The Christian Scriptures, assuming the resurrection of Christ as a

fact, describe it as a fulfilment of prophecy. Luke reports from

the risen Savior the words, "O fools, and slow of heart to believe

all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have

suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" "Thus it is

written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from

the dead the third day." Peter declares that the patriarch David

before "spake of the resurrection of Christ." And Paul also

affirms, "That the promise which was made unto the fathers, God

hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath

raised up Jesus again." One can scarcely hesitate in deciding the

meaning of these words as they were used by the apostles. The

unanimous opinion and interpretation of the Christians of the

first centuries, and of all the Church Fathers, leave no shadow of

a doubt that it was believed that the resurrection of Jesus was

repeatedly foretold in the Old Testament, expected by the

prophets, and fulfilled in the event as a seal of the inspired

prophecy. Furthermore, Jesus himself repeatedly prophesied his own

resurrection from the dead, though his disciples did not

understand his meaning until the event put a clear comment on the

words. He charged those who saw his transfiguration on the mount,

"Tell it to no man until the Son of Man be risen again from the

dead." The chief priests told Pilate that they remembered that

Jesus said, while he was yet alive, "After three days I will rise

again." Standing in the temple at Jerusalem, Jesus said once,

"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."

"When, therefore, he was risen from the dead, his disciples

remembered that he had said this unto them;" and then they

understood that "he had spoken of the temple of his body." It is

perfectly plain that the New Testament represents the resurrection

of Christ as the fulfilment of prophecies, those prophecies having

been so expounded by him.

There are few problems presented to the candid Christian scholar

of to day more perplexing than the one involved in the subject of

these prophecies. Paul declares to King Agrippa, "I say none other

things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should

come: that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first

that should rise from the dead and should show light unto the

Gentiles." It is vain to attempt to disguise the fact that the

ingenuous student cannot find these prophecies in the Old

Testament as we now have it. He will search it through in vain,

unless his eyes create what they see. Let any man endeavor to

discover a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures which, taken with its

context, can fairly bear such a sense. There is not a shadow of

valid evidence of any kind to support the merely traditional

notions on this subject. The only way of discerning predictions of

a death, descent, and ascent, of the Messiah, in the law and the

prophets, is by the application of Cabalistic methods of

interpretation, theories of occult types, double senses, methods

which now are not tolerable to intelligent men. That Rabbinical

interpretation which made the story of Ishmael and Isaac, the two

children borne to Abraham by Hagar and Sarah, an allegory

referring to the two covenants of Judaism and Christianity, could

easily extract any desired meaning from any given text. Bearing in

mind the prevalence of this kind of exegesis among the Jews, and

remembering also that they possessed in the times of Jesus a vast

body of oral law, to which they attributed as great authority as

to the written, there are two possible ways of honestly meeting

the difficulty before us.

First: in God's counsels it was determined that a Messiah should

afterwards arise among the Jews. The revealed hope of this stirred

the prophets and the popular heart. It became variously and

vaguely hinted in their writings, still more variously and

copiously unfolded in their traditions. The conception of him

gradually took form; and they began to look for a warrior prophet,

a national deliverer, a theocratic king. Jesus, being the true

Messiah, though a very different personage from the one meant by

the writers and understood by the people, yet being the Messiah

foreordained by God, applied these Messianic passages to himself,

and explained them according to his experience and fate. This will

satisfactorily clear up the application of some texts. And others

may be truly explained as poetical illustrations, rhetorical

accommodations, as when he applies to Judas, at the Last Supper,

the words of the Psalm, "He that eateth with me lifteth up his

heel against me;" and when he refers to Jonah's tarry in the

whale's belly as a symbol of his own destined stay beneath the

grave for a similar length of time. Or, secondly, we may conclude

that the prophecies under consideration, referred to in the New

Testament, were not derived from any sacred documents now in our

possession, but either from perished writings, or from oral

sources, which we know were abundant then. Justin Martyr says

there was formerly a passage in Jeremiah to this effect: "The Lord

remembered the dead who were sleeping in the earth, and went down

to them to preach salvation to them." 4 There were floating in the

Jewish mind, at the time of Christ, at least some fragmentary

traditions, vague expectations, that the Messiah was to die,

descend to Sheol, rescue some of the captives, and triumphantly

ascend. It is true, this statement is denied by some; but the

weight of critical authorities seems to us to preponderate in its

favor, and the intrinsic historical probabilities leave hardly a

doubt of it in our own minds.5 Now, three alternatives are offered

us. Either Jesus interpreted Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets,

on the Rabbinical ground of a double sense, with mystic

applications; or he accepted the prophecies referred to, from oral

traditions held by his countrymen; or the apostles misunderstood,

and in consequence partially misreported, him. All we can

positively say is that these precise predictions are plainly not

in the Jewish Scriptures, undoubtedly were in the oral law, and

were certainly received by the apostles as authoritative.

Continuing our inquiry into the apostolic view of the resurrection

of Christ, we shall perceive that it is most prominently set forth

as the certificate of our redemption from the

4 Dial. cum Tryph. sect. lxxii.

5 Discussed, with full list of references, in Strauss's Life of

Jesus, part iii. cap. i. sect.

112.

kingdom of death to the same glorious destiny which awaited him

upon his ascension into heaven. The apostles regarded his

resurrection as a supernatural seal set on his mission, warranting

his claims as an inspired deliverer and teacher. Thereby, they

thought, God openly sanctioned and confirmed his promises.

Thereby, they considered, was shown to men God's blessed grace,

freely forgiving their sins, and securing to them, by this pledge,

a deliverance from the doom of sin as he had risen from it, and an

acceptance to a heavenly immortality as he had ascended to it. The

resurrection of Christ, then, and not his death, was to them the

point of vital interest, the hinge on which all hung. Does not the

record plainly show this to an impartial reader? Wherever the

apostles preach, whenever they write, they appeal not to the death

of a veiled Deity, but to the resurrection of an appointed

messenger; not to a vicarious atonement or purchase effected by

the mortal sufferings of Jesus, but to the confirmation of the

good tidings he brought, afforded by the Father's raising him from

the dead. "Whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that he

hath raised him from the dead," Paul proclaimed on Mars Hill. In

the discourses of the apostles recorded in the Book of Acts, we

find that, when they preached the new religion to new audiences,

the great doctrine in all cases set forth as fundamental and

absorbing is the resurrection; not an atoning death, but a

justifying resurrection. "He died for our sins, and rose for our

justification." Some of the Athenians thought Paul "a setter forth

of two strange gods, Jesus and Resurrection." And when they desire

to characterize Christ, the distinguishing culminating phrase

which they invariably select shows on what their minds rested as

of chief import: they describe him as the one "whom God hath

raised from the dead." "If we believe that Jesus died and rose

again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with

him." "That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of God's

power toward us who believe, according to the working of his

mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from

the dead and set him at his own right hand in heaven." It is plain

here that the dying of Christ is regarded merely as preliminary to

his rising, and that his resurrection and entrance into heaven are

received as an assurance that faithful disciples, too, shall

obtain admission into the heavenly kingdom.

