind to its reality. It is the most adequate and sublime view of things that ever entered the reason of man. It is worthy the inspiration of God, worthy the preaching of the Son of God. All the artificial and arbitrary schemes of fanciful theologians are as ridiculous and impertinent before it as the offensive flaring of torches in the face of one who sees the steady and solemn splendors of the sun. To live in the harmony of the truth of things, in the conscious love of God and enjoyment of immortality, blessed children, everywhere at home in the hospitable mansions of the everlasting Father, this is the experience to which Christ calls his followers; and any eschatology inconsistent with such a conception is not his.

There are two general methods of interpretation respectively applied to the words of Christ, the literal, or mechanical, and the spiritual, or vital. The former leads to a belief in his second visible advent with an army of angels from heaven, a bodily resurrection of the dead, a universal judgment, the burning up of the world, eternal tortures of the wicked in an abyss of infernal fire, a heaven located on the arch of the Hebrew firmament. The latter gives us a group of the profoundest moral truths clustered about the illuminating and emphasizing mission of Christ, sealed with Divine sanctions, truths of universal obligation and of all redeeming power. The former method is still adopted by the great body of Christendom, who are landed by it in a system of doctrines well nigh identical with those of the Pharisees, against which Christ so emphatically warned his followers, a system of traditional dogmas not having the slightest support in philosophy, nor the least contact with the realities of experience, nor the faintest color of inherent or historical probability. In this age they are absolutely incredible to unhampered and studious minds. On the other hand, the latter method is pursued by the growing body of rational Christians, and it guides them to a consistent array of indestructible moral truths, simple, fundamental, and exhaustive, an array of spiritual principles commanding universal and implicit homage, robed in their own brightness, accredited by their own fitness, armed with the loveliness and terror of their own rewarding and avenging divinity, flashing in mutual lights and sounding in consonant echoes alike from the law of nature and from the soul of man, as the Son of God, with miraculous voice, speaks between.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VII. RESURRECTION OF CHRIST

OF all the single events that ever were supposed to have occurred in the world, perhaps the most august in its moral associations and the most stupendous in its lineal effects, both on the outward fortunes and on the inward experience of mankind, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If, therefore, there is one theme in all the range of thought worthy of candid consideration, it is this. There are two ways of examining it. We may, as unquestioning Christians, inquire how the New Testament writers represent it, what premises they assume, what statements they make, and what inferences they draw. Thus, without perversion, without mixture of our own notions, we should construct the Scripture doctrine of the resurrection of the Savior. Again as critical scholars and philosophical thinkers, we may study that doctrine in all its parts, scrutinize it in all its bearings, trace, as far as possible, the steps and processes of its formation, discriminate as well as we can, by all fair tests, whether it be entirely correct, or wholly erroneous, or partly true and partly false. Both of these methods of investigation are necessary to a full understanding of the subject. Both are obligatory upon the earnest inquirer. Whoso would bravely face his beliefs and intelligently comprehend them, with their grounds and their issues, with a devout desire for the pure truth, whatsoever it may be, putting his trust in the God who made him, will never shrink from either of these courses of examination. Whoso does shrink from these inquiries is either a moral coward, afraid of the results of an honest search after that truth of things which expresses the will of the Creator, or a spiritual sluggard, frightened by a call to mental effort and torpidly clinging to ease of mind. And whoso, accepting the personal challenge of criticism, carries on the investigation with prejudice and passion, holding errors because he thinks them safe and useful, and rejecting realities because he fancies them dangerous and evil, is an intellectual traitor, disloyal to the sacred laws by which God hedges the holy fields and rules the responsible subjects of the realm of truth. We shall combine the two modes of inquiry, first singly asking what the Scriptures declare, then critically seeking what the facts will warrant, it being unimportant to us whether these lines exactly coincide or diverge somewhat, the truth itself being all. We now pass to an examination of Christ's resurrection from five points of view: first, as a fact; second, as a fulfilment of prophecy; third, as a pledge; fourth, as a symbol; and fifth, as a theory.

The writers of the New Testament speak of the resurrection of Christ, in the first place, as a fact. "Jesus whom ye slew and hanged on a tree, him hath God raised up." It could not have been viewed by them in the light of a theory or a legend, nor, indeed, as any thing else than a marvellous but literal fact. This appears from their minute accounts of the scenes at the sepulchre and of the disappearance of his body. Their declarations of this are most unequivocal, emphatic, iterated, "The Lord is risen indeed." All that was most important in their faith they based upon it, all that was most precious to them in this life they staked upon it. "Else why stand we in jeopardy every hour?" They held it before their inner vision as a guiding star through the night of their sufferings and dangers, and freely poured out their blood upon the cruel shrines of martyrdom in testimony that it was a fact. That they believed he literally rose from the grave in visible form also appears, and still more forcibly, from their descriptions of his frequent manifestations to them. These show that in their faith he assumed at his resurrection the same body in which he had lived before, which was crucified and buried. All attempts, whether by Swedenborgians or others, to explain this Scripture language as signifying that he rose in an immaterial body, are futile.1 He appeared to their senses and was recognised by his identical bodily form. He partook of physical food with them. "They gave him a piece of broiled fish and of an honey comb; and he ate before them." The marks in his hands and side were felt by the incredulous Thomas, and convinced him. He said to them, "Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have." To a candid mind there can hardly be a question that the gospel records describe the resurrection of Christ as a literal fact, that his soul reanimated the deceased body, and that in it he showed himself to his disciples. Yet that there are a few texts implying the immateriality of his resurrection body that there are two accounts of it in the gospels we cannot deny.

We advance to see what is the historical evidence for the fact of the resurrection of Christ. This argument, of course, turns chiefly on one point, namely, the competency of the witnesses, and the validity of their testimony.2 We will present the usually exhibited scheme of proof as strongly as we can.3 In the first place, those who testified to the resurrection were numerous enough, so far as mere numbers go, to establish the fact beyond question. Paul declares there were above five hundred who from their personal knowledge could affirm of the Lord's resurrection. But particularly there were the eleven apostles, the two Marys, Cleopas, and the disciples from whom Joseph and Matthias the candidates for Judas Iscariot's apostleship were selected, consisting probably of most of the seventy. If the evidence of any number of men ought to convince us of the alleged event, then, under the existing circumstances, that of twelve ought. Important matters of history are often unhesitatingly received on the authority of a single historian. If the occurrences at the time were sufficient to demonstrate to a reasonable mind the reality of the resurrection, then the unanimous testimony of twelve men to those occurrences should convince us. The oaths of a thousand would be no stronger.

These men possessed sufficient abilities to be trusted, good powers of judgment, and varied experience. The selection of them by Him who "knew what was in man," the boldness and efficiency of their lives, the fruits of their labors everywhere, amply prove their

1 The opposite view is ably argued by Bush in his valuable treatise on the Resurrection.

2 Sherlock, Trial of the Witnesses.

3 Ditton, Demonstration of the Resurrection of Christ. For a sternly faithful estimate of the cogency of this argument, it must be remembered that all the data, every fact and postulate in each step of the reasoning, rest on the historical authority of the four Gospels, documents whose authorship and date are lost in obscurity. Even of "orthodox" theologians few, with any claims to scholarship, now hold that these Gospels, as they stand, were written by the persons whose names they bear. They wander and waver in a thick fog. See Milman's "History of Christianity," vol. i. ch. ii. appendix ii.

general intelligence and energy. And they had, too, the most abundant opportunities of knowledge in regard to the facts to which they bore witness. They were present in the places, at the times, when and where the events occurred. Every motive would conspire to make them scrutinize the subject and the attendant circumstances. And it seems they did examine; for at first some doubted, but afterwards believed. They had been close companions of Jesus for more than a year at the least. They had studied his every feature, look, gesture. They must have been able to recognise him, or to detect an impostor, if the absurd idea of an attempted imposition can be entertained. They saw him many times, near at hand, in the broad light. Not only did they see him, but they handled his wounded limbs and listened to his wondrous voice. If these means of knowing the truth were not enough to make their evidence valid, then no opportunities could be sufficient.

