Systematic Theology (Volume 3 of 3)

by Augustus Hopkins Strong

I. Physical Death.

Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. We distinguish it from spiritual death, or the separation of the soul from God; and from the second death, or the banishment from God and final misery of the reünited soul and body of the wicked.

Spiritual death: Is. 59:2—“but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, so that he will not hear”; Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins.” The second death: Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire”; 21:8—“But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”

Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:303—“Spiritual death, the inner discord and enslavement of the soul, and the misery resulting therefrom, to which belongs that other death, the second death, an outward condition corresponding to that inner slavery.” Trench, Epistles to the Seven Churches, 151—“This phrase [‘second death’] is itself a solemn protest against the Sadduceeism and Epicureanism which would make natural death the be-all and the end-all of existence. As there is a life beyond the present life for the faithful, so there is death beyond that which falls under our eyes for the wicked.” E. G. Robinson: “The second death is the continuance of spiritual death in another and timeless existence.” Hudson, Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life, 222—“If a man has a power that transcends the senses, it is at least presumptive evidence that it does not perish when the senses are extinguished.... The activity of the subjective mind is in inverse proportion to that of the body, though the objective mind weakens with the body and perishes with the brain.”

Prof. H. H. Bawden: “Consciousness is simply the growing of an organism, while the organism is just that which grows. Consciousness is a function, not a thing, not an order of existence at all. It is the universe coming to a focus, flowering so to speak in a finite centre. Society is an organism in the same sense that the human being is an organism. The spatial separation of the elements of the social organism is relatively no greater than the separation of the unit factors of the body. As the neurone cannot deny the consciousness which is the function of the body, so the individual member of society has no reason for denying the existence of a cosmic life of the organism which we call society.”

Emma M. Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:878—“Man is nature risen into the consciousness of its relationship to the divine. There is no receding from this point. When ‘that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home,’ the persistence of each personal life is necessitated. Human life, as it is, includes, though it transcends the lower forms through which it has developed. Human life, as it will be, must include though it may transcend its present manifestation, viz., personality.” “Sometime, when all life's lessons have been learned, And suns and stars forevermore have set, And things which our weak judgments here have spurned, The things o'er which we grieved with lashes wet, Will flash before us through our life's dark night, As stars shine most in deepest tints of blue: And we shall see how all God's plans were right, And most that seemed reproof was love most true: And if sometimes commingled with life's wine We find the wormwood and rebel and shrink, Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine Pours out this portion for our lips to drink. And if some friend we love is lying low, Where human kisses cannot reach his face, O do not blame the loving Father so, But wear your sorrow with obedient grace; And you shall shortly know that lengthened breath Is not the sweetest gift God sends his friend, And that sometimes the sable pall of death Conceals the fairest boon his love can send. If we could push ajar the gates of life, And stand within, and all God's working see, We could interpret all this doubt and strife, And for each mystery find a key.”

Although physical death falls upon the unbeliever as the original penalty of sin, to all who are united in Christ it loses its aspect of penalty, and becomes a means of discipline and of entrance into eternal life.

To the Christian, physical death is not a penalty: see Ps. 116:15—“Precious in the sight of Jehovah Is the death of his saints”; Rom. 8:10—“And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”; 14:8—“For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's”; 1 Cor. 3:22—“whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours”; 15:55—“O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” 1 Pet. 4:6—“For unto this end was the gospel preached even to the dead, that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit”; cf. Rom. 1:18—“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder the truth in unrighteousness”; 8:1, 2—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death”; Heb. 12:6—“For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”

Dr. Hovey says that “the present sufferings of believers are in the nature of discipline, with an aspect of retribution; while the present sufferings of unbelievers are retributive, with a glance toward reformation.” We prefer to say that all penalty has been borne by Christ, and that, for him who is justified in Christ, suffering of whatever kind is of the nature of fatherly chastening, never of judicial retribution; see our discussion of the Penalty of Sin, pages 652-660.

“We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly damps; What are to us but sad funereal tapers May be Heaven's distant lamps. There is no death,—what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian Whose portal men call death.” “'Tis meet that we should pause awhile, Ere we put off this mortal coil, And in the stillness of old age, Muse on our earthly pilgrimage.”Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 4:5—“Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now Heaven hath all, And all the better is it for the maid: Your part in her you could not keep from death, But Heaven keeps his part in eternal life. The most you sought was her promotion, For 't was your heaven she should be advanced; And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced Above the clouds, as high as Heaven itself?” Phœbe Cary's Answered: “I thought to find some healing clime For her I loved; she found that shore, That city whose inhabitants Are sick and sorrowful no more. I asked for human love for her; The Loving knew how best to still The infinite yearning of a heart Which but infinity could fill. Such sweet communion had been ours, I prayed that it might never end; My prayer is more than answered; now I have an angel for my friend. I wished for perfect peace to soothe The troubled anguish of her breast; And numbered with the loved and called She entered on untroubled rest. Life was so fair a thing to her, I wept and pleaded for its stay; My wish was granted me, for lo! She hath eternal life to-day!”

Victor Hugo: “The tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes with the twilight, to open with the dawn.... I feel that I have not said the thousandth part of what is in me.... The thirst for infinity proves infinity.” Shakespeare: “Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail, Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair.” O. W. Holmes: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!” J. G. Whittier: “So when Time's veil shall fall asunder, The soul may know No fearful change or sudden wonder, Nor sink the weight of mystery under, But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.”

To neither saint nor sinner is death a cessation of being. This we maintain, against the advocates of annihilation:

1. Upon rational grounds.

(a) The metaphysical argument.—The soul is simple, not compounded. Death, in matter, is the separation of parts. But in the soul there are no parts to be separated. The dissolution of the body, therefore, does not necessarily work a dissolution of the soul. But, since there is an immaterial principle in the brute, and this argument taken by itself might seem to prove the immortality of the animal creation equally with that of man, we pass to consider the next argument.

The Gnostics and the Manichæans held that beasts had knowledge and might pray. The immateriality of the brute mind was probably the consideration which led Leibnitz, Bishop Butler, Coleridge, John Wesley, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Somerville, James Hogg, Toplady, Lamartine, and Louis Agassiz to encourage the belief in animal immortality. See Bp. Butler, Analogy, part i, chap. i (Bohn's ed., 81-91); Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 99—“Most of the arguments for the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings.” Elsewhere Agassiz says of animals: “I cannot doubt of their immortality any more than I doubt of my own.” Lord Shaftesbury in 1881 remarked: “I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say or conjecture how or where; but sure I am that the love, so manifested by dogs especially, is an emanation from the divine essence, and as such it can, or rather, it will, never be extinguished.” St. Francis of Assisi preached [pg 985]to birds, and called sun, moon, earth, fire, water, stones, flowers, crickets, and death, his brothers and sisters. “He knew not if the brotherhood His homily had understood; He only knew that to one ear The meaning of his words was clear” (Longfellow, The Sermon of St. Francis—to the birds). “If death dissipates the sagacity of the elephant, why not that of his captor?” See Buckner, Immortality of Animals; William Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 240.

Mansel, Metaphysics, 371, maintains that all this argument proves is that the objector cannot show the soul to be compound, and so cannot show that it is destructible. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 259—“The facts which point toward the termination of our present state of existence are connected with our physical nature, not with our mental.” John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 110—“With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem, with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view.”John Fiske, Life Everlasting, 80-85—“How could immortal man have been produced through heredity from an ephemeral brute? We do not know. Nature's habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour, until at length it overflows, and straightway vast systems of machinery are awakened into rumbling life. Slowly the ellipse becomes eccentric, until suddenly the finite ellipse becomes an infinite paraboloid.”

Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206—“The ideas of dividing up or splitting off are not applicable to mind. The argument for the indestructibility of mind as growing out of its indiscerptibility, and the argument by which Kant confuted it, are alike absurd within the realm of mental phenomena.” Adeney, Christianity and Evolution, 127—“Nature, this argument shows, has nothing to say against the immortality of that which is above the range of physical structure.” Lotze: “Everything which has once originated will endure forever so soon as it possesses an unalterable value for the coherent system of the world; but it will, as a matter of course, in turn cease to be, if this is not the case.” Bowne, Int. to Psych. Theory, 315-318—“Of what use would brutes be hereafter? We may reply: Of what use are they here?... Those things which have perennial significance for the universe will abide.” Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203—“In living beings there is always a pressure toward larger and higher existence.... The plant must grow, must bloom, must sow its seeds, or it withers away.... The aim is to bring forth consciousness, and in greatest fulness.... Beasts of prey and other enemies to the ascending path of life are to be swept out of the way.”

But is not the brute a part of that Nature which has been subjected to vanity, which groans and travails in pain, and which waits to be redeemed? The answer seems to be that the brute is a mere appendage to man, has no independent value in the creation, is incapable of ethical life or of communion with God the source of life, and so has no guarantee of continuance. Man on the other hand is of independent value. But this is to anticipate the argument which follows. It is sufficient here to point out that there is no proof that consciousness is dependent upon the soul's connection with a physical organism. McLane, Evolution in Religion, 261—“As the body may preserve its form and be to a degree made to act after the psychic element is lost by removal of the brain, so this psychic element may exist, and act according to its nature after the physical element ceases to exist.” Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 19—“If I am in a house, I can look upon surrounding objects only through its windows; but open the door and let me go out of the house, and the windows are no longer of any use to me.”Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 295—“To perpetuate mind after death is less surprising than to perpetuate or transmit mind here by inheritance.” See also Martineau, Study, 2:332-337, 363-365.

William James, in his Essay on Human Immortality, argues that thought is not necessarily a productive function of the brain; it may rather be a permissive or transmissivefunction. Thought is not made in the brain, so that when the brain perishes the soul dies. The brain is only the organ for the transmission of thought, just as the lens transmits the light which it does not produce. There is a spiritual world behind and above the material world. Our brains are thin and half transparent places in the veil, through which knowledge comes in. Savage, Life after Death, 289—“You may attach a dynamo for a time to some particular machine. When you have removed the machine, you have not destroyed the dynamo. You may attach it to some other machine and find that you have the old time power. So the soul may not be confined to one body.”These analogies seem to us to come short of proving personal immortality. They [pg 986]belong to “psychology without a soul,” and while they illustrate the persistence of some sort of life, they do not render more probable the continuance of my individual consciousness beyond the bounds of death. They are entirely consistent with the pantheistic theory of a remerging of the personal existence in the great whole of which it forms a part. Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds and, fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet.” See Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl'sche Theologie, 12; Howison, Limits of Evolution, 279-312.

Seth, Hegelianism: “For Hegel, immortality is only the permanence of the Absolute, the abstract process. This is no more consoling than the continued existence of the chemical elements of our bodies in new transformations. Human self-consciousness is a spark struck in the dark, to die away on the darkness whence it has arisen.” This is the only immortality of which George Eliot conceived in her poem, The Immortal Choir: “O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues.”Those who hold to this unconscious immortality concede that death is not a separation of parts, but rather a cessation of consciousness; and that therefore, while the substance of human nature may endure, mankind may ever develop into new forms, without individual immortality. To this we reply, that man's self-consciousness and self-determination are different in kind from the consciousness and determination of the brute. As man can direct his self-consciousness and self-determination to immortal ends, we have the right to believe this self-consciousness and self-determination to be immortal. This leads us to the next argument.