The Calvinistic doctrine is that the unutterable vicarious agonies

of the death of Christ placated the wrath of God, satisfied his

justice, and ransomed the souls of the elect from the tortures of

hell, and that his resurrection was simply his victorious return

from a penal conflict with the powers of Satan. The Unitarian

doctrine is that the violent death of Christ was an expression of

self sacrificing love, to exert a moral power on the hearts of

men, and that his resurrection was a miraculous proof of the

authority and truth of his teachings, a demonstration of human

immortality. We maintain that neither of these views fully

contains the true representation of the New Testament. The

artificial horrors of the former cannot be forced into nor wrung

out of the written words; while the natural simplicity and

meagerness of the latter cannot be made to fill up the written

words with adequate significance. There is a medium doctrine,

based on the conceptions prevalent at the time the Christian

system was constructed and written; a doctrine which equally

avoids the credulous excess of the Calvinistic interpretation and

the skeptical poverty of the Unitarian; a doctrine which fully

explains all the relevant language of the New Testament without

violence; a doctrine which, for our own part, we feel sure

accurately represents the ideas meant to be conveyed by the

Scripture authors. We will state it, and then quote, for its

illustration and for their own explanation, the principal texts

relating to the resurrection of Jesus.

On account of sin, which had alienated man from God and unfitted

him for heaven, he was condemned after death to descend as a

disembodied soul into the dark kingdom of the grave, the under

world. In that cheerless realm of helpless shades and stillness

all departed human spirits were prisoners, and must be, until the

advent of the Messiah, when they, or a part of them, should rise.

This was the Jewish belief. Now, the apostles were Jews, who had

the ideas of their countrymen, to which, upon becoming Christians,

they added the new conceptions formed in their minds by the

teachings, character, deeds, death, resurrection, of Christ, mixed

with their own meditations and experience. Accepting, with these

previous notions, the resurrection of Christ as a fact and a

fulfilment of prophecy, they immediately supposed that his

triumphant exit from the prison of the dead and return to heaven

were the prefiguration of the similar deliverance of others and

their entrance into heaven. They considered him as "the first born

from the dead," "the first fruits of the dead." They emphatically

characterize his return to life as a "resurrection out from among

the dead," "[non-ASCII characters], plainly implying that the rest

of the dead still remained below.6 They received his experience in

this respect as the revealing type of that which was awaiting his

followers. So far as relates to the separate existence of the

soul, the restoration of the widow's son by Elijah, or the

resurrection of Lazarus, logically implies all that is implied in

the mere resurrection of Christ. But certain notions of

localities, of a redemptive ascent, and an opening of heaven for

the redeemed spirits of men to ascend thither, were associated

exclusively with the last. When, through the will of God, Christ

rose, "then first humanity triumphant passed the crystal ports of

light, and seized eternal youth!" Their view was not that Christ

effected all this by means of his own; but that the free grace of

God decreed it, and that Christ came to carry the plan into

execution. "God, for his great love to us, even when we were dead

in sins, has quickened us together with Christ." This was effected

as in dramatic show: Christ died, which was suffering the fate of

a sinner; he went in spirit to the subterranean abode of spirits,

which was bearing the penalty of sin; he rose again, which was

showing the penalty of sin removed by Divine forgiveness; he

ascended into heaven, which was revealing the way for our ascent

thrown open. Such is the general scope of thought in close and

vital connection with which the doctrine of the resurrection of

Christ stands. We shall spare enlarging on those parts of it which

have been sufficiently proved and illustrated in preceding

chapters, and confine our attention as much as may be to those

portions which have direct relations with the resurrection of

Christ. It is our object, then, to show what we think will plainly

appear in the light of the above general statement that, to the

New Testament writers, the resurrection, and not the death, of

Christ is the fact of central moment, is the assuring seal of our

forgiveness, reconciliation, and heavenly adoption.

6 Wood, The Last Things, pp. 31-44.

They saw two antithetical starting points in the history of

mankind: a career of ruin, beginning with condemned Adam in the

garden of Eden at the foot of the forbidden tree, dragging a

fleshly race down into Sheol; a career of remedy, beginning with

victorious Christ in the garden of Joseph at the mouth of the rent

sepulchre, guiding a spiritual race up into heaven.

The Savior himself is reported as saying, "I lay down my life that

I may take it again:" the dying was not for the sake of

substitutional suffering, but for the sake of a resurrection.

"Except a corn of wheat die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, it

bringeth forth much fruit." "A woman when she is in travail hath

sorrow; but as soon as she is delivered of the child she

remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into

the world." The context here shows the Savior's meaning to be that

the woe of his death would soon be lost in the weal of his

resurrection. The death was merely the necessary antecedent to the

significant resurrection. "Blessed be the God and Father of our

Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to his abundant mercy, hath

begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus

Christ from the dead unto an inheritance, incorruptible,

undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you

who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation

ready to be revealed." "Him hath God raised on high by his right

hand, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins." How

clear it is here that not the vicarious death of Christ buys off

sinners, but his resurrection shows sins to be freely forgiven,

the penalty remitted! "Remember that Jesus Christ was raised from

the dead, according to my gospel: therefore I endure all things

for the elect's sake, that they may obtain the salvation which is

in Christ Jesus with eternal glory." "Be it known unto you,

therefore, men, brethren, that through Him whom God raised again

is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins." The passage in the

Epistle to the Hebrews, ninth chapter, from the twenty third verse

to the twenty seventh, most emphatically connects the annulling of

sin through the sacrifice of Christ with his ascended appearance

in heaven. "Jesus who was delivered for our offences and was

raised again for our justification:" that is, Jesus died because

he had entered the condition of sinful humanity, the penalty of

which was death; he was raised to show that God had forgiven us

our sins and would receive us to heaven instead of banishing us to

the under world. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord

Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him

from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Belief in the resurrection of

Christ is here undeniably made the great condition of salvation.