Whoso allows its full force to the argument thus far will admit that the testimony of the witnesses to the resurrection is conclusive, unless he suspects that by some cause they were either incapacitated to weigh evidence fairly, or were led wilfully to stifle the truth and publish a falsehood. Very few persons have ever been inclined to make this charge, that the apostles were either wild enthusiasts of fancy, or crafty calculators of fraud; and no one has ever been able to support the position even with moderate plausibility. Granting, in the first place, hypothetically, that the disciples were ever so great enthusiasts in their general character and conduct, still, they could not have been at all so in relation to the resurrection, because, before it occurred, they had no belief, expectations, nor thoughts about it. By their own frank confessions, they did not understand Christ's predictions, nor the ancient supposed prophecies of that event. And without a strong faith, a burning hopeful desire, or something of the kind, for it to spring from, and rest on, and be nourished by, evidently no enthusiasm could exist. Accordingly, we find that previous to the third day after Christ's death they said nothing, thought nothing, about a resurrection; but from that time, as by an inspiration from heaven, they were roused to both words and deeds. The sudden astonishing change here alluded to is to be accounted for only by supposing that in the mean time they had been brought to a belief that the resurrection had occurred. But, secondly, it is to be noticed that these witnesses were not enthusiasts on other subjects. No one could be the subject of such an overweening enthusiasm as the hypothesis supposes, without betraying it in his conduct, without being overmastered and led by it as an insane man is by his mania. The very opposite of all this was actually the case with the apostles. The Gospels are unpretending, dispassionate narratives, without rhapsody, adulation, or vanity. Their whole conduct disproves the charge of fanaticism. Their appeals were addressed more to reason than to feeling; their deeds were more courageous than rash. They avoided tumult, insult, and danger whenever they could honorably do so; but, when duty called, their noble intrepidity shrank not. They were firm as the trunks of oaks to meet the agony and horror of a violent death when it came; yet they rather shunned than sought to wear the glorious crown from beneath whose crimson circlet drops of bloody sweat must drip from a martyr's brows. The number of the witnesses for the resurrection, the abilities they possessed, their opportunities for knowing the facts, prove the impossibility of their being duped, unless we suppose them to have been blind fanatics. This we have just shown they were not. Would it not, moreover, be most marvellous if they were such heated fanatics, all of them, so many men?

But there is one further foothold for the disbeliever in the historic resurrection of Christ. He may say, "I confess the witnesses were capable of knowing, and undoubtedly did know, the truth; but, for some reason, they suppressed it, and proclaimed a deception." As to this charge, we not only deny the actuality, but even the possibility, of its truth. The narratives of the evangelists contain the strongest evidences of their honesty. The many little unaccountable circumstances they recount, which are so many difficulties in the way of critical belief, the real and the apparent inconsistencies, none of these would have been permitted by fraudulent authors. They are the most natural things in the world, supposing their writers unsuspiciously honest. They also frankly confess their own and each others' errors, ignorance, prejudices, and faults. Would they have done this save from simple hearted truthfulness? Would a designing knave voluntarily reveal to a suspicious scrutiny actions and traits naturally subversive of confidence in him? The conduct of the disciples under the circumstances, through all the scenes of their after lives, proves their undivided and earnest honesty. The cause they had espoused was, if we deny its truth, to the last degree repulsive in itself and in its concomitants, and they were surrounded with allurements to desert it. Yet how unyielding, wonderful, was their disinterested devotedness to it, without exception! Not one, overcome by terror or bowed by strong anguish, shrank from his self imposed task and cried out, "I confess!" No; but when they, and their first followers who knew what they knew, were laid upon racks and torn, when they were mangled and devoured alive by wild beasts, when they were manacled fast amidst the flames till their souls rode forth into heaven in chariots of fire, amidst all this, not one of them ever acknowledged fraud or renounced his belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Were they not honest? Others have died in support of theories and opinions with which their convictions and passions had become interwoven: they died rather than deny facts which were within the cognizance of their senses. Could any man, however firm and dauntless, under the circumstances, go through the trials they bore, without a feeling of truth and of God to support him?

These remarks are particularly forcible in connection with the career of Paul. Endowed with brilliant talents, learned, living at the time and place, he must have been able to form a reliable opinion. And yet, while all the motives that commonly actuate men loudmouthed consistency, fame, wealth, pride, pleasure, the rooted force of inveterate prejudices all were beckoning to him from the temples and palaces of the Pharisaic establishment, he spurned the glowing visions of his ambition and dashed to earth the bright dreams of his youth. He ranged himself among the Christians, the feeble, despised, persecuted Christians; and, after having suffered every thing humanity could bear, having preached the resurrection everywhere with unflinching power, he was at last crucified, or beheaded, by Nero; and there, expiring among the seven hills of Rome, he gave the resistless testimony of his death to the resurrection of Jesus, gasping, as it were, with his last breath, "It is true." Granting the honesty of these men, we could not have any greater proof of it than we have now.

But dishonesty in this matter was not merely untrue; it was also impossible. If fraud is admitted, a conspiracy must have been formed among the witnesses. But that a conspiracy of such a character should have been entered into by such men is in itself incredible, in the outset. And then, if it had been entered into, it must infallibly have broken through, been found out, or been betrayed, in the course of the disasters, perils, terrible trials, to which it and its fabricators were afterwards exposed. Prove that a body of from twelve to five hundred men could form a plan to palm off a gross falsehood upon the world, and could then adhere to it unfalteringly through the severest disappointments, dangers, sufferings, differences of opinion, dissension of feeling and action, without retiring from the undertaking, letting out the secret, or betraying each other in a single instance in the course of years, prove this, and you prove that men may do and dare, deny and suffer, not only without motives, but in direct opposition to their duty, interest, desire, prejudice, and passion. The disciples could not have pretended the resurrection from sensitiveness to the probable charge that they had been miserably deceived; for they did not understand their Master to predict any such event, nor had they the slightest expectation of it. They could not have pretended it for the sake of establishing and giving authority to the good precepts and doctrines Jesus taught; because such a course would have been in the plainest antagonism to all those principles themselves, and because, too, they must have known both the utter wickedness and the desperate hazards and forlornness of such an attempt to give a fictitious sanction to moral truths. In such an enterprise there was before them not the faintest probability of even the slightest success. Every selfish motive would tend to deter them; for poverty, hatred, disgrace, stripes, imprisonment, contempt, and death stared in their faces from the first step that way. Dishonesty, deliberate fraud, then, in this matter, was not merely untrue, but was impossible. The conclusion from the whole view is, therefore, the conviction that the evidence of the witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus is worthy of credence.

There are three considerations, further, worthy of notice in estimating the strength of the historic argument for the resurrection. First, the conduct of the Savior himself in relation to the subject. The charge of unbalanced enthusiasm is inconsistent with the whole character and life of Jesus; but suppose on this point he was an enthusiast, and really believed that three days after his death he would rise again. In that case, would not his mind have dwelt upon the wonderful anticipated phenomenon? Would not his whole soul have been wrapped up in it, and his speech have been almost incessantly about it? Yet he spoke of it only three or four times, and then with obscurity. Again: suppose he was an impostor. An impostor would hardly have risked his reputation voluntarily on what he knew could never take place. Had he done so, his only reliance must have been upon the credulous enthusiasm of his followers. He would then have made it the chief topic, would have striven strenuously to make it a living and intense hope, an immovable, all controlling faith, concentrating on it their desires and expectations, heart and soul. But he really did not do this at all. He did not even make them understand what his vaticinations of the resurrection meant. And when they saw his untenanted body hanging on the cross, they slunk away in confusion and despair. Admit, again, that Christ was enthusiast, or impostor, or both: these qualities exist not in the grave. Here was their end. They could neither raise him from the dead nor move him from the tomb. No considerations in any way connected with Christ himself, therefore, can account for the occurrences that succeeded his death.

