THE APOSTOLIC VIEW OF THE STATE OF THE DEAD.
PROFESSOR PLUM.PTRE, in an able and interesting sermon 1. recently preached at St. Paul's, and now published (by &rabid)) on that article in the Apostles' Creed known as "the Descent into Hell," has shown that certainly St. Peter in his first epistle, and probably St. Paul in the epistle to the Ephesians, intended to declare their belief that our Lord, in the interval between his death and resurrection, carried his gospel into the region peopled by the spirits of the dead. Indeed, St. Peter goes further, and appears to have held, contrary to the Catholic theology, that he preached to those who " sometime were dis- obedient," and who had been found, according to the tradition in Genesis, at least too corrupt to be saved from the flood, when Noah, with a character by no means spotless according to the same tra- dition, was saved by divine revelation. Mr. Plumptre rightly lays eloquent stress upon the evidence thus given that the chief of the Apostles, apparently in complete concurrence with the Apostle to the Gentiles, did not seem to have understood the teach- ing of his Master as to the finality of the probation afforded by this world in the sense or anything like the sense of modern orthodoxy. Moreover, he points out that in the New Testa- ment very strong things appear to be said on both sides, but that those which are said on the one side never seem to pre- clude the genuine belief in sayings of a directly opposite drift, and he appears to infer that in speculating on the state of those who die in alienation from God, we ought to take both classes of sayings together, and allow our minds to be swayed at times by one, at times by the other. Ade admits that the passages as to the last judgment and the absolute division of the good from the evil are very strong on one side ; on the other, he brings forward our Lord's saying that there was but one sin which could not be forgiven, "neither in this world, nor in the world to come,"— a saying which, but for theological prejudice, would no doubt have been taken to imply that there were other grave sins which, even though unrepented and therefore unforgiven here, could be repented and forgiven hereafter. Mr. Plump- tre points to the passages as to its being " more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment" than for those who, living in Cliorazia and Bethssida, had not listened to Christ's appeals ; and to the saying that the servant which knew not his Lord's will, and did it not, should be beaten with few stripes, —certainly indicating a terminable punishment,—and, as observed, he insists on the assertion of St. Peter that a gospel had been preached to the dead,' and even to those who " sometime were disobedient," and on that of St. Paul as to the time when Christ should have put all things under his feet, and God should be all in all. Again, he tells us that of which the present writer at least was ignorant,—that the practice of praying for the dead was ac- knowledged in the Jewish Church centuries before the time of Christ, and was never condemned by him or by St. Paul, who con- demns so many Judaisms :—" For more than two centuries before the conqueror over Hades was revealed, they [prayers for the dead] had entered into the worship of all true Israelites, had been part of the services of Temple and synagogue. They passed, to say the least, uriblarned by Him who laid his finger with such an unspar-
ing severity on the corrupt traditions of Pharisaisua, by the Apostle who had no words too sharp for the weak and beggarly elements which he had left behind when Christ was revealed in him."
But without any wish to underrate the great value of the ser- mon, we are disposed to think Mr. Plumptre rather ignores one side of the inferences to be drawn from his facts. It is certain enough that the article as to Christ's descent into Hades was far more elaborately insisted on during the first, three centuries than it has ever been since,—that, indeed, during, that time it was one of the main subjects of Christian specu- lation, and of very wild speculation too. Origen, for instance, whom Mr. Plumptre quotes with eloquent respect, went so far as to say (as quoted by Rufinus) that Christ rove asunder. Satan's eternal prison-house, "liberated his captives, desolated his kingdom, and drove him forth a powerless vagabond, to glean by plunder in the by-ways a band of the unfaithful." Mr. Plumptre admits that the Christian speculation of the first cen-
turies on this head was very wild, and often led to frightfully ignoble as well as dreamy creeds, such as that the death of-
Christ was iu some respects a ruse played upon Satan, who had not known that God was really incarnate in him, and supposed that through his death he should master a great enemy, instead of which he (Satan) was entrapped into admitting into his realm a divine power which was too great for and overpowered him. But Professor Plumptre hardly notices the bearing which this enormous growth of wild myths as to Christ's descent into
Hades during the first three centuries has on the very unprecise apostolic evidence as to the alleged fact itself. It has been very