No text can be found in which belief in the death, or blood, or

atoning merits, of Christ is made that condition. And yet nine

tenths of Christendom by their creeds are to day proclaiming,

"Believe in the vicarious sufferings of Christ, and thou shalt be

saved; believe not in them, and thou shalt be damned!" "God hath

both raised up the Lord and will also raise up us." "If Christ be

not raised, your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins." This

text cannot be explained upon the common Calvinistic or Unitarian

theories. Whether Christ was risen or not made no difference in

their justification before God if his death had atoned for them,

made no difference in their moral condition, which was as it was;

but if Christ had not risen, then they were mistaken in supposing

that heaven had been opened for them: they were yet held in the

necessity of descending to the under world, the penalty of their

sins. The careful reader will observe that, in many places in the

Scriptures where a burden and stress of importance seem laid upon

the death of Christ, there immediately follows a reference to his

resurrection, showing that the dying is only referred to as the

preparatory step to the rising, the resurrection being the

essential thing. "The Apostle Paul scarcely speaks of the death of

the Savior except in connection with his resurrection," Bleek

says, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. "It is

Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again and is now at

the right hand of God."

"If we believe that Jesus died and rose again." "To this end

Christ both died, and rose and lived again." "He died for them and

rose again." We confidently avow, therefore, that the Christian

Scriptures concentrate the most essential significance and value

of the mission of Jesus in his resurrection, describing it as the

Divine seal of his claims, the visible proof and pledge of our

redemption, by God's freely forgiving grace, from the fatal

bondage of death's sepulchral domain to the blessed splendors of

heaven's immortal life.

There remain a class of passages to be particularly noticed, in

which an extraordinary emphasis seems to be laid on Christ's

sufferings, Christ's blood, Christ's death, three phrases that

mean virtually the same thing and are used interchangeably. The

peculiar prominence given to the idea of the sacrifice of Christ

in the instances now referred to is such as might lead one to

suppose that some mysterious efficacy was meant to be attributed

to it. But we think an accurate examination of the subject will

show that these texts are really in full harmony with the view we

have been maintaining. Admitting that the resurrection of Christ

was the sole circumstance of ultimate meaning and importance,

still, his violent and painful death would naturally be spoken of

as often and strongly as it is, for two reasons. First, the chief

ground of wonder and claim for gratitude to him was that he should

have left his pre existent state of undisturbed bliss and glory,

and submitted to such humiliation and anguish for others, for

sinners. Secondly, it was the prerequisite to his resurrection,

the same, in effect, with it, since the former must lead to the

latter; for, as the foremost apostle said, "It was not possible

that he should be holden in death."

The apostolical writers do not speak of salvation by the blood of

Christ any more plainly than they do of salvation by the name of

Christ, salvation by grace, and salvation by faith. If at one time

they identify him with the sacrificial "lamb," at another time

they as distinctively identify him with the "high priest offering

himself," and again with "the great Shepherd of the sheep," and

again with "the mediator of the new covenant," and again with "the

second Adam." These are all figures of speech, and, taken

superficially, they determine nothing as to doctrine. The

propriety and the genuine character and force of the metaphor are

in each case to be carefully sought with the lights of learning

and under the guidance of a docile candor. The thoughts that, in

consequence of transmitted sin, all departed souls of men were

confined in the under world that Christ, to carry out and

revealingly exemplify the free grace of the Father, came into the

world, died a cruel death, descended to the prison world of the

dead, declared there the glad tidings, rose thence and ascended

into heaven, the forerunner of the ransomed hosts to follow, these

thoughts enable us to explain, in a natural, forcible, and

satisfactory manner, the peculiar phraseology of the New Testament

in regard to the death of Christ, without having recourse to the

arbitrary conceptions and mystical horror usually associated with

it now.

For instance, consider the passage in the second chapter of the

Epistle to the Ephesians, from the eleventh verse to the

nineteenth. The writer here says that "the Gentiles, who formerly

were far off, strangers from the covenants of promise, are now

made nigh by the blood of Christ." This language he clearly

explains as meaning that through the death and resurrection of

Christ "the middle wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles was

broken down" and a universal religion inaugurated, free from all

invidious distinctions and carnal ordinances. In his bodily death

and spiritual ascension the Jewish ritual law was abolished and

the world wide moral law alone installed. From his spirit, rising

into heaven, all national peculiarities fell away, and through him

Jews and Gentiles both had access, by communion with his ascended

and cosmopolitan soul, unto the Father. A careful study of all the

passages in the New Testament which speak of Christ as delivering

men from the wrath of God will lead, it seems to us, almost every

unprejudiced person to agree with one of the ablest German

critics, who says that "the technical phrase 'wrath of God' here

means, historically, banishment of souls into the under world, and

that the fact of Christ's triumph and ascent was a precious pledge

showing to the Christians that they too should ascend to eternal

life in heaven."7 The doctrine of the descent of Christ among the

dead and of his redemptive mission there has of late wellnigh

faded from notice; but if any one wishes to see the evidence of

its universal reception and unparalleled importance in the

Christian Church for fifteen hundred years, presented in

overwhelming quantity and irresistible array, let him read the

learned work devoted to this subject recently published in

Germany.8 He can hardly peruse this work and follow up its

references without seeing that, almost without an exception, from

the days of Peter and Paul to those of Martin Luther, it has been

held that "the death and resurrection of Christ are the two poles

between which," as Guder says, "his descent into the under world

lies." The phrase "blood of Christ" is often used in Scripture in

a pregnant sense, including the force of meaning that would be

expressed by his death, descent, resurrection, and ascension, with

all their concomitants. As a specimen of innumerable passages of

like import which might be cited, we will quote a single

expression from Epiphanius, showing that the orthodox teachers in

the fourth century attributed redeeming efficacy to Christ's

resurrection rather than to his death." As the pelican restores

its dead offspring by dropping its own blood upon their wounds, so

our Lord Jesus Christ dropped his blood upon Adam, Eve, and all

the dead, and gave them life by his burial and resurrection." 9

It was a part of the Mosaic ritual, laid down in the sixteenth

chapter of Leviticus, that on the great annual day of expiation

there should be two goats chosen by lot, one for the Lord and one

for Azazel. The former the high priest was to slay, and with his

blood sprinkle

7 Bretschneider, Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 59: Christus der

Erloser vom Tode.