Secondly, if the resurrection did not take place, what became of the Savior's body? We have already given reasons why the disciples could not have falsely pretended the resurrection. It is also impossible that they obtained, or surreptitiously disposed of, the dead and interred body; because it was in a tomb of rock securely sealed against them, and watched by a guard which they could neither bribe nor overpower; because they were too much disheartened and alarmed to try to get it; because they could not possibly want it, since they expected a temporal Messiah, and had no hope of a resurrection like that which they soon began proclaiming to the world. And as for the story told by the watch, or rather by the chief priests and Pharisees, it has not consistency enough to hold together. Its foolish unlikelihood has always been transparent. It is unreasonable to suppose that fresh guards would slumber at a post where the penalty of slumbering was death. And, if one or two did sleep, it is absurd to think all would do so. Besides, if they slept, how knew they what transpired in the mean time? Could they have dreamed it? Dreams are not taken in legal depositions; and, furthermore, it would be an astounding, gratuitous miracle if they all dreamed the same thing at the same time.

Finally, a powerful collateral argument in proof of the resurrection of Christ is furnished by the conduct of the Jews. It might seem that if the guards told the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees, of the miracles which occurred at the sepulchre, they must immediately have believed and proclaimed their belief in the Messiahship and resurrection of the crucified Savior. But they had previously remained invulnerable to as cogent proof as this would afford. They had acknowledged the miracles wrought by him when he was alive, but attributed them even his works of beneficence to demoniacal power. They said, "He casteth out devils by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of devils." So they acted in the present case, and, notwithstanding the peerless miracle related by the sentinels, still persisted in their alienation from the Christian faith. Their intensely cherished preconceptions respecting the Messiah, their persecution and crucifixion of Jesus, the glaring inconsistency of his teachings and experience with most that they expected, these things compelled their incredulity to every proof of the Messiahship of the contemned and murdered Nazarene. For, if they admitted the facts on which such proof was based, they would misinterpret them and deny the inferences justly drawn from them. This was plainly the case. It may be affirmed that the Jews believed the resurrection, because they took no fair measures to disprove it, but threatened those who declared it. Since they had every inducement to demonstrate its falsity, and might, it seems, have done so had it been false, and yet never made the feeblest effort to unmask the alleged fraud, we must suspect that they were themselves secretly convinced of its truth, but dared not let it be known, for fear it would prevail, become mighty in the earth, and push them from their seats. In the rage and blindness of their prejudices, they cried, "His blood be on us and on our children!" And from that generation to our own, their history has afforded a living proof of the historic truth of the gospel, and of the stability of its chief corner stone, the resurrection of Christ. The triumphal progress of Christianity from conquering to conquering, together with the baffled plans and complete subjection of the Jews, show that their providential preparatory mission has been fulfilled. If God is in history, guiding the moral drift of human affairs, then the dazzling success of the proclamation of the risen Redeemer is the Divine seal upon the truth of his mission and the reality of his apotheosis. Planting himself on this ground, surrounding himself with these evidences, the reverential Christian will at least for a long time to come cling firmly to the accepted fact of the resurrection of Christ, regardless of whatever misgivings and perplexities may trouble the mind of the iconoclastic and critical truth seeker.

The Christian Scriptures, assuming the resurrection of Christ as a fact, describe it as a fulfilment of prophecy. Luke reports from the risen Savior the words, "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" "Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day." Peter declares that the patriarch David before "spake of the resurrection of Christ." And Paul also affirms, "That the promise which was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again." One can scarcely hesitate in deciding the meaning of these words as they were used by the apostles. The unanimous opinion and interpretation of the Christians of the first centuries, and of all the Church Fathers, leave no shadow of a doubt that it was believed that the resurrection of Jesus was repeatedly foretold in the Old Testament, expected by the prophets, and fulfilled in the event as a seal of the inspired prophecy. Furthermore, Jesus himself repeatedly prophesied his own resurrection from the dead, though his disciples did not understand his meaning until the event put a clear comment on the words. He charged those who saw his transfiguration on the mount, "Tell it to no man until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead." The chief priests told Pilate that they remembered that Jesus said, while he was yet alive, "After three days I will rise again." Standing in the temple at Jerusalem, Jesus said once, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." "When, therefore, he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them;" and then they understood that "he had spoken of the temple of his body." It is perfectly plain that the New Testament represents the resurrection of Christ as the fulfilment of prophecies, those prophecies having been so expounded by him.

There are few problems presented to the candid Christian scholar of to day more perplexing than the one involved in the subject of these prophecies. Paul declares to King Agrippa, "I say none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come: that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead and should show light unto the Gentiles." It is vain to attempt to disguise the fact that the ingenuous student cannot find these prophecies in the Old Testament as we now have it. He will search it through in vain, unless his eyes create what they see. Let any man endeavor to discover a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures which, taken with its context, can fairly bear such a sense. There is not a shadow of valid evidence of any kind to support the merely traditional notions on this subject. The only way of discerning predictions of a death, descent, and ascent, of the Messiah, in the law and the prophets, is by the application of Cabalistic methods of interpretation, theories of occult types, double senses, methods which now are not tolerable to intelligent men. That Rabbinical interpretation which made the story of Ishmael and Isaac, the two children borne to Abraham by Hagar and Sarah, an allegory referring to the two covenants of Judaism and Christianity, could easily extract any desired meaning from any given text. Bearing in mind the prevalence of this kind of exegesis among the Jews, and remembering also that they possessed in the times of Jesus a vast body of oral law, to which they attributed as great authority as to the written, there are two possible ways of honestly meeting the difficulty before us.

First: in God's counsels it was determined that a Messiah should afterwards arise among the Jews. The revealed hope of this stirred the prophets and the popular heart. It became variously and vaguely hinted in their writings, still more variously and copiously unfolded in their traditions. The conception of him gradually took form; and they began to look for a warrior prophet, a national deliverer, a theocratic king. Jesus, being the true Messiah, though a very different personage from the one meant by the writers and understood by the people, yet being the Messiah foreordained by God, applied these Messianic passages to himself, and explained them according to his experience and fate. This will satisfactorily clear up the application of some texts. And others may be truly explained as poetical illustrations, rhetorical accommodations, as when he applies to Judas, at the Last Supper, the words of the Psalm, "He that eateth with me lifteth up his heel against me;" and when he refers to Jonah's tarry in the whale's belly as a symbol of his own destined stay beneath the grave for a similar length of time. Or, secondly, we may conclude that the prophecies under consideration, referred to in the New Testament, were not derived from any sacred documents now in our possession, but either from perished writings, or from oral sources, which we know were abundant then. Justin Martyr says there was formerly a passage in Jeremiah to this effect: "The Lord remembered the dead who were sleeping in the earth, and went down to them to preach salvation to them." 4 There were floating in the Jewish mind, at the time of Christ, at least some fragmentary traditions, vague expectations, that the Messiah was to die, descend to Sheol, rescue some of the captives, and triumphantly ascend. It is true, this statement is denied by some; but the weight of critical authorities seems to us to preponderate in its favor, and the intrinsic historical probabilities leave hardly a doubt of it in our own minds.5 Now, three alternatives are offered us. Either Jesus interpreted Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, on the Rabbinical ground of a double sense, with mystic applications; or he accepted the prophecies referred to, from oral traditions held by his countrymen; or the apostles misunderstood, and in consequence partially misreported, him. All we can positively say is that these precise predictions are plainly not in the Jewish Scriptures, undoubtedly were in the oral law, and were certainly received by the apostles as authoritative.

Continuing our inquiry into the apostolic view of the resurrection of Christ, we shall perceive that it is most prominently set forth as the certificate of our redemption from the

4 Dial. cum Tryph. sect. lxxii.

5 Discussed, with full list of references, in Strauss's Life of Jesus, part iii. cap. i. sect. 112.

kingdom of death to the same glorious destiny which awaited him upon his ascension into heaven. The apostles regarded his resurrection as a supernatural seal set on his mission, warranting his claims as an inspired deliverer and teacher. Thereby, they thought, God openly sanctioned and confirmed his promises. Thereby, they considered, was shown to men God's blessed grace, freely forgiving their sins, and securing to them, by this pledge, a deliverance from the doom of sin as he had risen from it, and an acceptance to a heavenly immortality as he had ascended to it. The resurrection of Christ, then, and not his death, was to them the point of vital interest, the hinge on which all hung. Does not the record plainly show this to an impartial reader? Wherever the apostles preach, whenever they write, they appeal not to the death of a veiled Deity, but to the resurrection of an appointed messenger; not to a vicarious atonement or purchase effected by the mortal sufferings of Jesus, but to the confirmation of the good tidings he brought, afforded by the Father's raising him from the dead. "Whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that he hath raised him from the dead," Paul proclaimed on Mars Hill. In the discourses of the apostles recorded in the Book of Acts, we find that, when they preached the new religion to new audiences, the great doctrine in all cases set forth as fundamental and absorbing is the resurrection; not an atoning death, but a justifying resurrection. "He died for our sins, and rose for our justification." Some of the Athenians thought Paul "a setter forth of two strange gods, Jesus and Resurrection." And when they desire to characterize Christ, the distinguishing culminating phrase which they invariably select shows on what their minds rested as of chief import: they describe him as the one "whom God hath raised from the dead." "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him." "That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of God's power toward us who believe, according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in heaven." It is plain here that the dying of Christ is regarded merely as preliminary to his rising, and that his resurrection and entrance into heaven are received as an assurance that faithful disciples, too, shall obtain admission into the heavenly kingdom.