(b) The teleological argument.—Man, as an intellectual, moral, and religious being, does not attain the end of his existence on earth. His development is imperfect here. Divine wisdom will not leave its work incomplete. There must be a hereafter for the full growth of man's powers, and for the satisfaction of his aspirations. Created, unlike the brute, with infinite capacities for moral progress, there must be an immortal existence in which those capacities shall be brought into exercise. Though the wicked forfeit all claim to this future, we have here an argument from God's love and wisdom to the immortality of the righteous.

In reply to this argument, it has been said that many right wishes are vain. Mill, Essays on Religion, 294—“Desire for food implies enough to eat, now and forever? hence an eternal supply of cabbage?” But our argument proceeds upon three presuppositions: (1) that a holy and benevolent God exists; (2) that he has made man in his image; (3) that man's true end is holiness and likeness to God. Therefore, what will answer the true end of man will be furnished; but that is not cabbage—it is holiness and love, i. e., God himself. See Martineau, Study, 2:370-381.

The argument, however, is valuable only in its application to the righteous. God will not treat the righteous as the tyrant of Florence treated Michael Angelo, when he bade him carve out of ice a statue, which would melt under the first rays of the sun. In the case of the wicked, the other law of retribution comes in—the taking away of “even that which he hath” (Mat. 25:29). Since we are all wicked, the argument is not satisfactory, unless we take into account the further facts of atonement and justification—facts of which we learn from revelation alone.

But while, taken by itself, this rational argument might be called defective, and could never prove that man may not attain his end in the continued existence of the race, rather than in that of the individual, the argument appears more valuable as a rational supplement to the facts already mentioned, and seems to render certain at least the immortality of those upon whom God has set his love, and in whom he has wrought the beginnings of righteousness.

Lord Erskine: “Inferior animals have no instincts or faculties which are not subservient to the ends and purposes of their being. Man's reason, and faculties endowed with power to reach the most distant worlds, would be useless if his existence were to terminate in the grave.” There would be wastefulness in the extinction of great minds; see Jackson, James Martineau, 439. As water is implied by the organization of [pg 987]the fish, and air by that of the bird, so “the existence of spiritual power within us is likewise presumption that some fitting environment awaits the spirit when it shall be set free and perfected, and sex and death can be dispensed with” (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 106). Nägeli, the German botanist, says that Nature tends to perfection. Yet the mind hardly begins to awake, ere the bodily powers decline (George, Progress and Poverty, 505). “Character grows firmer and solider as the body ages and grows weaker. Can character be vitally implicated in the act of physical dissolution?” (Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 353). If a rational and moral Deity has caused the gradual evolution in humanity of the ideas of right and wrong, and has added to it the faculty of creating ethical ideals, must he not have provided some satisfaction for the ethical needs which this development has thus called into existence? (Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 351).

Royce, Conception of God, 50, quotes Le Conte as follows: “Nature is the womb inwhich, and evolution the process by which, are generated sons of God. Without immortality this whole process is balked—the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with himself, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness?” John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 116, accepts the immortality of the soul by “a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work.” If man is the end of the creative process and the object of God's care, then the soul's career cannot be completed with its present life upon the earth (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 92, 93). Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 254—“Neither God nor the future life is needed to pay us for present virtue, but rather as the condition without which our nature falls into irreconcilable discord with itself, and passes on to pessimism and despair. High and continual effort is impossible without correspondingly high and abiding hopes.... It is no more selfish to desire to live hereafter than it is to desire to live to-morrow.” Dr. M. B. Anderson used to say that there must be a heaven for canal horses, washerwomen, and college presidents, because they do not get their deserts in this life.

Life is a series of commencements rather than of accomplished ends. Longfellow, on Charles Sumner: “Death takes us by surprise, And stays our hurrying feet; The great design unfinished lies, Our lives are incomplete. But in the dark unknown Perfect their circles seem, Even as a bridge's arch of stone Is rounded in the stream.” Robert Browning, Abt Vogler: “There never shall be one lost good”; Prospice: “No work begun shall ever pause for death”; “Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain; And this first life claims a second, else I count its good no gain”; Old Pictures in Florence: “We are faulty—why not? We have time in store”; Grammarian's Funeral: “What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes,—Man has Forever.”Robert Browning wrote in his wife's Testament the following testimony of Dante: “Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamored.”And Browning says in a letter: “It is a great thing—the greatest—that a human being should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a witness to the power and love of God.... I see even more reason to hold by the same hope.”

(c) The ethical argument.—Man is not, in this world, adequately punished for his evil deeds. Our sense of justice leads us to believe that God's moral administration will be vindicated in a life to come. Mere extinction of being would not be a sufficient penalty, nor would it permit degrees of punishment corresponding to degrees of guilt. This is therefore an argument from God's justice to the immortality of the wicked. The guilty conscience demands a state after death for punishment.

This is an argument from God's justice to the immortality of the wicked, as the preceding was an argument from God's love to the immortality of the righteous. “History defies our moral sense by giving a peaceful end to Sulla.” Louis XV and Madame Pompadour died in their beds, after a life of extreme luxury. Louis XVI and his queen, though far more just and pure, perished by an appalling tragedy. The fates of these four cannot be explained by the wickedness of the latter pair and the virtue of the former. Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the popes, was apparently prosperous and happy in his iniquities. Though guilty of the most shameful crimes, he was serenely impenitent, and to the last of his days he defied both God and man. Since [pg 988]there is not an execution of justice here, we feel that there must be a “judgment to come,”such as that which terrified Felix (Acts 24:25). Martineau, Study, 2:383-388. Stopford A. Brooke, Justice: “Three men went out one summer night, No care had they or aim, And dined and drank. ‘Ere we go home We'll have,’ they said, ‘a game.’ Three girls began that summer night A life of endless shame, And went through drink, disease, and death As swift as racing flame. Lawless and homeless, foul, they died; Rich, loved and praised, the men: But when they all shall meet with God, And Justice speaks,—what then?” See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:255-297. G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution: “Belief in immortality is a practical necessity of evolution. If the decisions of to-day are to determine our eternal destiny, then it is vastly more important to choose and act aright, than it is to preserve our earthly life. The martyrs were right. Conscience is vindicated. We can live for the ideal of manhood. Immortality is a powerful reformatory instrument.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:388—“If Death gives a final discharge to the sinner and the saint alike, Conscience has told us more lies than it has ever called to their account.” Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:2—“If [transgressors] have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God”; Henry VI, 2d part, 5:2—“Can we outrun the heavens?” Addison, Cato: “It must be so,—Plato, thou reasonest well.—Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself and startles at destruction? 'Tis the divinity that stirs within us, 'Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.”

Gildersleeve, in The Independent, March 30, 1899—“Plato in the Phædo argues for immortality from the alternation of opposites: life must follow death as death follows life. But alternation of opposites is not generation of opposites. He argues from reminiscence. But this involves pre-existence and a cycle of incarnations, not the immortality which we crave. The soul abides, as the idea abides, but there is no guarantee that it abides forever. He argues from the uncompounded nature of the soul. But we do not know the soul's nature, and at most this is an analogy: as soul is like God, invisible, it must like God abide. But this is analogy, and nothing more.”William James, Will to Believe, 87—“That our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being which we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life, but are not of it. They bite, but do not know what it means; they submit to vivisection, and do not know the meaning of that.”

George Eliot, walking with Frederic Myers in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity, Cambridge, “stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”But this idea of the infinite nature of Duty is the creation of Christianity—the last infinite would never have attained its present range and intensity, had it not been indissolubly connected with the other two (Forrest, Christ of History and Experience, 16).

This ethical argument has probably more power over the minds of men than any other. Men believe in Minos and Rhadamanthus, if not in the Elysian Fields. But even here it may be replied that the judgment which conscience threatens may be, not immortality, but extinction of being. We shall see, however, in our discussion of the endlessness of future punishment, that mere annihilation cannot satisfy the moral instinct which lies at the basis of this argument. That demands a punishment proportioned in each case to the guilt incurred by transgression. Extinction of being would be the same to all. As it would not admit of degrees, so it would not, in any case, sufficiently vindicate God's righteousness. F. W. Newman: “If man be not immortal, God is not just.”

But while this argument proves life and punishment for the wicked after death, it leaves us dependent on revelation for our knowledge how long that life and punishment will be. Kant's argument is that man strives equally for morality and for well-being; but morality often requires the sacrifice of well-being; hence there must be a future reconciliation of the two in the well-being or reward of virtue. To all of which it might be answered, first, that there is no virtue so perfect as to merit reward; and secondly, that virtue is its own reward, and so is well-being.

(d) The historical argument.—The popular belief of all nations and ages shows that the idea of immortality is natural to the human mind. It is not sufficient to say that this indicates only such desire for continued earthly existence as is necessary to self-preservation; for multitudes expect a life beyond death without desiring it, and multitudes desire a heavenly life without caring for the earthly. This testimony of man's nature to immortality may be regarded as the testimony of the God who made the nature.

Testimonies to this popular belief are given in Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, preface: The arrow-heads and earthen vessels laid by the side of the dead Indian; the silver obolus put in the mouth of the dead Greek to pay Charon's passage money; the furnishing of the Egyptian corpse with the Book of the Dead, the papyrus-roll containing the prayer he is to offer and the chart of his journey through the unseen world. The Gauls did not hesitate to lend money, on the sole condition that he to whom they lent it would return it to them in the other life,—so sure were they that they should get it again (Valerius Maximus, quoted in Boissier, La Religion Romaine, 1:264). The Laplanders bury flint and tinder with the dead, to furnish light for the dark journey. The Norsemen buried the horse and armor for the dead hero's triumphant ride. The Chinese scatter paper images of sedan porters over the grave, to help along in the sombre pilgrimage. The Greenlanders bury with the child a dog to guide him (George Dana Boardman, Sermon on Immortality).

Savage, Life after Death, 1-18—“Candles at the head of the casket are the modern representatives of the primitive man's fire which was to light the way of the soul on its dark journey.... Ulysses talks in the underworld with the shade of Hercules though the real Hercules, a demigod, had been transferred to Olympus, and was there living in companionship with the gods.... The Brahman desired to escape being reborn. Socrates: ‘To die and be released is better for me.’ Here I am walking on a plank. It reaches out into the fog, and I have got to keep walking. I can see only ten feet ahead of me. I know that pretty soon I must walk over the end of that plank,—I haven't the slightest idea into what, and I don't believe anybody else knows. And I don't like it.” Matthew Arnold: “Is there no other life? Pitch this one high.” But without positive revelation most men will say: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”(1 Cor. 15:32).

