stantial flesh: For, as the said father writes, by the blasphemous imaginations that our Saviour's body was only in shew and appearance, "the whole work of God is overturned, the entire weight and fruit of Christianity, even the death of Christ, is denied, which the apostle so expressly asserts to be true, constituting it the chief foundation of the gospel, of our salvation and his preaching; for, saith he, I delivered unto you first of all, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: Now if his flesh be denied, how can his death be as serted? which relates to flesh returning into the ground, from whence it was taken, accor ding to the law of its author."

By the death of Christ, is signified the separation of his soul and body, by which the vital union being dissolved, he was in a perfect incapacity to perform any living actions: "death," saith Ambrose, "is the secession or division of soul and body;" and so Athanasius makes the formality of death to consist "in the disjunction or separation of the soul and body" after which, each of those two essential parts of man goes to its proper and ap pointed place, the one to the grave, and the other to the invisible receptacle of departed

souls; according to which universal law of nature our Saviour died, that is, there was a separation of his soul and body; and then, according to the manner and custom of all mankind, his body was commited to the grave, and his soul went unto the dwelling and ha bitation of separated spirits; both of which immediately follow in the creed, the former in the term "buried," and the latter in this clause," he descended into hell."

Now, as for the burial of our Saviour's body, that as well as the precedent clauses, was al so introduced against those heretics, who im pugned the reality thereof; this being a most sensible and undeniable demonstration, that he had a material and substantial body, seeing any one might then have both felt and seen, that what was buried, was real and cer tain, and that it could be no other than a true body of flesh, which was committed to the grave; for, as Theodoret well observes against these heretics," the burial of our Saviour was a sufficient confutation of them: for it was neither his soul nor his godhead which the grave received; but his body; for graves are prepared for bodies:" in which sense, this article is generally applied by the primitive commentators on the creed, as by Epiphanius, who writes, "that hereby we are obliged to believe,

that his body was buried in truth, remaining without a soul three days, void of breath and motion, wrapped in a linen cloth, laid in a tomb, and secured by a stone, and the seals of those who rolled it on ;" and by Maximus Taurinensis to the same purpose; "that our Saviour's burial declared him to be truly dead;" not much unlike to which Petrus Chrysologus saith hereon," that the confession of the burial of our Saviour, proves that he assumed true flesh, and that he really died."

So that after our Saviour's expiration on the cross, and the dissolution of the vital union between body and soul, that he might in eve ry thing become like unto us, (sin only excepted) and by his personal endurance sanctify every state and condition to all his members, he permitted his body, like unto ours, to be buried in a grave, and committed to the earth, whilst his soul fled to the invisible re ceceptacle of disunited spirits and separated souls, which is contained under the following article," he descended into hell," and will be the subject of the ensuing chapter.

I

CHA P. IV.

The descent of our Saviour into hell, was never questioned by any differences in the expli cation thereof: the moderation of the church of England herein. This article relates, first, something done by Christ's soul, which excludes the burial of his body from being designed thereby; and, secondly, something done by his soul in its separate state, exclu sive of the sufferings thereof, whilst he was alive no exact agreement in the notions of the primitive writers hereabouts: the expli cation of the word hell or hades, as it is in the Greek: no one word in the modern English, French or Dutch, comprehensive of the full signification thereof: hell in old English, exactly answers to the Greek hades, which properly signifies the habitation or receptacle of all separted human souls, whether good or bad: the Pagans, from whom the propriety of any Greek or Latin word is to be fetched, understood it in this sense: the modern, or at least the ancient Jews, placed all separated souls in hell: the pri mitive Christians affirmed, That all good souls immediately after their separation from the body, passed into a place of joy and huppiness, which they termed hell, as is at large proved. In the declension of the Greek, and chiefly af the Latin tongue, the word hell began to be solitarily applied to the mansion of departed wicked souls: Origen, amongst the Greeks, doubted of the passage

of faithful souls into hell, since the resurrec tion of Christ but after him, the ancient doctrine, that all souls go to hell, and remain there till the resurrection-day, generally prevailed in the East, home to this very day : Ambrose, and after him Jerome, and others, entertained the same notion in the West, as Origen had in the East: Austin was uncertain and wavering in his apprehensions hereof the recession from the ancient opinion, occasioned by the mutation of languages and words: the word hell in the apostolic sense, could not according to the propriety of speech, signify any other thing, than the state or place of separated human souls, whether good or bad. The meaning of the word descended; it sometimes only signifies a simple removal from one place.to another used in the creed, because it was a popular kind of speech arising from the common opinion, that hell was in the bowels of the earth; from whence it was called by the Latins infernum, and by the Greeks hades, and the like: some of the fathers imagined hell to be in the heart of the earth, others under the earth and some were uncertain of the situation thereof, but all apprehended it to be the common lodge of departed souls; and in a conformity to the common dialect, usually termed the passage thither a descent into hell, as in this article of the creed; by which they meant no other, than that our Saviour's soul being separated from his body, went by a local motion to the unseen habitation of departed souls, where it remain