shadow.

They were that upper sphere into which his own spirit had been caught, and in which he had seen the glorified Saviour, and received a commission from his lips. We see no reason to doubt that he uses the word "heaven” in the same representative sense that Christ had done; the state of eternal peace imaged forth sublimely in those galaxies hung down by the evening skies. Christ uses the word in the plural number, as if indicating the fact that the state of the blest is not single, but multiform, rising upward in degree; just as the expanse over us rises above earth's lowly plains, sky beyond sky, with growing and multiplying splendors. The Hebrew conception of three heavens, the lowest, the middle, and the highest, thus represents the heavens of the world to come. If Paul speaks with any decent consistency, he uses the word amp (air), which means the aerial or lower sky, and the phrase Tρíros oupavós, the third heaven, after the same analogy; making the Hebrew topography of the visible expanse to furnish a language descriptive of the invisible glories. When he says he was caught up into paradise, does he mean that he was taken into a hanging garden overhead? Not at all. No more does he mean by the heavens (whether the aerial or lowest, or the third, the supreme) the visible dome above us, but the eternal abodes. And in

describing the ascent of "the saints that slept" out of Hades, or the mediate state, he would of course make them reach first the heaven proximate to them, and not the third or highest of all. Thither, too, their friends from earth would rise first, and there they would meet each other. "We who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the lower sky, and so shall we ever be with the Lord." Allusion, too, is evidently had to the appearances at the Lord's ascension, when he arose and melted from sight in a cloud on the visible expanse of air, the outward semblances indicating the spiritual reality to the men who stood gazing below.

The writings of St. Paul are fragmentary, and contain nowhere an orderly development of his whole plan of doctrine. That plan only gleams out upon us now and then, here an arch and there a column; leaving us to infer the consistence and grandeur of the edifice. We readily admit that there are phrases which may be singled out and fitted in to a system of materialism. But the main sweep of his argument, his being made a personal witness of the risen Christ, his whole wonderful experience under Christianity, and the prominent features of his system of pneumatology, standing out in boldest relief, are each and all totally inconsistent with material

ism. Single phrases are to be interpreted in the light of his known spiritual philosophy, and are not by a narrow and tortuous criticism to be made to say something in conflict with it; and then that philosophy becomes luminous enough, and breaks from the old Judaism as from the shell that had enclosed it. He uses the terms which had belonged to the old topography of the material universe, but both its overworld and its underworld become the images and representatives of eternal things.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE HADES OF CHRISTIANITY.

We trust that the reader is abundantly satisfied as to the Christian meaning of the words "heaven" and "hell," and that they are rescued effectually and totally from the circle both of pagan and Jewish ideas. If heaven is not the zenith overhead, but the zenith of the eternal purity and peace, -if Gehenna or hell is not the lowest pit in the depths under our feet, but the nadir of a reversed and degraded humanity, then it becomes obvious enough what the spiritual Hades is, or the condition mediate between. It is not a place under ground in the natural world, but a position in the spiritual world to which that place answered as the image and the sign.

Two ideas are vastly prominent in the writings of the Apostle: first, that under "the Law," or the ante-Christian economy, there was no power available to the race for removing from it the

burden of hereditary evil; secondly, that Christ brings this power, so that "the curse rolls off and humanity can spring at once into its glorious fruition. These two thoughts, putting Christ and the Law in contrast, reappear on almost

every page.

Hence none who died under former dispensations can have entered heaven. From Adam to Moses, as well as from Moses to Christ, "death reigned." He does not mean physical dissolution, for that must always take place; but he means that inheritance of a disordered moral nature which had been a cleaving curse to all the generations. Men might fulfil all the outward ceremonial righteousness of Judaism, but still the curse would cling to them, and consequently when they entered the spiritual world they would remain under its shadow, and there they must wait till the great redemption comes. There even the saints and patriarchs of the former dispensations must be, for they are still under the bondage of entailed moral evil, still “included under sin," which no religion of mere legal observances could ever remove. Hence the state of the dead was neither heaven nor hell. The entailed burden rested still on all alike. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain." But this state of things was not always to continue. The heavens have opened at last, and the