The Calvinistic doctrine is that the unutterable vicarious agonies of the death of Christ placated the wrath of God, satisfied his justice, and ransomed the souls of the elect from the tortures of hell, and that his resurrection was simply his victorious return from a penal conflict with the powers of Satan. The Unitarian doctrine is that the violent death of Christ was an expression of self sacrificing love, to exert a moral power on the hearts of men, and that his resurrection was a miraculous proof of the authority and truth of his teachings, a demonstration of human immortality. We maintain that neither of these views fully contains the true representation of the New Testament. The artificial horrors of the former cannot be forced into nor wrung out of the written words; while the natural simplicity and meagerness of the latter cannot be made to fill up the written words with adequate significance. There is a medium doctrine, based on the conceptions prevalent at the time the Christian system was constructed and written; a doctrine which equally avoids the credulous excess of the Calvinistic interpretation and the skeptical poverty of the Unitarian; a doctrine which fully explains all the relevant language of the New Testament without violence; a doctrine which, for our own part, we feel sure accurately represents the ideas meant to be conveyed by the Scripture authors. We will state it, and then quote, for its illustration and for their own explanation, the principal texts relating to the resurrection of Jesus.

On account of sin, which had alienated man from God and unfitted him for heaven, he was condemned after death to descend as a disembodied soul into the dark kingdom of the grave, the under world. In that cheerless realm of helpless shades and stillness all departed human spirits were prisoners, and must be, until the advent of the Messiah, when they, or a part of them, should rise. This was the Jewish belief. Now, the apostles were Jews, who had the ideas of their countrymen, to which, upon becoming Christians, they added the new conceptions formed in their minds by the teachings, character, deeds, death, resurrection, of Christ, mixed with their own meditations and experience. Accepting, with these previous notions, the resurrection of Christ as a fact and a fulfilment of prophecy, they immediately supposed that his triumphant exit from the prison of the dead and return to heaven were the prefiguration of the similar deliverance of others and their entrance into heaven. They considered him as "the first born from the dead," "the first fruits of the dead." They emphatically characterize his return to life as a "resurrection out from among the dead," "[non-ASCII characters], plainly implying that the rest of the dead still remained below.6 They received his experience in this respect as the revealing type of that which was awaiting his followers. So far as relates to the separate existence of the soul, the restoration of the widow's son by Elijah, or the resurrection of Lazarus, logically implies all that is implied in the mere resurrection of Christ. But certain notions of localities, of a redemptive ascent, and an opening of heaven for the redeemed spirits of men to ascend thither, were associated exclusively with the last. When, through the will of God, Christ rose, "then first humanity triumphant passed the crystal ports of light, and seized eternal youth!" Their view was not that Christ effected all this by means of his own; but that the free grace of God decreed it, and that Christ came to carry the plan into execution. "God, for his great love to us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ." This was effected as in dramatic show: Christ died, which was suffering the fate of a sinner; he went in spirit to the subterranean abode of spirits, which was bearing the penalty of sin; he rose again, which was showing the penalty of sin removed by Divine forgiveness; he ascended into heaven, which was revealing the way for our ascent thrown open. Such is the general scope of thought in close and vital connection with which the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ stands. We shall spare enlarging on those parts of it which have been sufficiently proved and illustrated in preceding chapters, and confine our attention as much as may be to those portions which have direct relations with the resurrection of Christ. It is our object, then, to show what we think will plainly appear in the light of the above general statement that, to the New Testament writers, the resurrection, and not the death, of Christ is the fact of central moment, is the assuring seal of our forgiveness, reconciliation, and heavenly adoption.

6 Wood, The Last Things, pp. 31-44.

They saw two antithetical starting points in the history of mankind: a career of ruin, beginning with condemned Adam in the garden of Eden at the foot of the forbidden tree, dragging a fleshly race down into Sheol; a career of remedy, beginning with victorious Christ in the garden of Joseph at the mouth of the rent sepulchre, guiding a spiritual race up into heaven.

The Savior himself is reported as saying, "I lay down my life that I may take it again:" the dying was not for the sake of substitutional suffering, but for the sake of a resurrection. "Except a corn of wheat die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." "A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow; but as soon as she is delivered of the child she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." The context here shows the Savior's meaning to be that the woe of his death would soon be lost in the weal of his resurrection. The death was merely the necessary antecedent to the significant resurrection. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead unto an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed." "Him hath God raised on high by his right hand, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins." How clear it is here that not the vicarious death of Christ buys off sinners, but his resurrection shows sins to be freely forgiven, the penalty remitted! "Remember that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, according to my gospel: therefore I endure all things for the elect's sake, that they may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory." "Be it known unto you, therefore, men, brethren, that through Him whom God raised again is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins." The passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ninth chapter, from the twenty third verse to the twenty seventh, most emphatically connects the annulling of sin through the sacrifice of Christ with his ascended appearance in heaven. "Jesus who was delivered for our offences and was raised again for our justification:" that is, Jesus died because he had entered the condition of sinful humanity, the penalty of which was death; he was raised to show that God had forgiven us our sins and would receive us to heaven instead of banishing us to the under world. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Belief in the resurrection of Christ is here undeniably made the great condition of salvation. No text can be found in which belief in the death, or blood, or atoning merits, of Christ is made that condition. And yet nine tenths of Christendom by their creeds are to day proclaiming, "Believe in the vicarious sufferings of Christ, and thou shalt be saved; believe not in them, and thou shalt be damned!" "God hath both raised up the Lord and will also raise up us." "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins." This text cannot be explained upon the common Calvinistic or Unitarian theories. Whether Christ was risen or not made no difference in their justification before God if his death had atoned for them, made no difference in their moral condition, which was as it was; but if Christ had not risen, then they were mistaken in supposing that heaven had been opened for them: they were yet held in the necessity of descending to the under world, the penalty of their sins. The careful reader will observe that, in many places in the Scriptures where a burden and stress of importance seem laid upon the death of Christ, there immediately follows a reference to his resurrection, showing that the dying is only referred to as the preparatory step to the rising, the resurrection being the essential thing. "The Apostle Paul scarcely speaks of the death of the Savior except in connection with his resurrection," Bleek says, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. "It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again and is now at the right hand of God."

"If we believe that Jesus died and rose again." "To this end Christ both died, and rose and lived again." "He died for them and rose again." We confidently avow, therefore, that the Christian Scriptures concentrate the most essential significance and value of the mission of Jesus in his resurrection, describing it as the Divine seal of his claims, the visible proof and pledge of our redemption, by God's freely forgiving grace, from the fatal bondage of death's sepulchral domain to the blessed splendors of heaven's immortal life.

There remain a class of passages to be particularly noticed, in which an extraordinary emphasis seems to be laid on Christ's sufferings, Christ's blood, Christ's death, three phrases that mean virtually the same thing and are used interchangeably. The peculiar prominence given to the idea of the sacrifice of Christ in the instances now referred to is such as might lead one to suppose that some mysterious efficacy was meant to be attributed to it. But we think an accurate examination of the subject will show that these texts are really in full harmony with the view we have been maintaining. Admitting that the resurrection of Christ was the sole circumstance of ultimate meaning and importance, still, his violent and painful death would naturally be spoken of as often and strongly as it is, for two reasons. First, the chief ground of wonder and claim for gratitude to him was that he should have left his pre existent state of undisturbed bliss and glory, and submitted to such humiliation and anguish for others, for sinners. Secondly, it was the prerequisite to his resurrection, the same, in effect, with it, since the former must lead to the latter; for, as the foremost apostle said, "It was not possible that he should be holden in death."

