X.

"HELL" NOT GEHENNA NOR PURGATORY.

"For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell: neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption."-PSALM xvi. 10.

ACCORDING to the division of the Creed which I am following, the whole of the Fifth Article is: "He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead." At present I am engaged only on the first clause of this Article: "He descended into hell.”

Last Sabbath evening, in order to be as concise and as clear as the nature of the discussion of such an Article as this admits, I proposed the following method: namely,

I. To offer you a short history of the clause-He descended into hell, as it lies in our Creed.

II. Ascertain historically and from the Scriptures the meaning of the words, descended into hell. And,

III. I proposed to examine briefly the passages of Scripture which it is alleged teach the local descent of Christ's soul into hell, and which are thus made to support the modern doctrine of Purgatory. The first and second heads I presented as well as I could last Sabbath

VARIOUS MEANINGS OF HELL.

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evening. The third and last one remains for our present attempt. That is, it is my purpose now, with God's assistance, to show that the words, He descended into hell, as they lie in our Creed, do not mean Gehenna or Purgatory in any sense, and that the passages of Holy Scripture generally brought forward in proof of such an interpretation of the Creed, do not teach or favor it, nor allow any such doctrine to be preached as a part of the Faith once delivered to the saints.

It has been shown, I hope satisfactorily, that the words Sheol, Hades, inferi, inferna, and our Saxon word hell, bear a remarkable correspondence with each other, both as to their etymological meaning and as to the changes and applications they have undergone. They are terms so vague and extensive that they are found comprehending the invisible world, wherever and whatever it is, or is supposed to be--the state of the dead-the place of spirits separated from their bodies, both good and bad—and often simply the grave. Also it is to be noted that these words, as is usually the case in the primitive state of a language, and perhaps especially so in the Oriental languages, have passed from their primary to a secondary sense. This is emphatically the case with our word hell. It has now a determinate meaning. Now it means the place of the future and eternal punishment of the wicked; but its original meaning was any thing covered a hole, a pit, an abyss, the invisible. It is also true with these terms, as with others, that they are used in a figurative or metaphorical sense.

Again, although the descent of Christ into hell is not formally stated anywhere in the Scriptures, nor found as a distinct Article in any copy or draught of the Apostles' Creed, or of any ancient Creed, public or private, for about four hundred years after Christ, yet it was held as

an Article of Faith, in some sense, by almost all the Fathers. And Augustine boldly says, "None but an infidel would deny the descent of Christ into hell.”

There was, undoubtedly, a general opinion among the ancients, both heathen and Christian, that the souls of men descended at death into what they called the infernal regions, not meaning the hell of the damned, but the state or receptacle of spirits separated from their bodies, which was supposed to be beneath the earth. Here they thought the soul was detained-left to wander about in vast undefined regions. Some of the Fathers and theological writers of former ages have maintained that this was the meaning of these words in the Creed, which, however, I think is a mistake. Old Tertullian says that Christ descended into hell that He might satisfy the conditions of mortality, and complete the form of human death in the shades below.* As I understand him, he means precisely what I suppose our Creed means-namely, that the body and the soul of Christ were reduced by death to the precise condition that marks the natural dissolution of every other man.† Seeing, then, that such Fathers as Tertullian and Augustine, and the Church of the earliest ages, generally understood the sixteenth Psalm, quoted by Peter in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and portions of Colossians and Ephesians, and of first Peter, to mean that in some sense Christ did descend into hell, it is important and necessary for us to examine these several places of Holy Scripture, and ascertain, as clearly as we can, what they do really mean. They are: Ps. xvi. 10, quoted in Acts ii. 27; Eph. iv. 8–10; 1 Pet.

iii. 18-20.

* See Browne and Pearson. † See Harvey, vol. 1, p. 337.

NO "LIMBUS PATRUM."

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As far as my present investigations are concerned, the main interpretations of those passages of Scripture may be classed in the following order: I. The Fathers and Schoolmen, at least many of them, used the words of the Creed or their equivalent, descendit ad inferna, as expressing what they understood these passages to mean, without affixing any clear or definite meaning to the phrase, every one having his own interpretation.

II. The Roman Church and some others teach that Christ descended literally and locally to hell; that is, to some part of it; at least, to the part they call Limbus Patrum-alleged to be on the confines of the place of torment; and that He delivered from this Limbus Patrum the souls of the Patriarchs especially, and of good men who had died but were still not fit to go to heaven till He rescued them. There is great diversity of opinion, however, about Christ's descent into hell, and great latitude as to the doctrine of Purgatory, among those who believe in it. Even in the Church of Rome it was not formally affirmed till the Council of Florence, in 1439. The Primitive Church knew nothing of it, nor of the descent of Christ into hell, if these words mean any thing more than Christ's death and burial, as I have endeavored to explain them in the last discourse. The general idea among the Fathers and the Schoolmen of Hades and Sheol was that they meant the state of the dead, including the place of their existence, both of the good and bad, comprising Elysium and Tartarus, Paradise and Gehenna, and at least that the godly were not perfectly happy till the resurrection of their bodies. Even those who have taught that Christ by preaching to the spirits in prison delivered them from hell, do not hold that all sorts of bad people are thus to be saved. They tell us some are so bad they go to hell at once, and for them there is no hope. Others dying who are not bad

enough to go to hell, and yet not good enough to go to heaven, are sent to Purgatory, and there their sins are scoured away by fire and torment, provided money enough is paid to priests for singing dirges and saying masses. If there is not much money paid, it takes hundreds of years to get out of Purgatory; but such is the power of the Church keys in the hands of his Holiness the Pope, that prayers, masses, and dirges, well paid for, are supposed to shorten greatly the time. It is perfectly consistent with this view of Purgatory, for rich men to bestow vast sums of money on monasteries, chapels, cathedrals, and schools, on condition that the priests say so many masses and prayers to deliver their souls as soon as possible from the fires of Purgatory. But does the Creed mean this? Is there such a doctrine taught or allowed to be believed by the Word of God? I think not. That a higher degree of glory, a more perfect state of holiness and happiness is in reserve for God's people in the ages to come-after Christ's second coming, or after the general judgment--is the common belief of Christendom. We have Origen, Lactantius, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and others, in proof that the souls of the pious dead are at least in some measure held back from perfect glory-such a fulness of glory as is to be given to them at the resurrection.* This I can believe, if by it we are to understand that believers at death are happy, and do immediately pass to glory, so that, being absent from the body, they are present with the Lord; and provided also that it allows of different degrees in glory, and ever increasing weight of glory, especially at the resurrection of the body, and also different degrees of punishment for the ungodly. But if these Fathers are to be interpreted so as

* Quotations are in Browne, pp. 81, 82.