justly argued that the entire absence from all four Gospels of any statement asserting this spiritual agency of our Lord in Hades between his crucifixion and resurrection, is a very remarkable testi- mony to their early origin. Even in the Acts, St. Peter's speech in which he applies as prophetic to his Master the words of the Psalmist, " Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou , suffer thy Holy One to see corruption," seems to show an at least possible origin for this belief quite apart from any declaration of our Lord's. No doubt St. Paul had the same passage in his mind when he said in his epistle to the Ephesiaus, " Now that he as- cended, what was it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth ?" and no doubt either of the two Apostles might regard this prophetic passage as adequate evidence of the fact that so it had been. Certainly it is difficult to account for the extreme vagueness and brevity of St. Peter's statement in relation to a supernatural event which seized on the imagination of the existing world like Wild-fire, if he had had any explicit revelation from Christ of the event referred to. And does not the vivid impres- sion which the tradition of this descent into Hades made during the first centuries of Christianity indicate that, even in the minds of the Apostles, there must have been brooding a keen desire to know the achievements of their Master in that Under-world in which they profoundly believed, and a disposition to seize on any such passage as the psalm alluded to for the purpose of verifying their anticipations and hopes? Surely it is in the highest degree fanciful to put St. Peter's supposed testimony to this mysterious event on an historical footing with his testimony to his Master's death and resurrection ? From the passage in the Acts in which he states his belief that David was prophesying of Christ when he said, " Thou wilt not leave my -soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption," to the passage in the epistle in which he seems to speak of the descent into Hades, it is not necessarily more than a subjective step. At least, modern interpreters of Scripture have drawn quite as firm a belief in quite as great events, not otherwise known, out of mere applications and subjective interpretations of prophecy. If you scan the passage, it is full of obscurity, and the remarkable and difficult comparison, since adopted by the Church, between the Flood and Christian baptism, looks very much as if it embodied more of speculative doc- trine than of authoritative assertion of feet. " For Christ also bath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit, by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison ; which sometimes were disobedient, when once the long- suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is eight, souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God), by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who
* See the Belic.f of the First Three Centuries concerning revises Misaion to the Under- world, By Frederic Huidekoper. Boston, Massachusetts, 1854; pp. 70-80,--a very remarkable collection of the passages which illustrate how those centuries dwelt and fed upon the tradition as to the descent of Christ into Hades,
is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God." Surely, when we see how eagerly the Christian world seized on and developed into all sorts of dreams this article of the descent into Hades, and how the germs of it were in St. Peter's mind at the very time he first preached the resurrection after his Master's departure, a vague and indirect statement of this kind, complicated with dreamy analogies between the flood and baptism, can hardly be quoted as an authoritative statement of revealed fact. The eager- ness to fill up the picture of the conquest over the supernatural ter- rors of the grave so evident in the rest of the Christian community must have affected the Apostles themselves,—indeed, we find the verse, " Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption," twice quoted in the Acts as a prophecy of Christ, once by St. Peter and once by St. Paul. And if it thus affected them, it could hardly have entered their belief in a less positive or a more doctrinal (asdistinguished from historical) form than in this passage of St. Peter. We are disposed then, to regard the value of this curious passage rather as consisting in the proof that St. Peter himself had never been taught to give up hope for those who had died in sin, than in the implied statement of fact. St. Peter had certainly heard all his Master had said as to the judgment of souls, and he did not regard even those who had died in sin as shut off from the Gospel of Christ.
Our own impression is, that all our Lord's parables as to the dangers of delay, the hopeless condition of those who are found un- faithful when the Son of Man comes, and analogous subjects, made a far less dogmatic and doctrinal impression on those who heard them than they do on us. In the first place, the Oriental form of speech always paints things strongly, enjoins on people to " hate" their life, for instance, and love their Lord, when it means only sacrifice their life for their Lord ; and so, especially in the pictorial form of such parables as those of Dives and Lazarus, or the five wise and five foolish virgins, the finality of the sentence would appear to the who heard it only to express a relative finality,—to describe the anguish of lost opportunities much more than of lost souls. In the next place, all words convey a very different effect out of a living mouth from that which they do out of a written page ; and utter hopelessness was probably never the impression left by our Lord on any one,—hardly even on Judas. It is in this light that the clear proof which St. Peter's curious language seems to give, that he at least had not imbibed any idea that " as the tree falls, so it shall lie," possesses the greatest interest for us, —not because his statement that Christ went and preached to " the spirits in prison" can be regarded in any sense as of the same historical weight as his statement that Christ died and rose again ; but that it shows that he, the first of the Apostles, had no difficulty at all in believing a fact which would quite break down the finality of modern orthodox doctrine.
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