The apostolical writers do not speak of salvation by the blood of Christ any more plainly than they do of salvation by the name of Christ, salvation by grace, and salvation by faith. If at one time they identify him with the sacrificial "lamb," at another time they as distinctively identify him with the "high priest offering himself," and again with "the great Shepherd of the sheep," and again with "the mediator of the new covenant," and again with "the second Adam." These are all figures of speech, and, taken superficially, they determine nothing as to doctrine. The propriety and the genuine character and force of the metaphor are in each case to be carefully sought with the lights of learning and under the guidance of a docile candor. The thoughts that, in consequence of transmitted sin, all departed souls of men were confined in the under world that Christ, to carry out and revealingly exemplify the free grace of the Father, came into the world, died a cruel death, descended to the prison world of the dead, declared there the glad tidings, rose thence and ascended into heaven, the forerunner of the ransomed hosts to follow, these thoughts enable us to explain, in a natural, forcible, and satisfactory manner, the peculiar phraseology of the New Testament in regard to the death of Christ, without having recourse to the arbitrary conceptions and mystical horror usually associated with it now.

For instance, consider the passage in the second chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, from the eleventh verse to the nineteenth. The writer here says that "the Gentiles, who formerly were far off, strangers from the covenants of promise, are now made nigh by the blood of Christ." This language he clearly explains as meaning that through the death and resurrection of Christ "the middle wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles was broken down" and a universal religion inaugurated, free from all invidious distinctions and carnal ordinances. In his bodily death and spiritual ascension the Jewish ritual law was abolished and the world wide moral law alone installed. From his spirit, rising into heaven, all national peculiarities fell away, and through him Jews and Gentiles both had access, by communion with his ascended and cosmopolitan soul, unto the Father. A careful study of all the passages in the New Testament which speak of Christ as delivering men from the wrath of God will lead, it seems to us, almost every unprejudiced person to agree with one of the ablest German critics, who says that "the technical phrase 'wrath of God' here means, historically, banishment of souls into the under world, and that the fact of Christ's triumph and ascent was a precious pledge showing to the Christians that they too should ascend to eternal life in heaven."7 The doctrine of the descent of Christ among the dead and of his redemptive mission there has of late wellnigh faded from notice; but if any one wishes to see the evidence of its universal reception and unparalleled importance in the Christian Church for fifteen hundred years, presented in overwhelming quantity and irresistible array, let him read the learned work devoted to this subject recently published in Germany.8 He can hardly peruse this work and follow up its references without seeing that, almost without an exception, from the days of Peter and Paul to those of Martin Luther, it has been held that "the death and resurrection of Christ are the two poles between which," as Guder says, "his descent into the under world lies." The phrase "blood of Christ" is often used in Scripture in a pregnant sense, including the force of meaning that would be expressed by his death, descent, resurrection, and ascension, with all their concomitants. As a specimen of innumerable passages of like import which might be cited, we will quote a single expression from Epiphanius, showing that the orthodox teachers in the fourth century attributed redeeming efficacy to Christ's resurrection rather than to his death." As the pelican restores its dead offspring by dropping its own blood upon their wounds, so our Lord Jesus Christ dropped his blood upon Adam, Eve, and all the dead, and gave them life by his burial and resurrection." 9

It was a part of the Mosaic ritual, laid down in the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus, that on the great annual day of expiation there should be two goats chosen by lot, one for the Lord and one for Azazel. The former the high priest was to slay, and with his blood sprinkle

7 Bretschneider, Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 59: Christus der Erloser vom Tode.

8 Guder, Die Lehre von der Erscheinung Jesu Christi unter den Todten: In ihrem Zusammenhange mit der Lehre von den Letzten Dingen.

9 Physiol., cap. 8: De Pelecano.

the mercy seat. The latter, when the high priest's hands had been laid on his head and all the iniquities of the children of Israel confessed over him, was to be sent into the wilderness and loosed. The former goat is called "a sin offering for the people." The latter is called "a scape goat to make an atonement with the Lord." The blood of the sin offering could not have been supposed to be a substitute purchasing the pardon of men's offences, because there is no hint of any such idea in the record, and because it was offered to reconcile "houses," "tabernacles," "altars," as well as to reconcile men. It had simply a ceremonial significance. Such rites were common in many of the early religions. They were not the efficient cause of pardon, but were the formal condition of reconciliation. And then, in regard to the scapegoat, it was not sacrificed as an expiation for sinners; it merely symbolically carried off the sins already freely forgiven. All these forms and phrases were inwrought with the whole national life and religious language of the Jews. Now, when Jesus appeared, a messenger from God, to redeem men from their sins and to promise them pardon and heaven, and when he died a martyr's death in the fulfilment of his mission, how perfectly natural that this sacrificial imagery these figures of blood, propitiation, sprinkling the mercy seat should be applied to him, and to his work and fate! The burden of sins forgiven by God's grace in the old covenant the scape goat emblematically bore away, and the people went free. So if the words must be supposed to have an objective and not merely a moral sense when the Baptist cried, "Behold the Lamb of God, that beareth off the sin of the world," his meaning was that Jesus was to bear off the penalty of sin that is, the Hadean doom which God's free grace had annulled and open heaven to the ranks of reconciled souls. There is not the least shadow of proof that the sacrifices in the Mosaic ritual were Divinely ordained as types pre figuring the great sacrifice of Christ. There is no such pretence in the record, no such tradition among the people, not the slightest foundation whatever of any sort to warrant that arbitrary presumption. All such applications of them are rhetorical; and their historical force and moral meaning are clearly explicable on the views which we have presented in the foregoing pages, but are most violently strained and twisted by the Calvinistic theory to meet the severe exigencies of a theoretical dogma.

If any one, granting that the central efficacy of the mission of Christ, dogmatically and objectively considered, lay in his descent into Hades and in his resurrection, maintains that still certain passages in the New Testament do ascribe an expiatory effect directly to his death as such, we reply that this interpretation is quite likely to be correct. And we can easily trace the conception to its origin beyond the pale of revelation. It was an idea prevalent among the Jews in the time of the apostles, and before, that death was an atonement for all sins, and that the death of the righteous atoned for the sins of others.10 Now, the apostles might adopt this view and apply it pre eminently to the case of Christ. This is the very explanation given by Origen.11 De Wette quotes the following sentence, and many others of the same purport,

10 Gfrorer, Gesehichte des Urchristenthums, abth. ii. pp. 187 190.

11 Mosheim, Commentaries on Christianity in the First Three Centuries, Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 162-163.

from the Talmud: "The death of the just is the redemption of sinners."12 The blood of any righteous man was a little atonement; that of Christ was a vast one. The former all Protestants call a heathen error. So they should the latter, because it sprung from the same source and is the same in principle. If, then, there are any scriptural texts which imply that the mere death of Christ had a vicarious, expiatory efficacy, they are, so far forth, the reflection of heathen and Jewish errors yet lingering in the minds of the writers, and not the inspired revelation of an isolated, arbitrary after expedient contrived in the secret counsels of God and wonderfully interpolated into the providential history of the world. But, if there are any such passages, they are few and unimportant. The great mass of the scriptural language on this subject is fairly and fully explained by the historical theory whose outlines we have sketched. The root of the matter is the resurrection of Christ out from among the dead and his ascent into heaven.