“By passionately loving life, we make Loved life unlovely, hugging her to death.”Theodore Parker: “The intuition of mortality is written in the heart of man by a Hand that writes no falsehoods.... There is evidence of a summer yet to be, in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter—efflorescences in human nature unaccountable if the end of man is in the grave.” But it may be replied that many universal popular impressions have proved false, such as belief in ghosts, and in the moving of the sun round the earth. While the mass of men have believed in immortality, some of the wisest have been doubters. Cyrus said: “I cannot imagine that the soul lives only while it remains in this mortal body.” But the dying words of Socrates were: “We part; I am going to die, and you to live; which of us goes the better way is known to God alone.” Cicero declared: “Upon this subject I entertain no more than conjectures;” and said that, when he was reading Plato's argument for immortality, he seemed to himself convinced, but when he laid down the book he found that all his doubts returned. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 134—“Though Cicero wrote his Tusculan Disputations to prove the doctrine of immortality, he spoke of that doctrine in his letters and speeches as a mere pleasing speculation, which might be discussed with interest, but which no one practically held.”

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 3:9, calls death “the most to be feared of all things ... for it appears to be the end of everything; and for the deceased there appears to be no longer either any good or any evil.” Æschylus: “Of one once dead there is no resurrection.”Catullus: “When once our brief day has set, we must sleep one everlasting night.”Tacitus: “If there is a place for the spirits of the pious; if, as the wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies.” “In that if,” says Uhlhorn, “lies the whole torturing uncertainty of heathenism.” Seneca, Ep. liv.—“Mors est non esse”—“Death is not to be”; Troades, V, 393—“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil”—“There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.” Marcus Aurelius: “What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heavenborn things fly to their [pg 990]native seat.” The Emperor Hadrian to his soul: “Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.” Classic writers might have said of the soul at death: “We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relume.”

Chadwick, 184—“With the growth of all that is best in man of intelligence and affection, there goes the development of the hope of an immortal life. If the hope thus developed is not a valid one, then we have a radical contradiction in our moral nature. The survival of the fittest points in the same direction.” Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)—“At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast Eternity.” Goethe in his last days came to be a profound believer in immortality. “You ask me what are my grounds for this belief? The weightiest is this, that we cannot do without it.” Huxley wrote in a letter to Morley: “It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of time that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a great deal,—at any rate in one of the upper circles, where climate and the company are not too trying.”

The book of Job shows how impossible it is for man to work out the problem of personal immortality from the point of view of merely natural religion. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, represents Claudio as saying to his sister Isabella: “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod.” Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 2:739—“The other world is in all men the one enemy, in its aspect of a future world, however, the last enemy, which speculative criticism has to fight, and if possible to overcome.” Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, Stanzas 28-35—“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.... Up from Earth's Centre through the seventh gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a knot unravelled by the Road, But not the master-knot of human fate. There was the Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I might not see: Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was,—And then no more of Thee and Me. Earth could not answer, nor the Seas that mourn, In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn; Nor rolling Heaven, with all his signs revealed, And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn. Then of the Thee in Me, who works behind The veil, I lifted up my hands to find A Lamp, amid the darkness; and I heard As from without—‘The Me within Thee blind.’ Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn I leaned, the secret of my life to learn; And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—‘While you live, Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return!’ ” So “The Phantom Caravan has reached The Nothing it set out from.” It is a demonstration of the hopelessness and blindness and sensuality of man, when left without the revelation of God and of the life to come.

The most that can be claimed for this fourth argument from popular belief is that it indicates a general appentency for continued existence after death, and that the idea is congruous with our nature. W. E. Forster said to Harriet Martineau that he would rather be damned than annihilated; see F. P. Cobbe, Peak of Darien, 44. But it may be replied that there is reason enough for this desire for life in the fact that it ensures the earthly existence of the race, which might commit universal suicide without it. There is reason enough in the present life for its existence, and we are not necessitated to infer a future life therefrom. This objection cannot be fully answered from reason alone. But if we take our argument in connection with the Scriptural revelation concerning God's making of man in his image, we may regard the testimony of man's nature as the testimony of the God who made it.

We conclude our statement of these rational proofs with the acknowledgment that they rest upon the presupposition that there exists a God of truth, wisdom, justice, and love, who has made man in his image, and who desires to commune with his creatures. We acknowledge, moreover, that these proofs give us, not an absolute demonstration, but only a balance of probability, in favor of man's immortality. We turn therefore to Scripture for the clear revelation of a fact of which reason furnishes us little more than a presumption.

Everett, Essays, 76, 77—“In his Träume eines Geistersehers, Kant foreshadows the Method of his Kritik. He gives us a scheme of disembodied spirits, and calls it a bit of mystic (geheimen) philosophy; then the opposite view, which he calls a bit of vulgar [pg 991](gemeimen) philosophy. Then he says the scales of the understanding are not quite impartial, and the one that has the inscription ‘Hope for the future’ has a mechanical advantage. He says he cannot rid himself of this unfairness. He suffers feeling to determine the result. This is intellectual agnosticism supplemented by religious faith.”The following lines have been engraved upon the tomb of Professor Huxley: “And if there be no meeting past the grave, If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest. Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, For God still giveth his beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep he wills, so best.” Contrast this consolation with: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:1-3).

Dorner: “There is no rational evidence which compels belief in immortality. Immortality has its pledge in God's making man in his image, and in God's will of love for communion with men.” Luthardt, Compendium, 289—“The truth in these proofs from reason is the idea of human personality and its relation to God. Belief in God is the universal presupposition and foundation of the universal belief in immortality.”When Strauss declared that this belief in immortality is the last enemy which is to be destroyed, he forgot that belief in God is more ineradicable still. Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 92—“The doctrine of immortality is to me the indispensable corollary of that of the goodness of God.”

Hadley, Essays, Philological and Critical, 392-397—“The claim of immortality may be based on one or the other of two assumptions: (1) The same organism will be reproduced hereafter, and the same functions, or part of them, again manifested in connection with it, and accompanied with consciousness of continued identity; or, (2) The same functions may be exercised and accompanied with consciousness of identity, though not connected with the same organism as before; may in fact go on without interruption, without being even suspended by death, though no longer manifested to us.” The conclusion is: “The light of nature, when all directed to this question, does furnish a presumption in favor of immortality, but not so strong a presumption as to exclude great and reasonable doubts upon the subject.”

For an excellent synopsis of arguments and objections, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 276. See also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 417-441; A. M. Fairbairn, on Idea of Immortality, in Studies in Philos. of Religion and of History; Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality; Tennyson, Two Voices; Alger, Critical History of Doctrine of Future Life, with Appendix by Ezra Abbott, containing a Catalogue of Works relating to the Nature, Origin, and Destiny of the Soul; Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality, by George A. Gordon, Josiah Royce, William James, Dr. Osler, John Fiske, B. I. Wheeler, Hyslop, Münsterberg, Crothars.

2. Upon scriptural grounds.

(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.

Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”; 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body. Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life. Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”

Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”: 2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”; 1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first [pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.

But it may be asked: Is not all this, in 1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.

Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated ‘soul’, in Gen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If a force, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”

Dr. H. Heath Bawden: “It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”

(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life, viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.

Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”; cf. 3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”; 16-19—the curse of pain and toil: 22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life. Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”; 25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”; Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”; John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”; 6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”: 8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”

Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”; 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”; Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins”; 5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”; James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”; 1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”; Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”

We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to [pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for “God”, “spirit”, “holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.

(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.

Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”; Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated “was corrupt,” is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. In Ps. 119:176, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep” cannot mean “I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.” Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers [annihilators?] and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”; 57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth [is annihilated?] and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”; Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off [annihilated?].”

Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute “annihilate” for “lose”; Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”; cf. Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used. 1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth [annihilates?] the temple of God, him shall God destroy”; 2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used. 2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might” = the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation. “Destruction from” = separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. in loco: “from” = the source from which the “destruction” proceeds). “A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com. in loco. 2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word “destruction” (ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated “perished” (ἀπώλετο) in verse 6. “We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition” (Plumptre, Com. in loco).

(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.

Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”; Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”; 21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.” The “second death” is the first death intensified. Having one's “part in the lake of fire” is not annihilation.

In a similar manner the word “life” is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good. 1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life. John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that “life” is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions, “for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). But life is: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.

(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New [pg 994] Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.

On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and = “sinking,” “depth,” or “the sunken, deep, place.” Ἁιδης, Hades, = not “hell,” but the “unseen world,” conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, on Job 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word ‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”

Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham “was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.” “Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be ‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt” (W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac in Gen. 35:29, and of Jacob in 19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried. Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being “gathered unto his people” was something different from burial. Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.” Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”; 7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”; 14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”

Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”; Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”; 23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; cf. 1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor: “to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.

(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.

Death is often designated as a “sleeping” or a “falling asleep”; see John 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on 1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used in Eccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and in Ps. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”

See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.” Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for ‘spirit’ and ‘breath,’ shall we say that the spirit is only breath? ‘Heart’ in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be ‘eaten up with avarice,’ while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”

(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and [pg 995] of Elijah (Gen. 5:24; cf. Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14; cf. Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).

The Egyptian coffin was called “the chest of the living.” The Egyptians called their houses “hostelries,” while their tombs they called their “eternal homes” (Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are “living again after death, and being born again as the sun,” which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138). “The deceased lived again after death” (134). “The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born” (164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul. “There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs” (197).

Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo: “O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”; “Teti is the living dead”; “Arise, O Teti, to die no more”; “O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death. “The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”; “They render thee happy throughout all eternity”; “He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal. “Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”; “Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body. “Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”; “the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul. “A god is born, it is Unas”; “O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”; “O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.

Howard Osgood: “Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.” Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.” Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.” Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.” See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.

It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality: Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality: Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”; [pg 996] cf. Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”; 2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”; 1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor; cf. Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”; Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”; Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”; Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”; Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”

Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.” Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end; cf. Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.” Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”; 26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?” Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought “a better country, that is, a heavenly”; cf. Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.

The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More: “But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.” God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey: “They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”

Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child: “What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.” Whittier, Snowbound, 200 sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.” Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope: “For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”

The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”

(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).

John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”; 10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people: “We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”

Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence. “In reality,” he said, “it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.” It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.

There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour: “Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.” George Dana Boardman: “Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”

George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures: “Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.” Athanasius: “Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God” (quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial. [pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment. Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.

II. The Intermediate State.

The Scriptures affirm the conscious existence of both the righteous and the wicked, after death, and prior to the resurrection. In the intermediate state the soul is without a body, yet this state is for the righteous a state of conscious joy, and for the wicked a state of conscious suffering.

That the righteous do not receive the spiritual body at death, is plain from 1 Thess. 4:16,17 and 1 Cor. 15:52, where an interval is intimated between Paul's time and the rising of those who slept. The rising was to occur in the future, “at the last trump.” So the resurrection of the wicked had not yet occurred in any single case (2 Tim. 2:18—it was an error to say that the resurrection was “past already”); it was yet future (John 5:28-30—“the hour cometh”—ἔρχεται ὤρα, not καὶ νῦν ἐστίν—“now is,” as in verse 25; Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection”—ἀνάστασιν μέλλειν ἔσεσθαι). Christ was the firstfruits (1 Cor. 15:20, 23). If the saints had received the spiritual body at death, the patriarchs would have been raised before Christ.

1. Of the righteous.

Of the righteous, it is declared:

(a) That the soul of the believer, at its separation from the body, enters the presence of Christ.

