nated in allusion to its secret and invisible character, ädns, Hades, or Hell, where in distinct abodes, the souls of the righteous and of the wicked experience inconceivable happiness or misery, expecting the consummation of their felicity or woe, at the day of judgment, is placed beyond doubt by the fact that Christ's human soul was in hell, (hades,) in the place of the departed, and in that part of this place denominated Paradise, in the interval between his death and his resurrection. For

During this interval his human soul was in some place. Since, independently of every other consideration, it was declared of him, by the Prophet, that "his soul was not to be left in hell."

But his soul during this period could not have been in Heaven; for he did not ascend to Heaven, agreeably to his own declaration, until after his resurrection.

Nor could his soul have been in the Hell of torment, (an impious supposition,) for he declared as matter of triumph and joy to the penitent thief that after death they should be together in Paradise.

In Paradise then, that region of peace and joy, in Hades the place of the departed, was the human soul of the blessed Jesus in the interval between death and the resurrection.

And where the human soul of Jesus was during this period, there during the same period must be the souls of the human race whose sentence of mortality he sustained, and of whom he was the representative.

This doctrine has not the most remote connection with the papal doctrine of purgatory.

That the celebrated Protestants whose names have

been exhibited in support of this doctrine, in the preceding pages, that Campbell, and Doddridge, and Macknight, Presbyterian Divines; that Bishops Taylor, Bull, Burnet, Secker, Horsley, Tomline, and other Bishops of the English Church; that Hammond, and Whitby, and Clarke, and Scott, Clergymen, and Sir Peter King, a distinguished Layman of that Church; that Wesley and Clarke, of the Methodist communion; that Bishops Seabury and White, of our own Church; that all these, living in different ages and countries, and of different religious denominations, should have conspired to introduce the papal doctrine of purgatory, will hardly be credited.

The Papal doctrine is, that "some few have before their death so fully cleared up their accounts with the Divine Majesty, and washed away all their stains in the blood of the Lamb, as to go straight to Heaven after death; and that others who die in the guilt of deadly sins, go straight to Hell*." The doctrine set forth in the preceding pages is, that none go to Heaven, or to Hell, (yśɛvα, gehenna,) until after the day of judgment. In the interval between death and the resurrection, they are in a state of unchangeable happiness or misery in the place of the departed.

The Papal doctrine is that those who do not die perfectly pure and clean, nor yet under the guilt of unrepented deadly sin, go to Purgatory, where they suffer certain indefinable pains, and the pains of material fire;

* The Catholic Christian instructed, p. 176-a book of standard authority among the Roman Catholics, published by one of their distinguished Bishops, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Chaloner.

until God's justice is satisfied, or they are freed from these pains by the masses said for their souls. These tenets, it must be apparent, are in no degree, sanctioned by the doctrine advanced in the preceding pages, with respect to departed spirits. The eternal destiny of the individual is unchangeably fixed at death. His condition in the place of the departed is an unchangeable condition of happiness or misery, until the day of judgment, when this happiness or misery is consummated in body and soul.

The Papal doctrine with respect to Christ's descent into Hell is, that he went not into the place of departed spirits, as is believed by those who maintain the existence of this place, but into a region called Limbus Patrum, to manifest his glory to the holy saints, who had departed before his advent, and to release them from their confinement, and take them to Heaven.

There is thus a total dissimilarity between the Papaj doctrine of purgatory and the doctrine of the descent into hell, and the state of the departed, advanced in the preceding pages.

The Sermon of Bishop BULL, (from which Dr. DoD, DRIDGE quotes with approbation *,) in which he establishes this doctrine of a place of departed spirits, contains a refutation of the Papal doctrine of purgatory, and shews the entire difference between it and the doctrine which he advocates of an intermediate state. After exhibiting the faith of the primitive Church on this point, he

* See p. 59.

observes *.

"From what hath been said, it appears, that the doctrine of the distinction of the joys of Paradise, the portion of good souls in that state of separation, from that yet fuller and most complete beatitude of the kingdom of Heaven after the resurrection, consisting in that clearest vision of God, which the holy Scriptures call seeing him face to face, is far from being Popery, as some have ignorantly censured it; for we see it was the current doctrine of the first and purest ages of the Church. I add, that it is so far from being Popery, that it is directly the contrary. For it was the Popish convention at Florence +, that first boldly defined against the sense of the primitive Christians-That those souls, which having contracted the blemish of sin, are either in their bodies or out of them purged from it, do presently go into Heaven, and there clearly behold God himself, one God in three Persons, as he is. And this decree they made, partly to establish their superstition of prayer to the saints deceased, whom they would needs make us believe to see and know all our necessities and concerns in speculo Trinitatis, in the glass of the Trinity, as they call it, and so to be fit objects of our religious invocation; but chiefly to introduce their purgatory, and that the prayers of the ancient Church for the dead might be thought to be founded on a supposition, that the souls of some faithful persons after death, go into a place of grievous torment."

This doctrine of the separate existence of the soul in the place of the departed between death and the resurrection, being expressly revealed, should be an object of faith.

* Bull's ser. Vol. i. p. 114.

In the 15th Century.

1. It resolves all doubts with respect to the condition of the soul after her departure from the body, and before her reunion to it at the resurrection. The soul during this period is in a state of consciousness; either enjoying a foretaste of future bliss, or tormented by the anticipated pangs of future woe, after the judgment of the great day.

2. It is thus calculated to fill the wicked with dismay. It cuts off the hope of a moment's intermission of torment after death. The worm that never dies immediately begins to gnaw. In the company of spirits wretched like themselves, they dwell in the dark region of the departed, anticipating the summons which uniting them to incorruptible bodies, will bring them to the judgment seat, and also the more dread sentence that will consign them to gehenna, to the hell of torment, the "lake of fire," that "burneth for ever and ever."

3. But this doctrine of the place of the departed is full of consolation to the faithful disciples of the Lord Jesus. It assures them that, in the long interval between death and the resurrection, while detained from heaven, they shall not be deprived of a foretaste of its glories. In the bosom of Abraham, in the enjoyment of his society, and of the blessed fellowship of all the departed saints, they shall experience the most exalted delights. "Delivered from the burden of the flesh," their souls shall be with the Lord Jesus, the rays of whose glory sanctify and cheer the paradise of his saints. Here they shall enjoy perpetual peace and felicity; anticipating their "consummation both in body and soul in God's eternal and everlasting glory."