8 Guder, Die Lehre von der Erscheinung Jesu Christi unter den

Todten: In ihrem Zusammenhange mit der Lehre von den Letzten

Dingen.

9 Physiol., cap. 8: De Pelecano.

the mercy seat. The latter, when the high priest's hands had been

laid on his head and all the iniquities of the children of Israel

confessed over him, was to be sent into the wilderness and loosed.

The former goat is called "a sin offering for the people." The

latter is called "a scape goat to make an atonement with the

Lord." The blood of the sin offering could not have been supposed

to be a substitute purchasing the pardon of men's offences,

because there is no hint of any such idea in the record, and

because it was offered to reconcile "houses," "tabernacles,"

"altars," as well as to reconcile men. It had simply a ceremonial

significance. Such rites were common in many of the early

religions. They were not the efficient cause of pardon, but were

the formal condition of reconciliation. And then, in regard to the

scapegoat, it was not sacrificed as an expiation for sinners; it

merely symbolically carried off the sins already freely forgiven.

All these forms and phrases were inwrought with the whole national

life and religious language of the Jews. Now, when Jesus appeared,

a messenger from God, to redeem men from their sins and to promise

them pardon and heaven, and when he died a martyr's death in the

fulfilment of his mission, how perfectly natural that this

sacrificial imagery these figures of blood, propitiation,

sprinkling the mercy seat should be applied to him, and to his

work and fate! The burden of sins forgiven by God's grace in the

old covenant the scape goat emblematically bore away, and the

people went free. So if the words must be supposed to have an

objective and not merely a moral sense when the Baptist cried,

"Behold the Lamb of God, that beareth off the sin of the world,"

his meaning was that Jesus was to bear off the penalty of sin that

is, the Hadean doom which God's free grace had annulled and open

heaven to the ranks of reconciled souls. There is not the least

shadow of proof that the sacrifices in the Mosaic ritual were

Divinely ordained as types pre figuring the great sacrifice of

Christ. There is no such pretence in the record, no such tradition

among the people, not the slightest foundation whatever of any

sort to warrant that arbitrary presumption. All such applications

of them are rhetorical; and their historical force and moral

meaning are clearly explicable on the views which we have

presented in the foregoing pages, but are most violently strained

and twisted by the Calvinistic theory to meet the severe

exigencies of a theoretical dogma.

If any one, granting that the central efficacy of the mission of

Christ, dogmatically and objectively considered, lay in his

descent into Hades and in his resurrection, maintains that still

certain passages in the New Testament do ascribe an expiatory

effect directly to his death as such, we reply that this

interpretation is quite likely to be correct. And we can easily

trace the conception to its origin beyond the pale of revelation.

It was an idea prevalent among the Jews in the time of the

apostles, and before, that death was an atonement for all sins,

and that the death of the righteous atoned for the sins of

others.10 Now, the apostles might adopt this view and apply it

pre eminently to the case of Christ. This is the very explanation

given by Origen.11 De Wette quotes the following sentence, and

many others of the same purport,

10 Gfrorer, Gesehichte des Urchristenthums, abth. ii. pp. 187

190.

11 Mosheim, Commentaries on Christianity in the First Three

Centuries, Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 162-163.

from the Talmud: "The death of the just is the redemption of

sinners."12 The blood of any righteous man was a little atonement;

that of Christ was a vast one. The former all Protestants call a

heathen error. So they should the latter, because it sprung from

the same source and is the same in principle. If, then, there are

any scriptural texts which imply that the mere death of Christ had

a vicarious, expiatory efficacy, they are, so far forth, the

reflection of heathen and Jewish errors yet lingering in the minds

of the writers, and not the inspired revelation of an isolated,

arbitrary after expedient contrived in the secret counsels of God

and wonderfully interpolated into the providential history of the

world. But, if there are any such passages, they are few and

unimportant. The great mass of the scriptural language on this

subject is fairly and fully explained by the historical theory

whose outlines we have sketched. The root of the matter is the

resurrection of Christ out from among the dead and his ascent into

heaven.

It has not been our purpose in this chapter, or in the preceding

chapters, to present the history of the Christian doctrine of the

atonement, either in its intrinsic significance or in its

relations to subjective religious experience. We have only sought

to explain it, according to the original understanding of it, in

its objective relations to the fate of men in the future life. The

importance of the subject, its difficulty, and the profound

prejudices connected with it, are so great as not only to excuse,

but even to require, much explanatory repetition to make the truth

clear and to recommend it, in many lights, with various methods,

and by accumulated authorities. Those who wish to see the whole

subject of the atonement treated with consummate fulness and

ability, leaving nothing to be desired from the historical point

of view, have only to read the masterly work of Baur.13

In leaving this part of our subject here, we would submit the

following considerations to the candid judgment of the reader.

Admitting the truth of the common doctrine of the atonement, why

did Christ die? It does not appear how there could be any

particular efficacy in mere death. The expiation of sin which he

had undertaken required only a certain amount of suffering. It did

not as far as we can see on the theory of satisfaction by an

equivalent substituted suffering require death. It seems as if

local and physical ideas must have been associated with the

thought of his death. And we find the author of the Epistle to the

Hebrews thus replying to the question, Why did Christ die? "That

through death he might destroy him that hath the power of death,

that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death

were all their lifetime subject to bondage." Now, plainly, this

end was accomplished by his resurrection bursting asunder the

bonds of Hades and showing that it was no longer the hopeless

prison of the dead. The justice of this explanation appears from

the logical necessity of the series of ideas, the internal

coherence and harmony of thought. It has been ably shown that

substantially this view is the accurate interpretation of the New

Testament doctrine by

12 Comm. de Morte Christi Expiatoria, cap. iii.: Qua Judaorum

Recentiorum Christologia de Passione ac Morte Messia docet.

13 Die Christliche Lehre von der Versohnung in ihrer

Geschichtlichen Entwicklung von der Alteaten Zeit bis auf die

Neueste.