It has not been our purpose in this chapter, or in the preceding chapters, to present the history of the Christian doctrine of the atonement, either in its intrinsic significance or in its relations to subjective religious experience. We have only sought to explain it, according to the original understanding of it, in its objective relations to the fate of men in the future life. The importance of the subject, its difficulty, and the profound prejudices connected with it, are so great as not only to excuse, but even to require, much explanatory repetition to make the truth clear and to recommend it, in many lights, with various methods, and by accumulated authorities. Those who wish to see the whole subject of the atonement treated with consummate fulness and ability, leaving nothing to be desired from the historical point of view, have only to read the masterly work of Baur.13

In leaving this part of our subject here, we would submit the following considerations to the candid judgment of the reader. Admitting the truth of the common doctrine of the atonement, why did Christ die? It does not appear how there could be any particular efficacy in mere death. The expiation of sin which he had undertaken required only a certain amount of suffering. It did not as far as we can see on the theory of satisfaction by an equivalent substituted suffering require death. It seems as if local and physical ideas must have been associated with the thought of his death. And we find the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews thus replying to the question, Why did Christ die? "That through death he might destroy him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." Now, plainly, this end was accomplished by his resurrection bursting asunder the bonds of Hades and showing that it was no longer the hopeless prison of the dead. The justice of this explanation appears from the logical necessity of the series of ideas, the internal coherence and harmony of thought. It has been ably shown that substantially this view is the accurate interpretation of the New Testament doctrine by

12 Comm. de Morte Christi Expiatoria, cap. iii.: Qua Judaorum Recentiorum Christologia de Passione ac Morte Messia docet.

13 Die Christliche Lehre von der Versohnung in ihrer Geschichtlichen Entwicklung von der Alteaten Zeit bis auf die Neueste.

Steinbart,14 Schott,15 Bretschneider,16 Klaiber,17 and others. The gradual deviations from this early view can be historically traced, step by step, through the refining speculations of theologians. First, in ecclesiastical history, after the New Testament times, it is thought the devil has a right over all souls in consequence of sin. Christ is a ransom offered to the devil to offset his claim. Sometimes this is represented as a fair bargain, sometimes as a deception practised on the devil, sometimes as a battle waged with him. Next, it is conceived that the devil has no right over human souls, that it is God who has doomed them to the infernal prison and holds them there for their sin. Accordingly, the sacrifice of Christ for their ransom is offered not to the tyrannical devil but to the offended God. Finally, in the progress of culture, the satisfaction theory appears; and now the suffering of Christ is neither to buy souls from the devil nor to appease God and soften his anger into forgiveness; but it is to meet the inexorable exigencies of the abstract law of infinite justice and deliver sinners by bearing for them the penalty of sin. The whole course of thought, once commenced, is natural, inevitable; but the starting point is from an error, and the pausing places are at false goals.

The view which we have asserted to be the scriptural view prevailed as the orthodox doctrine of the Church throughout the first three centuries, as Bahr has proved in his valuable treatise on the subject.18 He shows that during that period Christ's death was regarded as a revelation of God's love, a victory over the devil, (through his resurrection,) a means of obtaining salvation for men, but not as a punitive sacrifice, not as a vindication of God's justice, not as a vicarious satisfaction of the law.19 If the leading theologians of Christendom, such as Anselm, Calvin, and Grotius, have so thoroughly repudiated the original Christian and patristic doctrine of the atonement, and built another doctrine upon their own uninspired speculations, why should our modern sects defer so slavishly to them, and, instead of freely investigating the subject for themselves from the first sources of Scripture and spiritual philosophy, timidly cling to the results reached by these biassed, morbid, and over sharp thinkers? In proportion as scholarly, unfettered minds engage in such a criticism, we believe the exposition given in the foregoing pages will be recognised as scriptural. Without involving this whole theory, how can any one explain the unquestionable fact that during the first four centuries the entire orthodox Church believed that Christ at his resurrection from the under world delivered Adam from his imprisonment there?20 All acknowledge that the phrase "redemption by the blood of Christ" is a metaphor. The only question is, what meaning was it intended to convey? We maintain its meaning to be that

14 System der Reinen Philosophie, oder Gluckseligkeitslehre des Christenthums, u.s.f.

15 Epitome Theologia Christiana Dogmatica.

16 Die Lehren von Adam's Fall, der Erbsunde, und dem Opfer Christi.

17 Studien der Evang. Geietlichkeit Wurtemburgs, viii. 1, 2. Doederlein, Morus, Knapp, Schwarze, and Reinhard affirm that the death of Christ was not the price of our pardon, but the confirming declaration of free pardon from God. Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 297, note 5.

18 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei Jahrhunderteu.

19 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei Jahrhunderten, ss. 176-180.

20 Augustine, Epist. ad Evodium 99. Op. Imp. vi. 22, 30. Epist. 164. Dante makes Adam say he had been 4302 years in Limbo when Christ, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi.

through all the events and forces associated with the death of Christ, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, men are delivered from the doom of the under world. The common theology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatory efficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system known as Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a saving spiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretation charges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of the love of God freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. The second seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeance legally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appetite. The third fills it with a regenerative moral influence to be distributed upon the characters of believers. The two former also include the last; but it excludes them. Now, as it seems to us, the first is the form of mistake in which the early Church, including the apostles, embodied the true significance of the mission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which they lived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples of Jesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortality brought to light by Christianity.21 The second is the form of false theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruel results of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third is the dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truth in the case.

There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holds up the resurrection of Christ. It is regarded as a summons to a moral and spiritual resurrection within the breast of the believer. As the great Forerunner had ascended to a spiritual and immortal life in the heavens, so his followers should be inspired with such a realizing sense of heavenly things, with such Divine faith and fellowship, as would lift them above the world, with all its evanescent cares, and fix their hearts with God. This high communion with Christ, and intense assurance of a destined speedy inheritance with him, should render the disciple insensible to the clamorous distractions of earth, invulnerable to the open and secret assaults of sin, as if in the body he were already dead, and only alive in the spirit to the obligations of holiness, the attractions of piety, and the promises of heaven. "When we were dead in trespasses and sins, God loved us, and hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places." "If ye, then, be risen with Christ, set your affection on things above, not on earthly things; for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." This moral symbolic application of the resurrection is most beautiful and effective. Christ has risen, immaculate and immortal, into the pure and holy heaven: then live virtuously and piously, that you may be found worthy to be received unto him. "He that hath this hope purifieth himself, even as He is pure." Paul enforces this thought through the striking figure that, since "we are freed from the law through the death of Christ, we should be married to his risen spirit and bring forth fruit unto God." And again, when he speaks in these words, "Christ in you the hope of glory," we suppose he refers to the spiritual image of the risen Redeemer formed in the disciples' imagination and heart, the prefiguring and witnessing pledge of their ascension also to heaven. The same practical use is made of the doctrine through the rite and sign of baptism. "Ye are buried with Christ in

21 Bretschneider forcibly illustrates this in his Handbuch der Dogmatik der Evang. Luther. Kirche, sects. 156-158, band ii.

baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through faith in the working of God, who hath raised him from the dead." "Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ, why are ye subject to worldly ordinances? and if ye be risen with him, seek those things which are above." When the disciple sunk beneath the baptizing waters, he was typically dead and buried, as Jesus was in the tomb; when he rose from the waters into the air again, he figuratively represented Christ rising from the dead into heaven. Henceforth, therefore, he was to consider himself as dead to all worldly sins and lusts, alive to all heavenly virtues and aspirations. "Therefore," the apostle says, "we are buried with Christ by baptism unto death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should walk in newness of life." "In that Christ died, he died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God." "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." This was strictly true to the immediate disciples of Jesus. When he died, their hearts died within them; they shrank away in hopeless confusion and gloom. When he returned to life and ascended to heaven, in feeling and imagination they went with him. Every moral power and motive started into new life and energy.

"The day when from the dead Our Lord arose, then everywhere, Out of their darkness and despair, Triumphant over fears and foes, The souls of his disciples rose."

