three and fourteen. They have never understood the nature and conditions of salvation, or attained to full moral responsibility; and if they sink immediately to eternal perdition, what will you say of the Divine justice? If, on the other hand, they ascend to heaven, "as in a moment when they die," alas for the influx of selfishness and stubbornness which heaven must be always receiving! We take it that, in the masses of children, moral evil has become considerably rampant at seven years of age, while the work of regeneration has not even begun.

It is only our ultra Protestantism that involves itself in these difficulties and absurdities. The English Episcopal Church rejected the mediaval doctrine of a purgatory, but she did not throw away the idea of a mediate place of souls. Her liturgy still recites the old clause, Christ descended into Hades, and she still holds it in her creed as the state of the dead, thus bridging the gulf between earth and heaven, or between earth and hell. The Greek Church also retains it, and the doctrine of immediate salvation or damnation at death by an "ictus Dei," is not likely to have any place in the creed of the Christian world, except among those smaller sects whose fierce resilience from Catholicism isolates them from the common reason, and from ideas which have had their development through all the Christian ages.

Thus, then, the matter stands historically. In the last quarter of the second century, when the Christian churches emerge clearly into the light, we find them universally in possession of the idea of a mediate place of souls, one which was neither heaven nor hell, but preliminary to either. It was not an idea broached by heretics here and there. It was the belief of the Church Universal, which nobody called in question. Out of this belief the papacy shaped its purgatory, and practised on human credulity and fear. In Dante's Divina Comoedia it expands into terrible sublimity, as the terraced hill that leads up from the concentric circles of hell towards the starry spheres. Protestantism made its assault on the purgatory of Rome, and in tearing it away tore away the primitive doctrine along with it, leaving to itself only two conditions after death, and looking into the immense vacuum between with blank amaze; necessitating the hideous logic that damns childhood and all heathendom, and which would damn all Christendom too, were it not that some may be saved by Christ's supererogatory and accredited righteousness.

How came the early churches by the doctrine of a mediate place of souls? How happens it, that, when we first get a clear historic view of them, separated only seventy years from the Apostles themselves, this belief among them was un

questioned and universal? From whom did they inherit it? We have no faith in church authority, nor do we think it necessary to adopt an opinion because the Christian Fathers believed it. But how came they to believe it, and that unanimously? It will be seen that this question is one of exceeding interest and importance.

23*

CHAPTER III.

THE HEBREW DOCTRINE OF HADES.

BEFORE we come to this question, however, we ask the company of the reader while we go back yet farther, and, stepping across the Apostolic age, inquire what was the ante-Christian doctrine respecting the condition of the dead? What was the state of opinion among the Jews at the advent of Christ? Christianity came out from the bosom of Judaism, somewhat as Spring breaks forth from the bosom of Winter, making the germs that had slept in death burst out in refulgent green. For Judaism furnished to Christianity the moulds of its thought, and the imagery under which its distinctive truths were bodied forth.

The Hebrews in the earlier stages of their history had no very definite ideas respecting the state of the dead. They believed in human immortality, and that Hades was the common receptacle of all departed souls. But of man's con

dition in Hades they conceived nothing more than that it was one of comparative weakness and shadowy repose. It was the region of the phantom nations, into which all passed alike at death. Kings reigned there, but on dusky and unsubstantial thrones. The language which the prophet puts into the mouth of Israel in exultation over the fall of Babylon, her former oppressor, describes probably the state of belief among the Hebrews at that time. "Hades from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us?" Heaven was the abode of God and of his angels above the sky. The more modern and Christian idea, that it was ever to be the place of human souls, seems not at this time to have been entertained by the Hebrew. Heaven above as the abode of superhuman intelligences, and Hades the shadowy realm beneath into which all the dead had departed, seems to comprise the whole of the early Hebrew pneumatology.

In process of time, however, and under the teachings of the later Rabbins, the idea of Hades became developed into something far more distinct and tangible. They divided it into separate