to Assyria and Egypt, to Moab and Ammon and Elam, to Samaria and to Sodom (Ezek. xvi). Only a salvation of so wide a scope as this could meet the requirements of such far-reaching and comprehensive prophecies as that, for example, of Isaiah xxv, in which all nations are invited to a feast of fat things prepared for them by the Lord God, who shall destroy from off the face of the earth all that now hides His glory from the nations, and swallow up death in victory.

A wide generalization of Old Testament passages has thus established for us these two principles: 1. The fire of God's anger must burn against all evil-doers to overthrow and consumet hem in death and hell. 2. This "land of the enemy" where they lie as outcasts in bondage and gloom is not a territory beyond the reach of His conquering arm. He has provided to ransom in due time and order all these prisoners in the pit; and so, over and beyond this region of deserved judgment for sin, to make good His promise of blessing to all the families of the earth.

Coming to the New Testament we began its study with the principle that it cannot at any point contradict the Old. Christ came not to supersede, but to fulfill the law and the prophets. His words therefore were spoken in reference to this Old Testament revelation. They were designed to illumine and unfold it. All His sayings therefore about hell and the wrath to come must be in accordance with the principles we have there discovered. And nothing more is needed to bring them into such harmony than to put all His words about future judgment, and hell, and

unquenchable fire, precisely where they belong,—as relating to what befalls wicked men before resurrection. Such an interpretation of them is so natural and obvious that it is a marvel that the church should have been so long blind to it. A single passage in the most obscure book of the Bible (Rev. xx. 11-15), which speaks of a judgment of the dead after their awakening from death, has been suffered to dominate and pervert the meaning of all the earlier New Testament passages which speak of a speedy judgment for sin, and of a suffering in hell awaiting sinners just beyond the borders of this earthly life. Just where the Old Testament located sheol there must we locate the New Testament hell. They are but the same place of punishment.* The division of this realm of death into a Hades, and a Gehenna widely separated in character and in time, is but a part of the obscuring process above referred to. It was in Hades that the rich man lifted up his eyes being in torment.. Gehenna is only a deeper pit in that realm of destruction which the Old Testament covers by the broader name of Sheol. Were it not for some of these false notions imported into our New Testament reading, no one would have. ever thought that when John the Baptist describes the Messiah's work of judgmeut as a burning up of the chaff with "unquenchable fire" that anything more was meant by that term than its frequent Old Testament usage implies. And when Jesus repeatedly warns men against the danger of hell-fire, and that it

*See upon this point Prof. Shedd's Doctrine of Endless Punishment, Pg. 22, et seq.

is far better that they should now mortify the sins in their members than lose the whole body and soul in hell, no one would have supposed that he was referring to a future resurrection body, brought up from the grave to be damned, but to the loss of their present heritage in life and manhood. What he has all along in view in such passages is an impending destruction awaiting sinful men, and from which He sought to rescue all who would receive Him by the gift of an eternal life which would make them even umphant over death.

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And so His words of judgment, which relate to the trial of living generations of mankind have been treated as if they had primary and sole reference to the masses of the resurrected dead. And this too, in the face of His repeated declarations that they would overtake the world in the same way that the men of Noah's and of Lot's day were surprised, and that they would begin before that generation passed away. No one would deny, of course, that Jesus Christ is exalted to be the Judge of the dead as well as of the living. But it still remains the fact that the nations who know Him not, and who obey not His gospel, and who are consigned by Him to eternal fire (Matt. xxv. 31-46), are the living nations of mankind who pass in review before His throne. The words describe a pre-resurrection scene, and do not attempt to define what may be in the purposes of God for these doomed masses beyond their resurrection. Indeed it must be borne in mind in interpreting all these words of Jesus that He did not intend

to throw the great light of His approaching triumph upon these dark shadows of judgment before it took place. He chose to wait, until after the Son of Man was risen from the dead, before illumining the minds of even His disciples to the meaning of this great event-its relation to all God's great promises in the past, and to His widening purposes of grace toward the world in the future. This explains why it is that the harshest words in the Bible about future punishment are those of the loving Lord and Saviour. The time for the full disclosure of His redeeming plan was not yet. What hope for the world was couched in His resurrection could not yet be made known, except in the way of hints which even His chosen followers did not apprehend. And this explains why, as these studies have made plain to us, our traditional notions of a future hell of fire and threats of everlasting torment, find no place in either the sermons or the epistles of the apostles. In conformity with what we learned of the teachings of the Master, we found that the wrath to come in their view was a fearful punishment awaiting the ungodly in death and before resurrection. The harshest passage in either St. Paul's addresses or letters is that in 2 Thess. i. 9, where he speaks of an eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power. But every careful reader of the context, and of these two epistles, will see that this passage applies to a class of sinners living on the earth and who are saying "peace and safety" at the time of the Lord's coming. The resurrected dead

are not brought to view. And so in the Catholic Epistles "the great day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men" is one which overtakes men on the earth. There is absolutely nothing therefore in the words of Christ, or in the words He put by the Holy Ghost into the mouth of His apostles, or upon their pens, which sets aside the force of the principles required by the Old Testament teaching that man's judgment and suffering for sin lie in death, and in that land of darkness and bondage into which souls. pass beyond it; and nothing to interfere with that great principle outlined there, but brought into clearer light in the New Testament, that this punishment is bounded for all men by a hope of resurrection which shall reach them, each in his own time and order, as the result of the ransom paid for all. Not even the doctrine of retribution as brought to view in the Apocalypse can set aside these principles. Indeed that vision is all in harmony with it. The passages which seem to be exceptional cannot really be so. Their interpretation must yield to the requirements of these great principles which underlie all Scripture, and which are fundamental in the plan of redemption it was written to reveal. This promised recovery of all from the death-state, which is sin's wages, is not the salvation of all to eternal life, but to the blessings and the opportunities of a restored human life. The Bible brings to view two orders of life, of which Adam and Christ are the respective heads. In Christ there is eternal life. Man, in union with Him, becomes partaker of the life of God and the heir of all things.