An unheard of assurance of the Father's love and of their eternal inheritance flooded their being with its regenerating, uplifting power. To their absorbing anticipations the mighty consummation of all was at hand. In reflective imagination it was already past, and they, dead to the world, only lived to God. The material world and the lust thereof had sunk beneath them and vanished. They were moving in the universe of imperishable realities unseen by the fleshly eye. To their faith already was unrolled over them that new firmament in whose spanless welkin no cloudy tempests ever gather and break, and the serene lights never fade nor go down. This experience of a spiritual exaltation above the sins and degrading turmoils of passion, above the perishing baubles of the earth, into the religious principles which are independent and assured, peace, and bliss, and eternity, is attainable by all who with the earnestness of their souls assimilate the moral truths of Christianity, pressing in pious trust after the steps of the risen Master. And this, after all, is the vital essence of the doctrine of the resurrection as it makes practical appeal to us. This will stand, though gnawing time and hostile criticism should assail and shake all the rest. It is something not to be mechanically wrought upon us from without, but to be done within by our own voluntary effort and prayer, by God's help. To rise from sloth, unbelief, sin, from moral death, to earnestness, faith, beneficence, to eternal life in the breast, is a real and most sublime resurrection, the indispensable preparation for that other and final one which shall raise us from the sepulchre to the sky. When, on Easter morning, Christian disciples throughout the world hear the joyous cry, "Christ is risen," and their own hearts instinctively respond, with an unquenchable persuasion that he is now alive somewhere in the heights of the universe, "Christ is risen indeed," they should endeavor in spirit to rise too, rise from the deadly bondage and corruption of vice and indifference. While the earth remains, and men survive, and the evils which alienate them from God and his blessedness retain any sway over them, so oft as that hallowed day comes round, this is the kindling message of Divine authority ever fresh, and of transcendent import never old, that it bears through all the borders of Christendom to every responsible soul: "Awake from your sleep, arise from your death, lift up your eyes to heaven, and the risen Redeemer will give you the light of immortal life!" Have this awakening and deathless experience in the soul, and you will be troubled by no doubts about an everlasting life succeeding the close of the world. But so long as this spiritual resurrection in the breast is unknown, you can have no knowledge of eternal life, no experimental faith in a future entrance from the grave into heaven, no, not though millions of resurrections had crowded the interstellar space with ascending shapes. Rise, then, from your moral graves, and already, by faith and imagination, sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.

Before leaving this subject, it belongs to us to look at it as a theory; that is, to consider with critical scrutiny the conclusions which are supposed to flow from its central fact. We must regard it from three distinct points of view, seeking its meaning in sound logic, its force in past history, its value in present experience. First, then, we are to inquire what really is the logical significance of the resurrection of Christ. The looseness and confusion of thought prevailing in relation to this point are amazing. It seems as if mankind were contented with investigations careless, reasonings incoherent, and inferences arbitrary, in proportion to the momentousness of the matter in hand. In regard to little details of sensible fact and daily business their observation is sharp, their analysis careful, their reflection patient; but when they approach the great problems of morality, God, immortality, they shrink from commensurate efforts to master those mighty questions with stern honesty, and remain satisfied with fanciful methods and vague results. The resurrection of Christ is generally regarded as a direct demonstration of the immortality of man, an argument of irrefragable validity. But this is an astonishing mistake. The argument was not so constructed by Paul. He did not seek directly to prove the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the dead. He took for granted the Pharisaic doctrine that all souls on leaving their bodies descended to Sheol, where they darkly survived, waiting to be summoned forth at the arrival of the Messianic epoch. Assuming the further premise that Christ after death went down among these imprisoned souls, and then rose thence again, Paul infers, by a logical process strictly valid and irresistible to one holding those premises, that the general doctrine of a resurrection from the dead is true, and that by this visible pledge we may expect it soon, since the Messiah, who is to usher in its execution, has already come and finished the preliminary stages of his work. The apostle's own words plainly show this to be his meaning. "If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen. But now is Christ risen from the dead, become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Every man shall be made alive in his own order: Christ the first fruits; then they that are Christ's, at his coming; then the last remnant, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God." The notions of a universal imprisonment of souls in the intermediate state, and of a universal raising of them thence at an appointed time, having faded from a deep and vivid belief into a cold traditional dogma, ridiculed by many, cared for at all by few, realizingly held by almost none, Paul's argument has been perverted and misinterpreted, until it is now commonly supposed to mean this: Christ has risen from the dead: therefore the soul of man is immortal. Whereas the argument really existed in his mind in the reverse form, thus: The souls of men are immortal and are hereafter to be raised up: therefore Christ has risen as an example and illustration thereof. It is singular to notice that he has himself clearly stated the argument in this form three times within the space of four consecutive verses, as follows: "If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:" "God raised Christ not up, if so be that the dead rise not." "For if the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised." The fact of the resurrection of Christ, taken in connection with the related notions previously held in the mind of Paul, formed the complement of an irresistible argument to prove the impending resurrection of the dead, But if it be now perceived that those other notions were Pharisaic errors, the argument, as he employed it, falls to the ground.

Taken by itself and analyzed by a severe logic, the resurrection of Christ proves nothing conclusively in regard to our immortality. If it did of itself prove any thing, the direct logical inference from it would be that henceforth all men, three days after death, would rise bodily from the dead, appear for a season on earth as before, and then ascend visibly into the sky. If at the present time a man who had been put to death and entombed three days should openly come forth alive, considered as an isolated fact, what would it prove? It would merely prove that a wonderful event had occurred. It would show that either by some mysterious means he had escaped death, or else that by some apparently preternatural agency he had been restored to life from the dead. Taken by itself, it could not prove whether the occurrence was caused by a demoniacal or by a Divine power, or by some occult force of nature developed by a peculiar combination of conditions. The strange event would stand clear to our senses; but all beyond that would be but an hypothesis of our own, and liable to mistake. Consequently, we say, the resurrection, taken by itself, proves no doctrine. But we may so suppose the case that such an event would, from its relation to something else, acquire logical meaning. For instance, if Christ had taught that he had supernatural knowledge of truth, a Divine commission to reveal a future life, and said that, after he should have been dead and buried three days, God would restore him to life to authenticate his words, and if, then, so stupendous a miracle occurred in accordance with his prediction, it would prove that his claims and doctrine were true, because God is no accomplice in deception. Such was the case with Jesus as narrated; and thus his resurrection appears, not as having doctrinal significance and demonstrative validity in itself, but as a miraculous authentication of his mission. That is to say, the Christian's faith in immortality rests not directly on the resurrection of Christ, but on his teachings, which were confirmed and sealed by his resurrection. It is true that, even in this modified form, some persons of dialectical minds will deny all validity to the argument. What necessary connection is there, they will ask, between the exhibition of mechanico chemical wonders, physical feats, however abnormal and inexplicable, and the possession of infallibility of intellectual insight and moral utterance? If a man should say, God is falsehood and hatred, and in evidence of his declaration should make a whole cemetery disembogue its dead alive, or cause the sun suddenly to sink from its station at noon and return again, would his wonderful performance prove his horrible doctrine? Why, or how, then, would a similar feat prove the opposite doctrine? Plainly, there is not, on rigid logical principles, any connecting tie or evidencing coherence between a physical miracle and a moral doctrine.22 We admit the correctness of this, on philosophical grounds. But the validity of a miracle as proof of a doctrine rests on the spontaneous assumption that no man can work a miracle unless God specially delegate him the power: thereby God becomes the voucher of his envoy. And when a person claiming to be a messenger from God appears, saying, "The Father hath commanded me to declare that in the many mansions of his house there is a blessed life for men after the close of this life," and when he promises that, in confirmation of his claim, God will restore him to life after he shall have been three days dead, and when he returns accordingly triumphant from the sepulchre, the argument will be unquestioningly received as valid by the instinctive common sense of all who are convinced of the facts.