2 Cor. 5:1-8—“if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For verily in this we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life ... willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”—Paul hopes to escape the violent separation of soul and body—the being “unclothed”—by living till the coming of the Lord, and then putting on the heavenly body, as it were, over the present one (ἐπενδύσασθαι); yet whether he lived till Christ's coming or not, he knew that the soul, when it left the body, would be at home with the Lord.

Luke 23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; 2 Tim. 4:18—“The Lord will deliver me from every evil work, and will save me unto [or, ‘into’] his heavenly kingdom” = will save me and put me into his heavenly kingdom (Ellicott), the characteristic of which is the visible presence of the King with his subjects. It is our privilege to be with Christ here and now. And nothing shall separate us from Christ and his love, “neither death, nor life ... nor things present, nor things to come” (Rom. 8:38); for he himself has said: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age” (Mat. 28:20).

(b) That the spirits of departed believers are with God.

Heb. 12:23—Ye are come “to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge of all”; cf. Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; John 20:17—“Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father”—probably means: “my body has not yet ascended.” The soul had gone to God during the interval between death and the resurrection, as is evident from Luke 23:43, 46—“with me in Paradise ... Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

(c) That believers at death enter paradise.

Luke 23:42, 43—“And he said, Jesus, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom. And he said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise”; cf. 2 Cor. 12:4—“caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter”; Rev. 2:7—“To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God”; Gen. 2:8—“And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.” Paradise is none other than the abode of God and the blessed, of which the primeval Eden was the type. If the penitent thief went to Purgatory, it was a Purgatory with Christ, which was better than a Heaven without Christ. Paradise is a place which Christ has gone to prepare, perhaps by taking our friends there before us.

(d) That their state, immediately after death, is greatly to be preferred to that of faithful and successful laborers for Christ here.

Phil. 1:23—“I am in a strait betwixt the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better”—here Hackett says: “ἀναλῦσαι = departing, cutting loose, as if to put to sea, followed by σὺν Χριστῷ εἶναι, as if Paul regarded one event as immediately subsequent to the other.” Paul, with his burning desire to preach Christ, would certainly have preferred to live and labor, even amid great suffering, rather than to die, if death to him had been a state of unconsciousness and inaction. See Edwards the younger, Works, 2:530, 531; Hovey, Impenitent Dead, 61.

(e) That departed saints are truly alive and conscious.

Mat. 22:32—“God is not the God of the dead, but of the living”; Luke 16:22—“carried away by the angels into Abraham's bosom”; 23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”—“with me” = in the same state,—unless Christ slept in unconsciousness, we cannot think that the penitent thief did; John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”; 1 Thess. 5:10—“who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him”; Rom. 8:10—“And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.” Life and consciousness clearly belong to the “souls under the altar” mentioned under the next head, for they cry: “How long?” Phil. 1:6—“he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”—seems to imply a progressive sanctification, through the Intermediate State, up to the time of Christ's second coming. This state is: 1. a conscious state (“God of the living”); 2. a fixed state (no “passing from thence”); 3. an incomplete state (“not to be unclothed”).

(f) That they are at rest and blessed.

Rev. 6:9-11—“I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: and they cried with a great voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And there was given them to each one a white robe; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little time, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, who should be killed even as they were, should have fulfilled their course”; 14:13—“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; for their works follow with them”; 20:14—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire”—see Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1883:303—“The shadow of death lying upon Hades is the penumbra of Hell. Hence Hades is associated with death in the final doom.”

2. Of the wicked.

Of the wicked, it is declared:

(a) That they are in prison,—that is, are under constraint and guard (1 Peter 3:19—φυλακή).

1 Pet. 3:19—“In which [spirit] also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison”—there is no need of putting unconscious spirits under guard. Hovey: “Restraint implies power of action, and suffering implies consciousness.”

(b) That they are in torment, or conscious suffering (Luke 16:23—ἐν βασάνοις).

Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.”

Here many unanswerable questions may be asked: Had the rich man a body before the resurrection, or is this representation of a body only figurative? Did the soul still feel the body from which it was temporarily separated, or have souls in the intermediate state temporary bodies? However we may answer these questions, it is certain [pg 1000]that the rich man suffers, while probation still lasts for his brethren on earth. Fire is here the source of suffering, but not of annihilation. Even though this be a parable, it proves conscious existence after death to have been the common view of the Jews, and to have been a view sanctioned by Christ.

(c) That they are under punishment (2 Pet. 2:9—κολαζομένους).

2 Pet. 2:9—“the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the day of judgment”—here “the unrighteous” = not only evil angels, but ungodly men; cf. verse 4—“For if God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.”

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the body is buried, yet still the torments of the soul are described as physical. Jesus here accommodates his teaching to the conceptions of his time, or, better still, uses material figures to express spiritual realities. Surely he does not mean to say that the Rabbinic notion of Abraham's bosom is ultimate truth. “Parables,” for this reason among others, “may not be made primary sources and seats of doctrine.” Luckock, Intermediate State, 20—“May the parable of the rich man and Lazarus be an anticipatory picture of the final state? But the rich man seems to assume that the judgment has not yet come, for he speaks of his brethren as still undergoing their earthly probation, and as capable of receiving a warning to avoid a fate similar to his own.”

The passages cited enable us properly to estimate two opposite errors.

A. They refute, on the one hand, the view that the souls of both righteous and wicked sleep between death and the resurrection.

This view is based upon the assumption that the possession of a physical organism is indispensable to activity and consciousness—an assumption which the existence of a God who is pure spirit (John 4:24), and the existence of angels who are probably pure spirits (Heb. 1:14), show to be erroneous. Although the departed are characterized as “spirits” (Eccl. 12:7; Acts 7:59; Heb. 12:23; 1 Pet. 3:19), there is nothing in this 'absence from the body' (2 Cor. 5:8) inconsistent with the activity and consciousness ascribed to them in the Scriptures above referred to. When the dead are spoken of as “sleeping” (Dan. 12:2; Mat. 9:24; John 11:11; 1 Cor. 11:30; 15:51; 1 Thess. 4:14; 5:10), we are to regard this as simply the language of appearance, and as literally applicable only to the body.

John 4:24—“God is a Spirit [or rather, as margin, ‘God is spirit’]”; Heb. 1:14—“Are they [angels] not all ministering spirits?” Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”; Heb. 12:23—“to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect”; 1 Pet. 3:19—“in which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison”; 2 Cor. 5:8—“we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”; Dan. 12:2—“many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake”; Mat. 9:24—“the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth”; John 11:11—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep”; 1 Cor. 11:30—“For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep”; 1 Thess. 4:14—“For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him”; 5:10—“who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him.”

B. The passages first cited refute, on the other hand, the view that the suffering of the intermediate state is purgatorial.

According to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church, “all who die at peace with the church, but are not perfect, pass into purgatory.” Here they make satisfaction for the sins committed after baptism by suffering a longer or shorter time, according to the degree of their guilt. The church on earth, however, has power, by prayers and the sacrifice of the Mass, to shorten these sufferings or to remit them altogether. But we urge, in reply, that the passages referring to suffering in the intermediate state give [pg 1001] no indication that any true believer is subject to this suffering, or that the church has any power to relieve from the consequences of sin, either in this world or in the world to come. Only God can forgive, and the church is simply empowered to declare that, upon the fulfilment of the appointed conditions of repentance and faith, he does actually forgive. This theory, moreover, is inconsistent with any proper view of the completeness of Christ's satisfaction (Gal. 2:21; Heb. 9:28); of justification through faith alone (Rom. 3:28); and of the condition after death, of both righteous and wicked, as determined in this life (Eccl. 11:3; Mat. 25:10; Luke 16:26; Heb. 9:27; Rev.22:11).

Against this doctrine we quote the following texts: Gal 2:21—“I do not make void the grace of God: for if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought”; Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once [or, ‘once for all’] offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Rom. 3:28—“We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law”; Eccl. 11:3—“if a tree fall toward the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth there shall it be”; Mat. 25:10—“And while they went away to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage feast: and the door was shut”; Luke 16:26—“And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross over from thence to us”; Heb. 9:27—“it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment”; Rev. 22:11—“He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him do righteousness still: and he that is holy, let him be made holy still.”

Rome teaches that the agonies of purgatory are intolerable. They differ from the pains of the damned only in this, that there is a limit to the one, not the other. Bellarmine, De Purgatorio, 2:14—“The pains of purgatory are very severe, surpassing any endured in this life.” Since none but actual saints escape the pains of purgatory, this doctrine gives to the death and the funeral of the Roman Catholic a dreadful and repellent aspect. Death is not the coming of Christ to take his disciples home, but is rather the ushering of the shrinking soul into a place of unspeakable suffering. This suffering makes satisfaction for guilt. Having paid their allotted penalty, the souls of the purified pass into Heaven without awaiting the day of judgment. The doctrine of purgatory gives hope that men may be saved after death; prayer for the dead has influence; the priest is authorized to offer this prayer; so the church sells salvation for money. Amory H. Bradford, Ascent of the Soul, 267-287, argues in favor of prayers for the dead. Such prayers, he says, help us to keep in mind the fact that they are living still. If the dead are free beings, they may still choose good or evil, and our prayers may help them to choose the good. We should be thankful, he believes, to the Roman Catholic Church, for keeping up such prayers. We reply that no doctrine of Rome has done so much to pervert the gospel and to enslave the world.

For the Romanist doctrine, see Perrone, Prælectiones Theologicæ, 2:391-420. Per contra, see Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:743-770; Barrows, Purgatory. Augustine, Encheiridion, 69, suggests the possibility of purgatorial fire in the future for some believers. Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless? page 69, says that Tertullian held to a delay of resurrection in the case of faulty Christians; Cyprian first stated the notion of a middle state of purification; Augustine thought it “not incredible”; Gregory the Great called it “worthy of belief”; it is now one of the most potent doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; that church has been, from the third century, for all souls who accept her last consolations, practically restorationist. Gore, Incarnation, 18—“In the Church of Rome, the 'peradventure' of an Augustine as to purgatory for the imperfect after death—'non redarguo', he says, 'quia forsitan verum est,'—has become a positive teaching about purgatory, full of exact information.”

Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:410, adopts Hume's simile, and says that purgatory gave the Roman Catholic Church what Archimedes wanted, another world on which to fix its lever, that so fixed, the church might with it move this world. We must remember, however, that the Roman church teaches no radical change of character in purgatory,—purgatory is only a purifying process for believers. The true purgatory is only in this world,—for only here are sins purged away by God's sanctifying Spirit; and in this process of purification, though God chastises, there is no element of penalty. On Dante's Purgatory, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 515-518.

Luckock, After Death, is an argument, based upon the Fathers, against the Romanist doctrine. Yet he holds to progress in sanctification in the intermediate state, though the work done in that state will not affect the final judgment, which will be for the deeds done in the body. He urges prayer for the departed righteous. In his book entitled The Intermediate State, Luckock holds to mental and spiritual development in that state, to active ministry, mutual recognition, and renewed companionship. He does not believe in a second probation, but in a first real probation for those who have had no proper opportunities in this life. In their reaction against purgatory, the Westminister divines obliterated the Intermediate State. In that state there is gradual purification, and must be, since not all impurity and sinfulness are removed at death. The purging of the will requires time. White robes were given to them while they were waiting (Rev. 6:11). But there is no second probation for those who have thrown away their opportunities in this life. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 232 (Pope, 2129), makes the Pope speak of following Guido “Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain; which must not be.” But the idea of hell as permitting essential change of character is foreign to Roman Catholic doctrine.