Steinbart,14 Schott,15 Bretschneider,16 Klaiber,17 and others. The

gradual deviations from this early view can be historically

traced, step by step, through the refining speculations of

theologians. First, in ecclesiastical history, after the New

Testament times, it is thought the devil has a right over all

souls in consequence of sin. Christ is a ransom offered to the

devil to offset his claim. Sometimes this is represented as a fair

bargain, sometimes as a deception practised on the devil,

sometimes as a battle waged with him. Next, it is conceived that

the devil has no right over human souls, that it is God who has

doomed them to the infernal prison and holds them there for their

sin. Accordingly, the sacrifice of Christ for their ransom is

offered not to the tyrannical devil but to the offended God.

Finally, in the progress of culture, the satisfaction theory

appears; and now the suffering of Christ is neither to buy souls

from the devil nor to appease God and soften his anger into

forgiveness; but it is to meet the inexorable exigencies of the

abstract law of infinite justice and deliver sinners by bearing

for them the penalty of sin. The whole course of thought, once

commenced, is natural, inevitable; but the starting point is from

an error, and the pausing places are at false goals.

The view which we have asserted to be the scriptural view

prevailed as the orthodox doctrine of the Church throughout the

first three centuries, as Bahr has proved in his valuable treatise

on the subject.18 He shows that during that period Christ's death

was regarded as a revelation of God's love, a victory over the

devil, (through his resurrection,) a means of obtaining salvation

for men, but not as a punitive sacrifice, not as a vindication of

God's justice, not as a vicarious satisfaction of the law.19 If

the leading theologians of Christendom, such as Anselm, Calvin,

and Grotius, have so thoroughly repudiated the original Christian

and patristic doctrine of the atonement, and built another

doctrine upon their own uninspired speculations, why should our

modern sects defer so slavishly to them, and, instead of freely

investigating the subject for themselves from the first sources of

Scripture and spiritual philosophy, timidly cling to the results

reached by these biassed, morbid, and over sharp thinkers? In

proportion as scholarly, unfettered minds engage in such a

criticism, we believe the exposition given in the foregoing pages

will be recognised as scriptural. Without involving this whole

theory, how can any one explain the unquestionable fact that

during the first four centuries the entire orthodox Church

believed that Christ at his resurrection from the under world

delivered Adam from his imprisonment there?20 All acknowledge that

the phrase "redemption by the blood of Christ" is a metaphor. The

only question is, what meaning was it intended to convey? We

maintain its meaning to be that

14 System der Reinen Philosophie, oder Gluckseligkeitslehre des

Christenthums, u.s.f.

15 Epitome Theologia Christiana Dogmatica.

16 Die Lehren von Adam's Fall, der Erbsunde, und dem Opfer

Christi.

17 Studien der Evang. Geietlichkeit Wurtemburgs, viii. 1, 2.

Doederlein, Morus, Knapp, Schwarze, and Reinhard affirm that the

death of Christ was not the price of our pardon, but the

confirming declaration of free pardon from God. Hagenbach,

Dogmengeschichte, sect. 297, note 5.

18 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei

Jahrhunderteu.

19 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei

Jahrhunderten, ss. 176-180.

20 Augustine, Epist. ad Evodium 99. Op. Imp. vi. 22, 30. Epist.

164. Dante makes Adam say he had been 4302 years in Limbo when

Christ, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi.

through all the events and forces associated with the death of

Christ, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, men

are delivered from the doom of the under world. The common

theology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatory

efficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system known

as Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a saving

spiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretation

charges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of the

love of God freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. The

second seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeance

legally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appetite. The

third fills it with a regenerative moral influence to be

distributed upon the characters of believers. The two former also

include the last; but it excludes them. Now, as it seems to us,

the first is the form of mistake in which the early Church,

including the apostles, embodied the true significance of the

mission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which they

lived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples of

Jesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortality

brought to light by Christianity.21 The second is the form of

false theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruel

results of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third is

the dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truth

in the case.

There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holds

up the resurrection of Christ. It is regarded as a summons to a

moral and spiritual resurrection within the breast of the

believer. As the great Forerunner had ascended to a spiritual and

immortal life in the heavens, so his followers should be inspired

with such a realizing sense of heavenly things, with such Divine

faith and fellowship, as would lift them above the world, with all

its evanescent cares, and fix their hearts with God. This high

communion with Christ, and intense assurance of a destined speedy

inheritance with him, should render the disciple insensible to the

clamorous distractions of earth, invulnerable to the open and

secret assaults of sin, as if in the body he were already dead,

and only alive in the spirit to the obligations of holiness, the

attractions of piety, and the promises of heaven. "When we were

dead in trespasses and sins, God loved us, and hath quickened us

together with Christ, and hath raised us up together and made us

sit together in heavenly places." "If ye, then, be risen with

Christ, set your affection on things above, not on earthly things;

for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." This

moral symbolic application of the resurrection is most beautiful

and effective. Christ has risen, immaculate and immortal, into the

pure and holy heaven: then live virtuously and piously, that you

may be found worthy to be received unto him. "He that hath this

hope purifieth himself, even as He is pure." Paul enforces this

thought through the striking figure that, since "we are freed from

the law through the death of Christ, we should be married to his

risen spirit and bring forth fruit unto God." And again, when he

speaks in these words, "Christ in you the hope of glory," we

suppose he refers to the spiritual image of the risen Redeemer

formed in the disciples' imagination and heart, the prefiguring

and witnessing pledge of their ascension also to heaven. The same

practical use is made of the doctrine through the rite and sign of

baptism. "Ye are buried with Christ in

21 Bretschneider forcibly illustrates this in his Handbuch der

Dogmatik der Evang. Luther. Kirche, sects. 156-158, band ii.

baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through faith in the

working of God, who hath raised him from the dead." "Wherefore, if

ye be dead with Christ, why are ye subject to worldly ordinances?

and if ye be risen with him, seek those things which are above."

When the disciple sunk beneath the baptizing waters, he was

typically dead and buried, as Jesus was in the tomb; when he rose

from the waters into the air again, he figuratively represented

Christ rising from the dead into heaven. Henceforth, therefore, he

was to consider himself as dead to all worldly sins and lusts,

alive to all heavenly virtues and aspirations. "Therefore," the

apostle says, "we are buried with Christ by baptism unto death,

that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should

walk in newness of life." "In that Christ died, he died unto sin

once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon

ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto

God." "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:

old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

This was strictly true to the immediate disciples of Jesus. When

he died, their hearts died within them; they shrank away in

hopeless confusion and gloom. When he returned to life and

ascended to heaven, in feeling and imagination they went with him.