We next pass from the meaning of the resurrection in logic to its force and working in history. When Jesus hung on the cross, and the scornful shouts of the multitude murmured in his ears, the disciples had fled away, disappointed, terror stricken, despairing. His star seemed set in a hopeless night of shame and defeat. The new religion appeared a failure. But in three days affairs had taken a new aspect. He that was crucified had risen, and the scattered disciples rallied from every quarter, and, animated by faith and zeal, went forth to convert the world. As an organic centre of thought and belief, as a fervid and enduring incitement to action, in the apostolic times and all through the early centuries, the received fact of the resurrection of Christ wielded an incomparable influence and produced incalculable results. Christianity indeed rose upon it, and, to a great extent, flourished through it. The principal effect which the gospel has had in bringing life and immortality to light throughout a large part of the world is to be referred to the proclaimed resurrection of Christ. For without the latter the former would not have been. Its historical value has therefore been immense. More than nine tenths of the dormant common faith of Christendom in a future life now outwardly reposes on it from tradition and custom. The great majority of Christians grow up, by education and habit, without any sharp conscientious investigation of their own, to an undisturbed belief in immortality, a belief passively resting on the demonstration of the doctrine supposed to have been furnished by the resurrection of Christ in Judea two thousand years ago. The historical power of that fact has therefore been inexpressibly important; and its vast and happy consequences as food and basis of faith still remain. But this historic force is no longer what it once was as a living and present cause. It now operates mostly through traditional reception as an established doctrine to be taken

22 J. Blanco White, Letter on Miracles, in appendix to Martineau's Rationale of Religious Inquiry.

for granted, without fresh individual inquiry. Education and custom use it as an unexamined but trusted foundation to build on by common assumptions. And so the historic impetus is not yet spent. But it certainly has diminished; and it will diminish more. When faced with dauntless eyes and approached by skeptical methods, it of course cannot have the silencing, all sufficient authority, now that it is buried in the dim remoteness of nineteen centuries and surrounded by obscuring accompaniments, that it had when its light blazed close at hand. The historical force of the alleged resurrection of Christ must evidently, other things being equal, lessen to an unprejudiced inquirer in some proportion to the lengthening distance of the event from him in time, and the growing difficulties of ignorance, perplexity, doubt, manifold uncertainty, deficiency, infidel suggestions, and naturalistic possibilities, intervening between it and him. The shock of faith given by the miracle is dissipated in coming through such an abyss of time. The farther off and the longer ago it was, the more chances for error and the more circumstances of obscurity there are, and so much the worth and force of the historical belief in it will naturally become fainter, till they will finally fade away. An honest student may bow humbly before the august front of Christian history and join with the millions around in acknowledging the fact of the resurrection of Christ. But we maintain that the essential fact in this historic act is not the visible resuscitation of the dead body, but the celestial reception of the deathless spirit. So Paul evidently thought; for he had never seen Christ in the flesh, yet he places himself, as a witness to the resurrection of Christ, in the same rank with those who had seen him on his reappearance in the body: "Last of all he was seen of me also." Paul had only seen him in vision as a glorified spirit of heaven.

We know that our belief in the fleshly resurrection of Jesus rests on education and habit, on cherished associations of reverence and attachment, rather than on sifted testimony and convincing proof. It is plain, too, that if a person takes the attitude, not of piety and receptive trust, but of skeptical antagonism, it is impossible, as the facts within our reach are to day, to convince him of the asserted reality in question. An unprejudiced mind competently taught and trained for the inquiry, but whose attitude towards the declared fact is that of distrust, a mind which will admit nothing but what is conclusively proved, cannot be driven from its position by all the extant material of evidence. Education, associations, hopes, affections, leaning that way, he may be convinced; but leaning the other way, or poised in indifference on a severe logical ground, he will honestly remain in his unbelief despite of all the arguments that can be presented. In the first place, he will say, "The only history we have of the resurrection is in the New Testament; and the testimony of witnesses in their own cause is always suspicious; and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote those documents, or precisely when and how they originated: besides that, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterly uncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation which satisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in any severe court of reason." And in reply, although we may claim that there is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble Christian, previously inclined to such a faith, that the New Testament documents were written by the persons whose names they bear, and that their accounts are true, yet we cannot pretend that there is sufficient evidence effectually to convince a critical inquirer that there is no possibility of ungenuineness and unauthenticity. In the second place, such a person will say, "Many fabulous miracles have been eagerly credited by contemporaries of their professed authors, and handed down to the credulity of after times; many actual events, honestly, interpreted as miracles, without fraud in any party concerned, have been so accepted and testified to.

Roman Catholic Christendom claims to this day the performance of miracles within the Church; while all Protestant Christendom scouts them as ridiculous tales: and this may be one of them. How can we demonstrate that it does not fall within the same class on the laws of evidence?" And although our own moral beliefs and sympathies may force upon us the most profound conviction to the contrary, it is plainly out of our power to disprove the possibility of this hypothesis being true. In the third place, he will say, "Of all who testify to the resurrection, there is nothing in the record admitting its entire reliableness as an ingenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors to show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion or deceit anywhere, may have put a miraculous interpretation upon it all, such additional particulars as his visible ascension into the sky being a later mythical accretion." This view may well seem offensive, even shocking, to the pious believer; but it is plainly possible. It is intrinsically more easily conceivable than the accredited miracle. It is impossible positively to refute it: the available data do not exist. Upon the whole, then, we conclude that the time is coming when the basis of faith in immortality, in order to stand the tests of independent scrutiny, must be historically as well as logically shifted from a blind dependence on the miraculous resurrection of Christ to a wise reliance on insight into the supernatural capacity and destiny of man, on the deductions of moral reason and the prophecies of religious trust.

Finally, we pause a moment, in closing this discussion, to weigh the practical value of the resurrection of Christ as acknowledged in the experience of the present time. How does that event, admitted as a fact, rest in the average personal experience of Christians now? We shall provoke no intelligent contradiction when we say that it certainly does not often rest on laborious research and rigorous testing of evidence. We surely risk nothing in saying that with the multitude of believers it rests on a docile reception of tradition, an unquestioning conformity to the established doctrine. And that reception and conformity in the present instance depend, we shall find by going a step further back, upon a deep a priori faith in God and immortality. When Paul reasons that, if the dead are not to rise, Christ is not risen, but that the dead are to rise, and therefore Christ is risen, his argument reposes on a spontaneous practical method of moral assumption, not on a judicial process of logical proof. So is it with Christians now. The intense moral conviction that God is good, and that there is another life, and that it would be supremely worthy of God to send a messenger to teach that doctrine and to rise from the dead in proof of it, it is this earnest previous faith that gives plausibility, vitality, and power to the preserved tradition of the actual event. If we trace the case home to the last resort, as it really lies in the experience developed in us by Christianity, we shall find that a deep faith in God is the basis of our belief, first in general immortality, and secondly in the special resurrection of Christ as related thereto. But, by a confusion, or a want, of thought, the former is mistakenly supposed to rest directly and solely on the latter. The doctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection of Christ fall within the province of faith, resting on moral grounds, not within that of knowledge, resting on logical grounds. For example: what direct proof is there that Christ, when he vanished from the disciples, went to the presence of God in heaven, to die no more? It was only seen that he disappeared: all beyond that except as it rests on belief in the previous words of Christ himself is an inference of faith, a faith kindled in the soul by God and not created by the miracle of the resurrection.

That imagination, tradition, feeling, and faith, have much more to do with the inferences commonly drawn from the resurrection of Christ than any strict investigation of its logical contents has, appears clearly enough from the universal neglect to draw any inferences from, or to attribute any didactic importance to, the other resurrections recorded in the New Testament. We refer especially to the resurrection narrated in the twenty seventh chapter of Matthew, "the most stupendous miracle ever wrought upon earth," it has been termed; and yet hardly any one ever deigns to notice it. Thus the evangelist writes: "And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." Nothing is inferred from this alleged event but the power of God. Yet logically what separates it from the resurrection of Christ? In Greece there was the accredited account of the resurrection of Er, in Persia that of Viraf, in Judea that of Lazarus, in other nations those of other persons. None of these ever produced great results. Yet the resurrection of one individual from the dead logically contains all that that of any other individual can. Why, then, has that of Christ alone made such a change in the faith of the world? Because, through a combination of causes, it has appealed to the imagination and heart of the world and stirred their believing activity, because the thought was here connected with a person, a history, a moral force, and a providential interposition, fit for the grandest deductions and equal to the mightiest effects. It is not accurate philosophical criticism that has done this, but humble love and faith.

In the experience of earnest Christians, a personal belief in the resurrection of Christ, vividly conceived in the imagination and taken home to the heart, is chiefly effective in its spiritual, not in its argumentative, results. It stirs up the powers and awakens the yearnings of the soul, opens heaven to the gaze, locates there, as it were visibly, a glorious ideal, and thus helps one to enter upon an inward realization of the immortal world. The one essential thing is not that Jesus appeared alive in the flesh after his physical death, the revealer of superhuman power and possessor of infallibility, but that he divinely lives now, the forerunner and type of our immortality.

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