We close our discussion of this subject with a single, but an important, remark,—this, namely, that while the Scriptures represent the intermediate state to be one of conscious joy to the righteous, and of conscious pain to the wicked, they also represent this state to be one of incompleteness. The perfect joy of the saints, and the utter misery of the wicked, begin only with the resurrection and general judgment.

That the intermediate state is one of incompleteness, appears from the following passages: Mat. 8:29—“What have we to do with thee, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” 2 Cor. 5:3, 4—“if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life”; cf. Rom. 8:23—“And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; Phil. 3:11—“if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead”; 2 Pet. 2:9—“the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the day of judgment”; Rev. 6:10—“and they [the souls underneath the altar] cried with a great voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”

In opposition to Locke, Human Understanding, 2:1:10, who said that “the soul thinks not always”; and to Turner, Wish and Will, 48, who declares that “the soul need not always think, any more than the body always move; the essence of the soul is potentiality for activity”; Descartes, Kant, Jouffroy, Sir William Hamilton, all maintain that it belongs to mental existence continuously to think. Upon this view, the intermediate state would be necessarily a state of thought. As to the nature of that thought, Dorner remarks in his Eschatology that “in this relatively bodiless state, a still life begins, a sinking of the soul into itself and into the ground of its being,—what Steffens calls ‘involution,’ and Martensen ‘self-brooding.’ In this state, spiritual things are the only realities. In the unbelieving, their impurity, discord, alienation from God, are laid bare. If they still prefer sin, its form becomes more spiritual, more demoniacal, and so ripens for the judgment.”

Even here, Dorner deals in speculation rather than in Scripture. But he goes further, and regards the intermediate state as one, not only of moral progress, but of elimination of evil; and holds the end of probation to be, not at death, but at the judgment, at least in the case of all non-believers who are not incorrigible. We must regard this as a practical revival of the Romanist theory of purgatory, and as contradicted not only by all the considerations already urged, but also by the general tenor of Scriptural representation that the decisions of this life are final, and that character is fixed here for eternity. This is the solemnity of preaching, that the gospel is “a savor from life unto life,” or “a savor from death unto death” (2 Cor. 2:16).

Descartes: “As the light always shines and the heat always warms, so the soul always thinks.” James, Psychology, 1:164-175, argues against unconscious mental states. The states were conscious at the time we had them; but they have been forgotten. In the Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, Prof. James denies that eternity is given at a stroke to omniscience. Lotze, in his Metaphysics, 268, in opposition to Kant, contends for the transcendental validity of time. Green, on the contrary, in Prolegomena [pg 1003]to Ethics, book 1, says that every act of knowledge in the case of man is a timeless act. In comparing the different aspects of the stream of successive phenomena, the mind must, he says, be itself out of time. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 306, denies this timeless consciousness even to God, and apparently agrees with Martineau in maintaining that God does not foreknow free human acts.

De Quincey called the human brain a palimpsest. Each new writing seems to blot out all that went before. Yet in reality not one letter has ever been effaced. Loeb, Physiology of the Brain, 213, tells us that associative memory is imitated by machines like the phonograph. Traces left by speech can be reproduced in speech. Loeb calls memory a matter of physical chemistry. Stout, Manual of Psychology, 8—“Consciousness includes not only awareness of our own states, but these states themselves whether we are aware of them or not. If a man is angry, that is a state of consciousness, even though he does not know that he is angry. If he does know that he is angry, that is another modification of consciousness, and not the same.” On unconscious mental action, see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 378-382—“Cerebration cannot be identified with psychical processes. If it could be, materialism would triumph. If the brain can do these things, why not do all the phenomena of consciousness? Consciousness becomes a mere epiphenomenon. Unconscious cerebration = wooden iron or unconscious consciousness. What then becomes of the soul in its intervals of unconsciousness? Answer: Unconscious finite minds exist only in the World-ground in which all minds and things have their existence.”

On the whole subject, see Hovey, State of Man after Death; Savage, Souls of the Righteous; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:304-446; Neander, Planting and Training, 482-484; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 407-448; Bib. Sac., 13:153; Methodist Rev., 34:240; Christian Rev., 20:381; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Hades; Stuart, Essays on Future Punishment; Whately, Future State; Hovey, Biblical Eschatology, 79-144.

III. The Second Coming of Christ.

While the Scriptures represent great events in the history of the individual Christian, like death, and great events in the history of the church, like the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and the destruction of Jerusalem, as comings of Christ for deliverance or judgment, they also declare that these partial and typical comings shall be concluded by a final, triumphant return of Christ, to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people.

Temporal comings of Christ are indicated in: Mat. 24:23, 27, 34—“Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is the Christ, or, Here; believe it not.... For as the lightning cometh forth from the east, and is seen even unto the west; so shall be the coming of the Son of man.... Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be accomplished”; 16:28—“Verily I say unto you, There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”; John 14:3, 18—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.... I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you”; Rev. 3:20—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”So the Protestant Reformation, the modern missionary enterprise, the battle against papacy in Europe and against slavery in this country, the great revivals under Whitefield in England and under Edwards in America, were all preliminary and typical comings of Christ. It was a sceptical spirit which indited the words: “God's new Messiah, some great Cause”; yet it is true that in every great movement of civilization we are to recognize a new coming of the one and only Messiah, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and to-day and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 1:840—“The coming began with his ascension to heaven (cf. Mat. 26:64—‘henceforth ἀπ᾽ ἄρτι [from now] ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven’).” Matheson, Spir. Devel. of St. Paul, 286—“To Paul, in his later letters, this world is already the scene of the second advent. The secular is not to vanish away, but to be permanent, transfigured, pervaded by the divine life. Paul began with the Christ of the resurrection; he ends with the Christ who already makes all things new.” See Metcalf, Parousia vs. Second Advent, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1907:61-65.

The final coming of Christ is referred to in: Mat. 24:30—“they shall see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a [pg 1004]trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other”; 25:31—“But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 1:11—“Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven? this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; 1 Thess. 4:16—“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”; 2 Thess. 1:7, 10—“the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power ... when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed”; Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Rev. 1:7—“Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him.” Dr. A. C. Kendrick, Com. on Heb. 1:6—“And when he shall conduct back again into the inhabited world the First-born, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”—in the glory of the second coming Christ's superiority to angels will be signally displayed—a contrast to the humiliation of his first coming.

The tendency of our day is to interpret this second class of passages in a purely metaphorical and spiritual way. But prophecy can have more than one fulfilment. Jesus' words are pregnant words. The present spiritual coming does not exhaust their meaning. His coming in the great movements of history does not preclude a final and literal coming, in which “every eye shall see him” (Rev. 1:7). With this proviso, we may assent to much of the following quotation from Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 44-58—“The last things of which Jesus speaks are not the end of the world, but of the age—the end of the Jewish period in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem.... After the entire statement is in, including both the destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of the Lord which is to follow it, it is distinctly said that that generation was not to pass away until all these things are accomplished. According to this, the coming of the Son of man must be something other than a visible coming. In O. T. prophecy any divine interference in human affairs is represented under the figure of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Mat. 26:64 says: ‘From this time ye shall see the Son of man seated ... and coming in the clouds of heaven.’ Coming and judgment are both continuous. The slow growth in the parables of the leaven and the mustard seed contradicts the idea of Christ's early coming. ‘After a long time the Lord of these servants cometh’ (Mat. 25:19). Christ came in one sense at the destruction of Jerusalem; in another sense all great crises in the history of the world are comings of the Son of man. These judgments of the nations are a part of the process for the final setting up of the kingdom. But this final act will not be a judgment process, but the final entire submission of the will of man to the will of God. The end is to be, not judgment, but salvation.” We add to this statement the declaration that the final act here spoken of will not be purely subjective and spiritual, but will constitute an external manifestation of Christ comparable to that of his first coming in its appeal to the senses, but unspeakably more glorious than was the coming to the manger and the cross. The proof of this we now proceed to give.

1. The nature of this coming.

Although without doubt accompanied, in the case of the regenerate, by inward and invisible influences of the Holy Spirit, the second advent is to be outward and visible. This we argue:

(a) From the objects to be secured by Christ's return. These are partly external (Rom. 8:21, 23). Nature and the body are both to be glorified. These external changes may well be accompanied by a visible manifestation of him who “makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

Rom. 8:10-23—“in hope that the creation also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God ... waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; Rev. 21:5—“Behold, I make all things new.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 49—“We must not confound the Paraclete and the Parousia. It has been argued that, because Christ came in the person of the Spirit, the Redeemer's advent in glory has already taken place. But in the Paraclete Christ comes spiritually and invisibly; in the Parousia he comes bodily and gloriously.”

(b) From the Scriptural comparison of the manner of Christ's return with the manner of his departure (Acts 1:11)—see Commentary of [pg 1005] Hackett, in loco:—“ὂν τρόπον = visibly, and in the air. The expression is never employed to affirm merely the certainty of one event as compared with another. The assertion that the meaning is simply that, as Christ had departed, so also he would return, is contradicted by every passage in which the phrase occurs.”

Acts 1:11—“this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; cf. Acts 7:28—“wouldest thou kill me, as ὂν τρόπον thou killedst the Egyptian yesterday?” Mat. 23:37—“how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as ὂν τρόπον a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”; 2 Tim. 3:8—“as ὂν τρόπον Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also withstand the truth.” Lyman Abbott refers to Mat. 23:37, and Luke 13:35, as showing that, in Acts 1:11, “in like manner” means only “in like reality.” So, he says, the Jews expected Elijah to return in form, according to Mal. 4:5, whereas he returned only in spirit. Jesus similarly returned at Pentecost in spirit, and has been coming again ever since. The remark of Dr. Hackett, quoted in the text above, is sufficient proof that this interpretation is wholly unexegetical.

(c) From the analogy of Christ's first coming. If this was a literal and visible coming, we may expect the second coming to be literal and visible also.

1 Thess. 4:16—“For the Lord himself [= in his own person] shall descend from heaven, with a shout[something heard], with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”—see Com. of Prof. W. A. Stevens: “So different from Luke 17:20, where ‘the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.’The ‘shout’ is not necessarily the voice of Christ himself (lit. ‘in a shout,’ or ‘in shouting’). ‘Voice of the archangel’ and ‘trump of God’ are appositional, not additional.” Rev. 1:7—“every eye shall see him”; as every ear shall hear him: John 5:28, 29—“all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice”; 2 Thess. 2:2—“to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled ... as that the day of the Lord is now present”—they may have “thought that the first gathering of the saints to Christ was a quiet, invisible one—a stealthy advent, like a thief in the night”(Lillie). 2 John 7—“For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh”—here denial of a future second coming of Christ is declared to be the mark of a deceiver.