Every moral power and motive started into new life and energy.

"The day when from the dead Our Lord arose, then everywhere, Out

of their darkness and despair, Triumphant over fears and foes, The

souls of his disciples rose."

An unheard of assurance of the Father's love and of their eternal

inheritance flooded their being with its regenerating, uplifting

power. To their absorbing anticipations the mighty consummation of

all was at hand. In reflective imagination it was already past,

and they, dead to the world, only lived to God. The material world

and the lust thereof had sunk beneath them and vanished. They were

moving in the universe of imperishable realities unseen by the

fleshly eye. To their faith already was unrolled over them that

new firmament in whose spanless welkin no cloudy tempests ever

gather and break, and the serene lights never fade nor go down.

This experience of a spiritual exaltation above the sins and

degrading turmoils of passion, above the perishing baubles of the

earth, into the religious principles which are independent and

assured, peace, and bliss, and eternity, is attainable by all who

with the earnestness of their souls assimilate the moral truths of

Christianity, pressing in pious trust after the steps of the risen

Master. And this, after all, is the vital essence of the doctrine

of the resurrection as it makes practical appeal to us. This will

stand, though gnawing time and hostile criticism should assail and

shake all the rest. It is something not to be mechanically wrought

upon us from without, but to be done within by our own voluntary

effort and prayer, by God's help. To rise from sloth, unbelief,

sin, from moral death, to earnestness, faith, beneficence, to

eternal life in the breast, is a real and most sublime

resurrection, the indispensable preparation for that other and

final one which shall raise us from the sepulchre to the sky.

When, on Easter morning, Christian disciples throughout the world

hear the joyous cry, "Christ is risen," and their own

hearts instinctively respond, with an unquenchable persuasion that

he is now alive somewhere in the heights of the universe, "Christ

is risen indeed," they should endeavor in spirit to rise too, rise

from the deadly bondage and corruption of vice and indifference.

While the earth remains, and men survive, and the evils which

alienate them from God and his blessedness retain any sway over

them, so oft as that hallowed day comes round, this is the

kindling message of Divine authority ever fresh, and of

transcendent import never old, that it bears through all the

borders of Christendom to every responsible soul: "Awake from your

sleep, arise from your death, lift up your eyes to heaven, and the

risen Redeemer will give you the light of immortal life!" Have

this awakening and deathless experience in the soul, and you will

be troubled by no doubts about an everlasting life succeeding the

close of the world. But so long as this spiritual resurrection in

the breast is unknown, you can have no knowledge of eternal life,

no experimental faith in a future entrance from the grave into

heaven, no, not though millions of resurrections had crowded the

interstellar space with ascending shapes. Rise, then, from your

moral graves, and already, by faith and imagination, sit in

heavenly places with Christ Jesus.

Before leaving this subject, it belongs to us to look at it as a

theory; that is, to consider with critical scrutiny the

conclusions which are supposed to flow from its central fact. We

must regard it from three distinct points of view, seeking its

meaning in sound logic, its force in past history, its value in

present experience. First, then, we are to inquire what really is

the logical significance of the resurrection of Christ. The

looseness and confusion of thought prevailing in relation to this

point are amazing. It seems as if mankind were contented with

investigations careless, reasonings incoherent, and inferences

arbitrary, in proportion to the momentousness of the matter in

hand. In regard to little details of sensible fact and daily

business their observation is sharp, their analysis careful, their

reflection patient; but when they approach the great problems of

morality, God, immortality, they shrink from commensurate efforts

to master those mighty questions with stern honesty, and remain

satisfied with fanciful methods and vague results. The

resurrection of Christ is generally regarded as a direct

demonstration of the immortality of man, an argument of

irrefragable validity. But this is an astonishing mistake. The

argument was not so constructed by Paul. He did not seek directly

to prove the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the

dead. He took for granted the Pharisaic doctrine that all souls on

leaving their bodies descended to Sheol, where they darkly

survived, waiting to be summoned forth at the arrival of the

Messianic epoch. Assuming the further premise that Christ after

death went down among these imprisoned souls, and then rose thence

again, Paul infers, by a logical process strictly valid and

irresistible to one holding those premises, that the general

doctrine of a resurrection from the dead is true, and that by this

visible pledge we may expect it soon, since the Messiah, who is to

usher in its execution, has already come and finished the

preliminary stages of his work. The apostle's own words plainly

show this to be his meaning. "If there be no resurrection of the

dead, then is Christ not risen. But now is Christ risen from the

dead, become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man

came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Every

man shall be made alive in his own order: Christ the first fruits;

then they that are Christ's, at his coming; then the last remnant,

when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God." The notions

of a universal imprisonment of souls in the intermediate state,

and of a universal raising of them thence at an appointed time,

having faded from a deep and vivid belief into a cold traditional

dogma, ridiculed by many, cared for at all by few, realizingly

held by almost none, Paul's argument has been perverted and

misinterpreted, until it is now commonly supposed to mean this:

Christ has risen from the dead: therefore the soul of man is

immortal. Whereas the argument really existed in his mind in the

reverse form, thus: The souls of men are immortal and are

hereafter to be raised up: therefore Christ has risen as an

example and illustration thereof. It is singular to notice that he

has himself clearly stated the argument in this form three times

within the space of four consecutive verses, as follows: "If there

be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:" "God

raised Christ not up, if so be that the dead rise not." "For if

the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised." The fact of the

resurrection of Christ, taken in connection with the related

notions previously held in the mind of Paul, formed the complement

of an irresistible argument to prove the impending resurrection of

the dead, But if it be now perceived that those other notions were

Pharisaic errors, the argument, as he employed it, falls to the

ground.

Taken by itself and analyzed by a severe logic, the resurrection

of Christ proves nothing conclusively in regard to our

immortality. If it did of itself prove any thing, the direct

logical inference from it would be that henceforth all men, three

days after death, would rise bodily from the dead, appear for a

season on earth as before, and then ascend visibly into the sky.