Alford and Alexander, in their Commentaries on Acts 1:11, agree with the view of Hackett quoted above. Warren, Parousia, 61-65, 106-114, controverts this view and says that “an omnipresent divine being can come, only in the sense of manifestation.” He regards the parousia, or coming of Christ, as nothing but Christ's spiritual presence. A writer in the Presb. Review, 1883:221, replies that Warren's view is contradicted “by the fact that the apostles often spoke of the parousia as an event yet future, long after the promise of the Redeemer's spiritual presence with his church had begun to be fulfilled, and by the fact that Paul expressly cautions the Thessalonians against the belief that the parousia was just at hand.” We do not know how all men at one time can see a bodily Christ; but we also do not know the nature of Christ's body. The day exists undivided in many places at the same time. The telephone has made it possible for men widely separated to hear the same voice,—it is equally possible that all men may see the same Christ coming in the clouds.

2. The time of Christ's coming.

(a) Although Christ's prophecy of this event, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, so connects it with the destruction of Jerusalem that the apostles and the early Christians seem to have hoped for its occurrence during their life-time, yet neither Christ nor the apostles definitely taught when the end should be, but rather declared the knowledge of it to be reserved in the counsels of God, that men might ever recognize it as possibly at hand, and so might live in the attitude of constant expectation.

1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”; 1 Thess. 4:17—“then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord”; 2 Tim. 4:8—“henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day: and not only to me, but also to all them that have loved his appearing”; James [pg 1006]5:7—“Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord”; 1 Pet. 4:7—“But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore of sound mind, and be sober unto prayer”; 1 John 2:18—“Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that antichrist cometh, even now have there risen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour.”

Phil. 4:5—“The Lord is at hand (ἐγγύς). In nothing be anxious”—may mean “the Lord is near”(in space), without any reference to the second coming. The passages quoted above, expressing as they do the surmises of the apostles that Christ's coming was near, while yet abstaining from all definite fixing of the time, are at least sufficient proof that Christ's advent may not be near to our time. We should be no more warranted than they were, in inferring from these passages alone the immediate coming of the Lord.

Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:349-350, maintains that Jesus expected his own speedy second coming and the end of the world. There was no mention of the death of his disciples, or the importance of readiness for it. No hard and fast organization of his disciples into a church was contemplated by him,—Mat. 16:18 and 18:17 are not authentic. No separation of his disciples from the fellowship of the Jewish religion was thought of. He thought of the destruction of Jerusalem as the final judgment. Yet his doctrine would spread through the earth, like leaven and mustard seed, though accompanied by suffering on the part of his disciples. This view of Wendt can be maintained only by an arbitrary throwing out of the testimony of the evangelist, upon the ground that Jesus' mention of a church does not befit so early a stage in the evolution of Christianity. Wendt's whole treatment is vitiated by the presupposition that there can be nothing in Jesus' words which is inexplicable upon the theory of natural development. That Jesus did not expect speedily to return to earth is shown in Mat. 25:19—“After a long time the Lord of those servants cometh”; and Paul, in 2 Thess., had to correct the mistake of those who interpreted him as having in his first Epistle declared an immediate coming of the Lord.

A. H. Strong, Cleveland Sermon, 1904:27—“The faith in a second coming of Christ has lost its hold upon many Christians in our day. But it still serves to stimulate and admonish the great body, and we can never dispense with its solemn and mighty influence. Christ comes, it is true, in Pentecostal revivals and in destructions of Jerusalem, in Reformation movements and in political upheavals. But these are only precursors of another and literal and final return of Christ, to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people. That day for which all other days are made will be a joyful day for those who have fought a good fight and have kept the faith. Let us look for and hasten the coming of the day of God. The Jacobites of Scotland never ceased their labors and sacrifices for their king's return. They never tasted wine, without pledging their absent prince; they never joined in song, without renewing their oaths of allegiance. In many a prison cell and on many a battlefield they rang out the strain: ‘Follow thee, follow thee, wha wadna follow thee? Long hast thou lo'ed and trusted us fairly: Chairlie, Chairlie, wha wadna follow thee? King o' the Highland hearts, bonnie Prince Chairlie!’ So they sang, so they invited him, until at last he came. But that longing for the day when Charles should come to his own again was faint and weak compared with the longing of true Christian hearts for the coming of their King. Charles came, only to suffer defeat, and to bring shame to his country. But Christ will come, to put an end to the world's long sorrow, to give triumph to the cause of truth, to bestow everlasting reward upon the faithful. ‘Even so, Lord Jesus, come! Hope of all our hopes the sum, Take thy waiting people home! Long, so long, the groaning earth, Cursed with war and flood and dearth, Sighs for its redemption birth. Therefore come, we daily pray; Bring the resurrection-day; Wipe creation's curse away!’ ”

(b) Hence we find, in immediate connection with many of these predictions of the end, a reference to intervening events and to the eternity of God, which shows that the prophecies themselves are expressed in a large way which befits the greatness of the divine plans.

Mat. 24:36—“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only”; Mark 13:32—“But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is”; Acts 1:7—“And he said unto them, It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within his own authority”; 1 Cor. 10:11—“Now these things happened unto them by way of example; and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come”; 16:22—“Marana tha [marg.: that is, O Lord, come!]”; 2 Thess. 2:1-3—“Now we beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him; to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled ... as that the day of the Lord is now present [Am. Rev.: [pg 1007] ‘is just at hand’]; let no man beguile you in any wise: for it will not be, except the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.”

James 5:8, 9—“Be ye also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Murmur not, brethren, one against another, that ye be not judged: behold, the judge standeth before the doors”; 2 Pet. 3:3-12—“in the last days mockers shall come ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for, from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they wilfully forget, that there were heavens from of old.... But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise.... But the day of the Lord will come as a thief ... what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for and earnestly desiring [marg.: ‘hastening’] the coming of the day of God”—awaiting it, and hastening its coming by your prayer and labor.

Rev. 1:3—“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of the prophecy, and keep the things that are written therein: for the time is at hand”: 22:12, 20—“Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to render to each man according as his work is.... He who testifieth these things saith, Yea: I come quickly. Amen: come, Lord Jesus.” From these passages it is evident that the apostles did not know the time of the end, and that it was hidden from Christ himself while here in the flesh. He, therefore, who assumes to know, assumes to know more than Christ or his apostles—assumes to know the very thing which Christ declared it was not for us to know!

Gould, Bib. Theol. N.T., 152—“The expectation of our Lord's coming was one of the elements and motifs of that generation, and the delay of the event caused some questioning. But there is never any indication that it may be indefinitely postponed. The early church never had to face the difficulty forced upon the church to-day, of belief in his second coming, founded upon a prophecy of his coming during the lifetime of a generation long since dead. And until this Epistle [2 Peter], we do not find any traces of this exegetical legerdemain as such a situation would require. But here we have it full-grown; just such a specimen of harmonistic device as orthodox interpretation familiarizes us with. The definite statement that the advent is to be within that generation is met with the general principle that ‘one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’ (2 Pet. 3:8).” We must regard this comment of Dr. Gould as an unconscious fulfilment of the prediction that “in the last days mockers shall come with mockery” (2 Pet. 3:3). A better understanding of prophecy, as divinely pregnant utterance, would have enabled the critic to believe that the words of Christ might be partially fulfilled in the days of the apostles, but fully accomplished only at the end of the world.

(c) In this we discern a striking parallel between the predictions of Christ's first, and the predictions of his second, advent. In both cases the event was more distant and more grand than those imagined to whom the prophecies first came. Under both dispensations, patient waiting for Christ was intended to discipline the faith, and to enlarge the conceptions, of God's true servants. The fact that every age since Christ ascended has had its Chiliasts and Second Adventists should turn our thoughts away from curious and fruitless prying into the time of Christ's coming, and set us at immediate and constant endeavor to be ready, at whatsoever hour he may appear.

Gen. 4:1—“And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man with the help of Jehovah [lit.: ‘I have gotten a man, even Jehovah’]”—an intimation that Eve fancied her first-born to be already the promised seed, the coming deliverer; see MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ. Deut. 18:15—“Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken”—here is a prophecy which Moses may have expected to be fulfilled in Joshua, but which God designed to be fulfilled only in Christ. Is. 7:14, 16—“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.... For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land whose two kings thou abhorrest shall be forsaken”—a prophecy which the prophet may have expected to be fulfilled in his own time, and which was partly so fulfilled, but which God intended to be fulfilled ages thereafter.

Luke 2:25—“Simeon; and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel”—Simeon was the type of holy men, in every age of Jewish history, who were waiting for the fulfilment of God's promise, and for the coming of the deliverer. So under the Christian dispensation. Augustine held that Christ's reign of a thousand years, which occupies the last epoch of the world's history, did not still lie in the future, but began with the [pg 1008]founding of the church (Ritschl, Just. and Reconc., 286). Luther, near the time of his death, said: “God forbid that the world should last fifty years longer! Let him cut matters short with his last judgment!” Melanchthon put the end less than two hundred years from his time. Calvin's motto was: “Domine, quousque?”—“O Lord, how long?” Jonathan Edwards, before and during the great Awakening, indulged high expectations as to the probable extension of the movement until it should bring the world, even in his own lifetime, into the love and obedience of Christ (Life, by Allen, 234). Better than any one of these is the utterance of Dr. Broadus: “If I am always ready, I shall be ready when Jesus comes.” On the whole subject, see Hovey, in Baptist Quarterly, Oct. 1877:416-432; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:641-646; Stevens, in Am. Com. on Thessalonians, Excursus on The Parousia, and notes on 1 Thess. 4:13, 16; 5:11; 2 Thess. 2:3, 12; Goodspeed, Messiah's Second Advent; Heagle, That Blessed Hope.

3. The precursors of Christ's coming.

(a) Through the preaching of the gospel in all the world, the kingdom of Christ is steadily to enlarge its boundaries, until Jews and Gentiles alike become possessed of its blessings, and a millennial period is introduced in which Christianity generally prevails throughout the earth.

Dan. 2:44, 45—“And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall the sovereignty thereof be left to another people; but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.”

Mat. 13:31, 32—“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed ... which indeed is less than all seeds; but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof”—the parable of the leaven, which follows, apparently illustrates the intensive, as that of the mustard seed illustrates the extensive, development of the kingdom of God; and it is as impossible to confine the reference of the leaven to the spread of evil as it is impossible to confine the reference of the mustard seed to the spread of good.

Mat. 24:14—“And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come”; Rom. 11:25, 26—“a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in; and so all Israel shall be saved”; Rev. 20:4-6—“And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and such as worshipped not the beast, neither his image, and received not the mark upon their forehead and upon their hand; and they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years.”

Col. 1:23—“the gospel which ye heard, which was preached in all creation under heaven”—Paul's phrase here and the apparent reference in Mat. 24:14 to A. D. 70 as the time of the end, should restrain theorizers from insisting that the second coming of Christ cannot occur until this text has been fulfilled with literal completeness (Broadus).

(b) There will be a corresponding development of evil, either extensive or intensive, whose true character shall be manifest not only in deceiving many professed followers of Christ and in persecuting true believers, but in constituting a personal Antichrist as its representative and object of worship. This rapid growth shall continue until the millennium, during which evil, in the person of its chief, shall be temporarily restrained.

Mat. 13:30, 38—“Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn ... the field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one”; 24:5, 11, 12, 24—“For many shall come in my name, saying, I am the Christ; and shall lead many astray.... And many false prophets shall arise, and shall lead many astray. And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold.... For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”

Luke 21:12—“But before all these things, they shall lay their hands on you, and shall persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, bringing you before kings and governors for my name's sake”; 2 Thess. 2:3, 4, 7, 8,—“it will not be, except the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.... For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work: only there is one that restraineth [pg 1009]now, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought by the manifestation of his coming.”

Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:65, holds that “Antichrist means another Christ, a pro-Christ, a vice-Christ, a pretender to the name of Christ, and in that character, an usurper and adversary. The principle of Antichrist was already sown in the time of Paul. But a certain hindrance, i. e., the Roman Empire as then constituted, needed first to be removed out of the way, before room could be made for Antichrist's development.”Antichrist, according to this view, is the hierarchical spirit, which found its final and most complete expression in the Papacy. Dante, Hell, 19:106-117, speaks of the Papacy, or rather the temporal power of the Popes, as Antichrist: “To you St. John referred, O shepherds vile, When she who sits on many waters, had Been seen with kings her person to defile”; see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 507.

It has been objected that a simultaneous growth both of evil and of good is inconceivable, and that the progress of the divine kingdom implies a diminution in the power of the adversary. Only a slight reflection however convinces us that, as the population of the world is always increasing, evil men may increase in numbers, even though there is increase in the numbers of the good. But we must also consider that evil grows in intensity just in proportion to the light which good throws upon it. “Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there.”Every revival of religion stirs up the forces of wickedness to opposition. As Christ's first advent occasioned an unusual outburst of demoniac malignity, so Christ's second advent will be resisted by a final desperate effort of the evil one to overcome the forces of good. The great awakening in New England under Jonathan Edwards caused on the one hand a most remarkable increase in the number of Baptist believers, but also on the other hand the rise of modern Unitarianism. The optimistic Presbyterian pastor at Auburn argued with the pessimistic chaplain of the State's Prison that the world was certainly growing better, because his congregation was increasing; whereupon the chaplain replied that his own congregation was increasing also.

(c) At the close of this millennial period, evil will again be permitted to exert its utmost power in a final conflict with righteousness. This spiritual struggle, moreover, will be accompanied and symbolized by political convulsions, and by fearful indications of desolation in the natural world.

Mat. 24:29, 30—“But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven”; Luke 21:8-28—false prophets; wars and tumults; earthquakes; pestilences; persecutions; signs in the sun, moon, and stars; “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads; because your redemption draweth nigh.”

Interpretations of the book of Revelation are divided into three classes: (1) the Præterist (held by Grotius, Moses Stuart, and Warren), which regards the prophecy as mainly fulfilled in the age immediately succeeding the time of the apostles (666 = Neron Kaisar); (2) the Continuous (held by Isaac Newton, Vitringa, Bengel, Elliott, Kelly, and Cumming), which regards the whole as a continuous prophetical history, extending from the first age until the end of all things (666 = Lateinos); Hengstenberg and Alford hold substantially this view, though they regard the seven seals, trumpets, and vials as synchronological, each succeeding set going over the same ground and exhibiting it in some special aspect; (3) the Futurist (held by Maitland and Todd), which considers the book as describing events yet to occur, during the times immediately preceding and following the coming of the Lord.

Of all these interpretations, the most learned and exhaustive is that of Elliott, in his four volumes entitled Horæ Apocalypticæ. The basis of his interpretation is the “time and times and half a time” of Dan. 7:25, which according to the year-day theory means 1260 years—the year, according to ancient reckoning, containing 360 days, and the “time”being therefore 360 years [360 + (2 X 360) + 180 = 1260]. This phrase we find recurring with regard to the woman nourished in the wilderness (Rev. 12:14). The blasphemy of the beast for forty and two months (Rev. 13:5) seems to refer to the same period [42 X 30 = 1260, as before]. The two witnesses prophecy 1260 days (Rev. 11:3); and the woman's time in the wilderness is stated (Rev. 12:6) as 1260 days. This period of 1260 years is regarded by Elliott as the time of the temporal power of the Papacy.

There is a twofold terminus a quo, and correspondingly a twofold terminus ad quem. The first commencement is A. D. 531, when in the edict of Justinian the dragon of the [pg 1010]Roman Empire gives its power to the beast of the Papacy, and resigns its throne to the rising Antichrist, giving opportunity for the rise of the ten horns as European kings (Rev. 13:1-3). The second commencement, adding the seventy-five supplementary years of Daniel 12:12 [1335 - 1260 = 75], is A. D. 606, when the Emperor Phocas acknowledges the primacy of Rome, and the ten horns, or kings, now diademed, submit to the Papacy (Rev. 17:12, 13). The first ending-point is A. D. 1791, when the French Revolution struck the first blow at the independence of the Pope [531 + 1260 = 1791]. The second ending-point is A. D. 1866, when the temporal power of the Pope was abolished at the unification of the kingdom of Italy [606 + 1260 = 1866]. Elliott regards the two-horned beast (Rev. 13:11) as representing the Papal Clergy, and the image of the beast (Rev. 13:14, 15) as representing the Papal Councils.

Unlike Hengstenberg and Alford, who consider the seals, trumpets, and vials as synchronological, Elliott makes the seven trumpets to be an unfolding of the seventh seal, and the seven vials to be an unfolding of the seventh trumpet. Like other advocates of the premillennial advent of Christ, Elliott regards the four chief signs of Christ's near approach as being: (1) the decay of the Turkish Empire (the drying up of the river Euphrates—Rev. 16:12); (2) the Pope's loss of temporal power (the destruction of Babylon—Rev. 17:19); (3) the conversion of the Jews and their return to their own land (Ez. 37; Rom. 11:12-15, 25-27—but on this last, see Meyer); (4) the pouring out of the Holy Spirit and the conversion of the Gentiles (the way of the kings of the East—Rev. 16:12; the fulness of the Gentiles—Rom. 11:25).

Elliott's whole scheme, however, is vitiated by the fact that he wrongly assumes the book of Revelation to have been written under Domitian (94 or 96), instead of under Nero (67 or 68). His terminus a quo is therefore incorrect, and his interpretation of chapters 5-9 is rendered very precarious. The year 1866, moreover, should have been the time of the end, and so the terminus ad quem seems to be clearly misunderstood—unless indeed the seventy-five supplementary years of Daniel are to be added to 1866. We regard the failure of this most ingenious scheme of Apocalyptic interpretation as a practical demonstration that a clear understanding of the meaning of prophecy is, before the event, impossible, and we are confirmed in this view by the utterly untenable nature of the theory of the millennium which is commonly held by so-called Second Adventists, a theory which we now proceed to examine.

A long preparation may be followed by a sudden consummation. Drilling the rock for the blast is a slow process; firing the charge takes but a moment. The woodwork of the Windsor Hotel in New York was in a charred and superheated state before the electric wires that threaded it wore out their insulation,—then a slight increase of voltage turned heat into flame. The Outlook, March 30, 1895—“An evolutionary conception of the Second Coming, as a progressive manifestation of the spiritual power and glory of Christ, may issue in a dénouement as unique as the first advent was which closed the preparatory ages.”

Joseph Cook, on A. J. Gordon: “There is a wide distinction between the flash-light theory and the burning-glass theory of missions. The latter was Dr. Gordon's view. When a burning-glass is held over inflammable material, the concentrated rays of the sun rapidly produce in it discoloration, smoke, and sparks. At a certain instant, after the sparks have been sufficiently diffused, the whole material suddenly bursts into flame. There is then no longer any need of the burning-glass, for fire has itself fallen from on high and is able to do its own work. So the world is to be regarded as inflammable material to be set on fire from on high. Our Lord's life on earth is a burning-glass, concentrating rays of light and heat upon the souls of men. When the heating has gone on far enough, and the sparks of incipient conflagration have been sufficiently diffused, suddenly spiritual flame will burst up everywhere and will fill the earth. This is the second advent of him who kindled humanity to new life by his first advent. As I understand the premillenarian view of history, the date when the sparks shall kindle into flame is not known, but it is known that the duty of the church is to spread the sparks and to expect at any instant, after their wide diffusion, the victorious descent of millennial flame, that is, the beginning of our Lord's personal and visible reign over the whole earth.” See article on Millenarianism, by G. P. Fisher, in McClintock and Strong's Cyclopædia; also by Semisch, in Schaff-Herzog, Cyclopædia; cf. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 1:840.

4. Relation of Christ's second coming to the millennium.

The Scripture foretells a period, called in the language of prophecy “a thousand years,” when Satan shall be restrained and the saints shall reign [pg 1011] with Christ on the earth. A comparison of the passages bearing on this subject leads us to the conclusion that this millennial blessedness and dominion is prior to the second advent. One passage only seems at first sight to teach the contrary, viz.: Rev. 20:4-10. But this supports the theory of a premillennial advent only when the passage is interpreted with the barest literalness. A better view of its meaning will be gained by considering:

(a) That it constitutes a part, and confessedly an obscure part, of one of the most figurative books of Scripture, and therefore ought to be interpreted by the plainer statements of the other Scriptures.

We quote here the passage alluded to: Rev. 20:4-10—“And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and such as worshipped not the beast, neither his image, and received not the mark upon their forehead and upon their hand; and they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead lived not until the thousand years should be finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: over these the second death hath no power; but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.”

Emerson and Parker met a Second Adventist who warned them that the end of the world was near. Parker replied: “My friend, that does not concern me; I live in Boston.” Emerson said: “Well, I think I can get along without it.” A similarly cheerful view is taken by Denney, Studies in Theology, 232—“Christ certainly comes, according to the picture in Revelation, before the millennium; but the question of importance is, whether the conception of the millennium itself, related as it is to Ezekiel, is essential to faith. I cannot think that it is. The religious content of the passages—what they offer for faith to grasp—is, I should say, simply this: that untilthe end the conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world must go on; that as the end approaches it becomes ever more intense, progress in humanity not being a progress in goodness merely or in badness only, but in the antagonism between the two; and that the necessity for conflict is sure to emerge even after the kingdom of God has won its greatest triumphs. I frankly confess that to seek more than this in such Scriptural indications seems to me trifling.”

(b) That the other Scriptures contain nothing with regard to a resurrection of the righteous which is widely separated in time from that of the wicked, but rather declare distinctly that the second coming of Christ is immediately connected both with the resurrection of the just and the unjust and with the general judgment.

Mat. 16:27—“For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then shall he render unto every man according to his deeds”; 25:31-33—“But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats”; John 5:28, 29—“Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall some forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment”; 2 Cor. 5:10—“For we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad”; 2 Thess. 1:6-10—“if so be that it is a righteous thing with God to recompense affliction to them that afflict you, and to you that are afflicted rest with us, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not God, and to them that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus: who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed.”