If at the present time a man who had been put to death and

entombed three days should openly come forth alive, considered as

an isolated fact, what would it prove? It would merely prove that

a wonderful event had occurred. It would show that either by some

mysterious means he had escaped death, or else that by some

apparently preternatural agency he had been restored to life from

the dead. Taken by itself, it could not prove whether the

occurrence was caused by a demoniacal or by a Divine power, or by

some occult force of nature developed by a peculiar combination of

conditions. The strange event would stand clear to our senses; but

all beyond that would be but an hypothesis of our own, and liable

to mistake. Consequently, we say, the resurrection, taken by

itself, proves no doctrine. But we may so suppose the case that

such an event would, from its relation to something else, acquire

logical meaning. For instance, if Christ had taught that he had

supernatural knowledge of truth, a Divine commission to reveal a

future life, and said that, after he should have been dead and

buried three days, God would restore him to life to authenticate

his words, and if, then, so stupendous a miracle occurred in

accordance with his prediction, it would prove that his claims and

doctrine were true, because God is no accomplice in deception.

Such was the case with Jesus as narrated; and thus his

resurrection appears, not as having doctrinal significance and

demonstrative validity in itself, but as a miraculous

authentication of his mission. That is to say, the Christian's

faith in immortality rests not directly on the resurrection of

Christ, but on his teachings, which were confirmed and sealed by

his resurrection. It is true that, even in this modified form,

some persons of dialectical minds will deny all validity to the

argument. What necessary connection is there, they will ask,

between the exhibition of mechanico chemical wonders, physical

feats, however abnormal and inexplicable, and the possession of

infallibility of intellectual insight and moral utterance? If a

man should say, God is falsehood and hatred, and in evidence of

his declaration should make a whole cemetery disembogue its dead

alive, or cause the sun suddenly to sink from its station at noon

and return again, would his wonderful performance prove his

horrible doctrine? Why, or how, then, would a similar feat prove

the opposite doctrine? Plainly, there is not, on rigid logical

principles, any connecting tie or evidencing coherence between a

physical miracle and a moral doctrine.22 We admit the correctness

of this, on philosophical grounds. But the validity of a miracle

as proof of a doctrine rests on the spontaneous assumption that no

man can work a miracle unless God specially delegate him the

power: thereby God becomes the voucher of his envoy. And when a

person claiming to be a messenger from God appears, saying, "The

Father hath commanded me to declare that in the many mansions of

his house there is a blessed life for men after the close of this

life," and when he promises that, in confirmation of his claim,

God will restore him to life after he shall have been three days

dead, and when he returns accordingly triumphant from the

sepulchre, the argument will be unquestioningly received as valid

by the instinctive common sense of all who are convinced of the

facts.

We next pass from the meaning of the resurrection in logic to its

force and working in history. When Jesus hung on the cross, and

the scornful shouts of the multitude murmured in his ears, the

disciples had fled away, disappointed, terror stricken,

despairing. His star seemed set in a hopeless night of shame and

defeat. The new religion appeared a failure. But in three days

affairs had taken a new aspect. He that was crucified had risen,

and the scattered disciples rallied from every quarter, and,

animated by faith and zeal, went forth to convert the world. As an

organic centre of thought and belief, as a fervid and enduring

incitement to action, in the apostolic times and all through the

early centuries, the received fact of the resurrection of Christ

wielded an incomparable influence and produced incalculable

results. Christianity indeed rose upon it, and, to a great extent,

flourished through it. The principal effect which the gospel has

had in bringing life and immortality to light throughout a large

part of the world is to be referred to the proclaimed resurrection

of Christ. For without the latter the former would not have been.

Its historical value has therefore been immense. More than nine

tenths of the dormant common faith of Christendom in a future life

now outwardly reposes on it from tradition and custom. The great

majority of Christians grow up, by education and habit, without

any sharp conscientious investigation of their own, to an

undisturbed belief in immortality, a belief passively resting on

the demonstration of the doctrine supposed to have been furnished

by the resurrection of Christ in Judea two thousand years ago. The

historical power of that fact has therefore been inexpressibly

important; and its vast and happy consequences as food and basis

of faith still remain. But this historic force is no longer what

it once was as a living and present cause. It now operates mostly

through traditional reception as an established doctrine to be

taken

22 J. Blanco White, Letter on Miracles, in appendix to Martineau's

Rationale of Religious Inquiry.

for granted, without fresh individual inquiry. Education and

custom use it as an unexamined but trusted foundation to build on

by common assumptions. And so the historic impetus is not yet

spent. But it certainly has diminished; and it will diminish more.

When faced with dauntless eyes and approached by skeptical

methods, it of course cannot have the silencing, all sufficient

authority, now that it is buried in the dim remoteness of nineteen

centuries and surrounded by obscuring accompaniments, that it had

when its light blazed close at hand. The historical force of the

alleged resurrection of Christ must evidently, other things being

equal, lessen to an unprejudiced inquirer in some proportion to

the lengthening distance of the event from him in time, and the

growing difficulties of ignorance, perplexity, doubt, manifold

uncertainty, deficiency, infidel suggestions, and naturalistic

possibilities, intervening between it and him. The shock of faith

given by the miracle is dissipated in coming through such an abyss

of time. The farther off and the longer ago it was, the more

chances for error and the more circumstances of obscurity there

are, and so much the worth and force of the historical belief in

it will naturally become fainter, till they will finally fade

away. An honest student may bow humbly before the august front of

Christian history and join with the millions around in

acknowledging the fact of the resurrection of Christ. But we

maintain that the essential fact in this historic act is not the

visible resuscitation of the dead body, but the celestial

reception of the deathless spirit. So Paul evidently thought; for

he had never seen Christ in the flesh, yet he places himself, as a

witness to the resurrection of Christ, in the same rank with those

who had seen him on his reappearance in the body: "Last of all he

was seen of me also." Paul had only seen him in vision as a

glorified spirit of heaven.

We know that our belief in the fleshly resurrection of Jesus rests

on education and habit, on cherished associations of reverence and

attachment, rather than on sifted testimony and convincing proof.

It is plain, too, that if a person takes the attitude, not of

piety and receptive trust, but of skeptical antagonism, it is

impossible, as the facts within our reach are to day, to convince

him of the asserted reality in question. An unprejudiced mind

competently taught and trained for the inquiry, but whose attitude

towards the declared fact is that of distrust, a mind which will

admit nothing but what is conclusively proved, cannot be driven

from its position by all the extant material of evidence.