2 Pet. 3:7, 10—“the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.... But the day of the Lord will come as a thief; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up”; Rev. 20:11-15—“And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat upon it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of the things that were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and Hades gave up the dead that [pg 1012]were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire.”

Here is abundant evidence that there is no interval of a thousand years between the second coming of Christ and the resurrection, general judgment, and end of all things. All these events come together. The only answer of the premillennialists to this objection to their theory is, that the day of judgment and the millennium may be contemporaneous,—in other words, the day of judgment may be a thousand years long. Elliott holds to a conflagration, partial at the beginning of this period, complete at its close,—Peter's prophecy treating the two conflagrations as one, while the book of Revelation separates them; so a nearer view resolves binary stars into two. But we reply that, if the judgment occupies the whole period of a thousand years, then the coming of Christ, the resurrection, and the final conflagration should all be a thousand years also. It is indeed possible that, in this case, as Peter says in connection with his prophecy of judgment, “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”(2 Pet. 3:8). But if we make the word “day” so indefinite in connection with the judgment, why should we regard it as so definite, when we come to interpret the 1260 days?

(c) That the literal interpretation of the passage—holding, as it does, to a resurrection of bodies of flesh and blood, and to a reign of the risen saints in the flesh, and in the world as at present constituted—is inconsistent with other Scriptural declarations with regard to the spiritual nature of the resurrection-body and of the coming reign of Christ.

1 Cor. 15:44, 50—“it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.... Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” These passages are inconsistent with the view that the resurrection is a physical resurrection at the beginning of the thousand years—a resurrection to be followed by a second life of the saints in bodies of flesh and blood. They are not, however, inconsistent with the true view, soon to be mentioned, that “the first resurrection” is simply the raising of the church to a new life and zeal. Westcott, Bib. Com. on John 14:18, 19—“I will not leave you desolate[marg.: ‘orphans’]: I come unto you. Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth me no more; but ye behold me”:—“The words exclude the error of those who suppose that Christ will ‘come’under the same conditions of earthly existence as those to which he submitted at his first coming.” See Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 66-78.

(d) That the literal interpretation is generally and naturally connected with the expectation of a gradual and necessary decline of Christ's kingdom upon earth, until Christ comes to bind Satan and to introduce the millennium. This view not only contradicts such passages as Dan. 2:34, 35, and Mat. 13:31, 32, but it begets a passive and hopeless endurance of evil, whereas the Scriptures enjoin a constant and aggressive warfare against it, upon the very ground that God's power shall assure to the church a gradual but constant progress in the face of it, even to the time of the end.

Dan. 2:34, 35—“Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, so that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth”; Mat. 13:31, 32—“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is less than all seeds; but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof.” In both these figures there is no sign of cessation or of backward movement, but rather every indication of continuous advance to complete victory and dominion. The premillennial theory supposes that for the principle of development under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, God will substitute a reign of mere power and violence. J. B. Thomas: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, not like a can of nitro-glycerine.” Leighton Williams: “The kingdom of God is to be realized on earth, not by a cataclysm, apart from effort and will, but through the universal dissemination of the gospel all but lost to the world.” E. G. Robinson: “Second Adventism stultifies the system and scheme of Christianity.” Dr. A. J. Gordon could not deny that the early disciples were mistaken [pg 1013]in expecting the end of the world in their day. So we may be. Scripture does not declare that the end should come in the lifetime of the apostles, and no definite date is set. “After a long time” (Mat. 25:19) and “the falling away come first” (2 Thess. 2:3) are expressions which postpone indefinitely. Yet a just view of Christ's coming as ever possible in the immediate future may make us as faithful as were the original disciples.

The theory also divests Christ of all kingly power until the millennium, or, rather, maintains that the kingdom has not yet been given to him; see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:94—where Luke 19:12—“A certain nobleman went into a far country, to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return”—is interpreted as follows: “Subordinate kings went to Rome to receive the investiture to their kingdoms from the Roman Emperor, and then returned to occupy them and reign. So Christ received from his Father, after his ascension, the investiture to his kingdom; but with the intention not to occupy it, till his return at his second coming. In token of this investiture he takes his seat as the Lamb on the divine throne” (Rev. 5:6-8). But this interpretation contradicts Mat. 28:18, 20—“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth ... lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”See Presb. Rev., 1882:228. On the effects of the premillennial view in weakening Christian endeavor, see J. H. Seelye, Christian Missions, 94-127; per contra, see A. J. Gordon, in Independent, Feb. 1886.

(e) We may therefore best interpret Rev. 20:4-10 as teaching in highly figurative language, not a preliminary resurrection of the body, in the case of departed saints, but a period in the later days of the church militant when, under special influence of the Holy Ghost, the spirit of the martyrs shall appear again, true religion be greatly quickened and revived, and the members of Christ's churches become so conscious of their strength in Christ that they shall, to an extent unknown before, triumph over the powers of evil both within and without. So the spirit of Elijah appeared again in John the Baptist (Mal. 4:5; cf. Mat. 11:13, 14). The fact that only the spirit of sacrifice and faith is to be revived is figuratively indicated in the phrase: “The rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years should be finished” = the spirit of persecution and unbelief shall be, as it were, laid to sleep. Since resurrection, like the coming of Christ and the judgment, is twofold, first, spiritual (the raising of the soul to spiritual life), and secondly, physical (the raising of the body from the grave), the words in Rev. 20:5—“this is the first resurrection”—seem intended distinctly to preclude the literal interpretation we are combating. In short, we hold that Rev. 20:4-10 does not describe the events commonly called the second advent and resurrection, but rather describes great spiritual changes in the later history of the church, which are typical of, and preliminary to, the second advent and resurrection, and therefore, after the prophetic method, are foretold in language literally applicable only to those final events themselves (cf. Ez. 37:1-14; Luke 15:32).

Mal. 4:5—“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of Jehovah come”; cf. Mat. 11:13, 14—“For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye are willing to receive it, this is Elijah, that is to come”; Ez. 37:1-14—the vision of the valley of dry bones = either the political or the religious resuscitation of the Jews; Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”—of the prodigal son. It will help us in our interpretation of Rev. 20:4-10 to notice that death, judgment, the coming of Christ, and the resurrection, are all of two kinds, the first spiritual, and the second literal:

(1) First, a spiritual death (Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins”); and secondly, a physical and literal death, whose culmination is found in the second death (Rev. 20:14—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire”).

(2) First, a spiritual judgment (Is. 26:9—“when thy judgments are in the earth”; John 12:31—“Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out”; 3:18—“he that believeth not hath been judged already”); and secondly, an outward and literal judgment (Acts 17:31—“hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained”).

(3) First, the spiritual and invisible coming of Christ (Mat. 16:28—“shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”—at the destruction of Jerusalem; John 14:16, 18—“another Comforter ... I come unto you”—at Pentecost; 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself”—at death); and secondly, a visible literal coming (Mat. 25:31—“the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him”).

(4) First, a spiritual resurrection (John 5:25—“The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live”); and secondly, a physical and literal resurrection (John 5:28, 29—“the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment”). The spiritual resurrection foreshadows the bodily resurrection.

This twofoldness of each of the four terms, death, judgment, coming of Christ, resurrection, is so obvious a teaching of Scripture, that the apostle's remark in Rev. 20:5—“This is the first resurrection”—seems distinctly intended to warn the reader against drawing the premillenarian inference, and to make clear the fact that the resurrection spoken of is the first or spiritual resurrection,—an interpretation which is made indubitable by his proceeding, further on, to describe the outward and literal resurrection in verse 13—“And the sea gave up the dead that were in it: and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them.” This physical resurrection takes place when “the thousand years” are “finished” (verse 5).

This interpretation suggests a possible way of reconciling the premillenarian and postmillenarian theories, without sacrificing any of the truth in either of them. Christ may come again, at the beginning of the millennium, in a spiritual way, and his saints may reign with him spiritually, in the wonderful advances of his kingdom; while the visible, literal coming may take place at the end of the thousand years. Dorner's view is postmillennial, in this sense, that the visible coming of Christ will be after the thousand years. Hengstenberg curiously regards the millennium as having begun in the Middle Ages (800-1800 A. D.). This strange view of an able interpreter, as well as the extraordinary diversity of explanations given by others, convinces us that no exegete has yet found the key to the mysteries of the Apocalypse. Until we know whether the preaching of the gospel in the whole world (Mat. 24:14) is to be a preaching to nations as a whole, or to each individual in each nation, we cannot determine whether the millennium has already begun, or whether it is yet far in the future.

The millennium then is to be the culmination of the work of the Holy Spirit, a universal revival of religion, a nation born in a day, the kings of the earth bringing their glory and honor into the city of God. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 211—“After the present elective work of the Spirit has been completed, there will come a time of universal blessing, when the Spirit shall literally be poured out upon all flesh, when that which is perfect shall come and that which is in part shall be done away.... The early rain of the Spirit was at Pentecost; the latter rain will be at the Parousia.”

A. H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress, London, July 12, 1905—“Let us expect the speedy spiritual coming of the Lord. I believe in an ultimate literal and visible coming of Christ in the clouds of heaven to raise the dead, to summon all men to the judgment, and to wind up the present dispensation. But I believe that this visible and literal coming of Christ must be preceded, and prepared for, by his invisible and spiritual coming and by a resurrection of faith and love in the hearts of his people. ‘This is the first resurrection’ (Rev. 20:5). I read in Scripture of a spiritual second coming that precedes the literal, an inward revelation of Christ to his people, a restraining of the powers of darkness, a mighty augmentation of the forces of righteousness, a turning to the Lord of men and nations, such as the world has not yet seen. I believe in a long reign of Christ on earth, in which his saints shall in spirit be caught up with him, and shall sit with him upon his throne, even though this muddy vesture of decay compasses them about, and the time of their complete glorification has not yet come. Let us hasten the coming of the day of God by our faith and prayer. ‘When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?’ (Luke 18:8). Let him find faith, at least in us. Our faith can certainly secure the coming of the Lord into our hearts. Let us expect that Christ will be revealed in us, as of old he was revealed in the Apostle Paul.”

Our own interpretation of Rev. 20:1-10, was first given, for substance, by Whitby. He was followed by Vitringa and Faber. For a fuller elaboration of it, see Brown, Second Advent, 206-259; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 447-453. For the postmillennial view generally, see Kendrick, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1870; New Englander, 1874:356; 1879:47-49, 114-147; Pepper, in Bap. Rev., 1880:15; Princeton Review, March, 1879:415-434; Presb. Rev., 1883:221-252; Bib. Sac., 15:381, 625; 17:111; Harris, Kingdom of Christ, 220-237; Waldegrave, Bampton Lectures for 1854, on the Millennium; Neander, Planting and Training, 526, 527; Cowles, Dissertation on Premillennial Advent, in Com. on Jeremiah [pg 1015]and Ezekiel; Weiss, Premillennial Advent; Crosby, Second Advent; Fairbairn on Prophecy, 432-480; Woods, Works, 3:267; Abp. Whately, Essays on Future State. For the premillennial view, see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 4:140-196; William Kelly, Advent of Christ Premillennial; Taylor, Voice of the Church on the Coming and Kingdom of the Redeemer; Litch, Christ Yet to Come.