Education, associations, hopes, affections, leaning that way, he

may be convinced; but leaning the other way, or poised in

indifference on a severe logical ground, he will honestly remain

in his unbelief despite of all the arguments that can be

presented. In the first place, he will say, "The only history we

have of the resurrection is in the New Testament; and the

testimony of witnesses in their own cause is always suspicious;

and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote those

documents, or precisely when and how they originated: besides

that, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterly

uncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation which

satisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in any

severe court of reason." And in reply, although we may claim that

there is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble Christian,

previously inclined to such a faith, that the New Testament

documents were written by the persons whose names they bear, and

that their accounts are true, yet we cannot pretend that there is

sufficient evidence effectually to convince a critical inquirer

that there is no possibility of ungenuineness and unauthenticity.

In the second place, such a person will say, "Many fabulous

miracles have been eagerly credited by contemporaries of their

professed authors, and handed down to the credulity of after

times; many actual events, honestly, interpreted as miracles,

without fraud in any party concerned, have been so accepted and

testified to.

Roman Catholic Christendom claims to this day the performance of

miracles within the Church; while all Protestant Christendom

scouts them as ridiculous tales: and this may be one of them. How

can we demonstrate that it does not fall within the same class on

the laws of evidence?" And although our own moral beliefs and

sympathies may force upon us the most profound conviction to the

contrary, it is plainly out of our power to disprove the

possibility of this hypothesis being true. In the third place, he

will say, "Of all who testify to the resurrection, there is

nothing in the record admitting its entire reliableness as an

ingenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors to

show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or

that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may

have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his

grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last

have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was

used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with

perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion or

deceit anywhere, may have put a miraculous interpretation upon it

all, such additional particulars as his visible ascension into the

sky being a later mythical accretion." This view may well seem

offensive, even shocking, to the pious believer; but it is plainly

possible. It is intrinsically more easily conceivable than the

accredited miracle. It is impossible positively to refute it: the

available data do not exist. Upon the whole, then, we conclude

that the time is coming when the basis of faith in immortality, in

order to stand the tests of independent scrutiny, must be

historically as well as logically shifted from a blind dependence

on the miraculous resurrection of Christ to a wise reliance on

insight into the supernatural capacity and destiny of man, on the

deductions of moral reason and the prophecies of religious trust.

Finally, we pause a moment, in closing this discussion, to weigh

the practical value of the resurrection of Christ as acknowledged

in the experience of the present time. How does that event,

admitted as a fact, rest in the average personal experience of

Christians now? We shall provoke no intelligent contradiction when

we say that it certainly does not often rest on laborious research

and rigorous testing of evidence. We surely risk nothing in saying

that with the multitude of believers it rests on a docile

reception of tradition, an unquestioning conformity to the

established doctrine. And that reception and conformity in the

present instance depend, we shall find by going a step further

back, upon a deep a priori faith in God and immortality. When Paul

reasons that, if the dead are not to rise, Christ is not risen,

but that the dead are to rise, and therefore Christ is risen, his

argument reposes on a spontaneous practical method of moral

assumption, not on a judicial process of logical proof. So is it

with Christians now. The intense moral conviction that God is

good, and that there is another life, and that it would be

supremely worthy of God to send a messenger to teach that doctrine

and to rise from the dead in proof of it, it is this earnest

previous faith that gives plausibility, vitality, and power to the

preserved tradition of the actual event. If we trace the case home

to the last resort, as it really lies in the experience developed

in us by Christianity, we shall find that a deep faith in God is

the basis of our belief, first in general immortality, and

secondly in the special resurrection of Christ as related thereto.

But, by a confusion, or a want, of thought, the former is

mistakenly supposed to rest directly and solely on the latter. The

doctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection of Christ

fall within the province of faith, resting on moral grounds, not

within that of knowledge, resting on logical grounds. For example:

what direct proof is there that Christ, when he vanished from the

disciples, went to the presence of God in heaven, to die no more?

It was only seen that he disappeared: all beyond that except as it

rests on belief in the previous words of Christ himself is an

inference of faith, a faith kindled in the soul by God and not

created by the miracle of the resurrection.

That imagination, tradition, feeling, and faith, have much more to

do with the inferences commonly drawn from the resurrection of

Christ than any strict investigation of its logical contents has,

appears clearly enough from the universal neglect to draw any

inferences from, or to attribute any didactic importance to, the

other resurrections recorded in the New Testament. We refer

especially to the resurrection narrated in the twenty seventh

chapter of Matthew, "the most stupendous miracle ever wrought upon

earth," it has been termed; and yet hardly any one ever deigns to

notice it. Thus the evangelist writes: "And the graves were

opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and came

out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy

city, and appeared unto many." Nothing is inferred from this

alleged event but the power of God. Yet logically what separates

it from the resurrection of Christ? In Greece there was the

accredited account of the resurrection of Er, in Persia that of

Viraf, in Judea that of Lazarus, in other nations those of other

persons. None of these ever produced great results. Yet the

resurrection of one individual from the dead logically contains

all that that of any other individual can. Why, then, has that of

Christ alone made such a change in the faith of the world?

Because, through a combination of causes, it has appealed to the

imagination and heart of the world and stirred their believing

activity, because the thought was here connected with a person, a

history, a moral force, and a providential interposition, fit for

the grandest deductions and equal to the mightiest effects. It is

not accurate philosophical criticism that has done this, but

humble love and faith.

In the experience of earnest Christians, a personal belief in the

resurrection of Christ, vividly conceived in the imagination and

taken home to the heart, is chiefly effective in its spiritual,

not in its argumentative, results. It stirs up the powers and

awakens the yearnings of the soul, opens heaven to the gaze,

locates there, as it were visibly, a glorious ideal, and thus

helps one to enter upon an inward realization of the immortal

world. The one essential thing is not that Jesus appeared alive in

the flesh after his physical death, the revealer of superhuman

power and possessor of infallibility, but that he divinely lives

now, the forerunner and type of our immortality.

CHAPTER VIII.

ESSENTIAL CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DEATH AND LIFE.

LET US first notice the uncommon amount of meaning which Christ

and the apostolic writers usually put into the words "death,"

"life," and other kindred terms. These words are scarcely ever

used in their merely literal sense, but are charged with a vivid

fulness of significance not to be fathomed without especial

attention. "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments."

Obviously this means more than simple life; because those who

neglect the laws of virtue may live. It signifies, distinctively,

true life, the experience of inward peace and of Divine favor.

"Whosoever hateth his brother hath not eternal life abiding in

him, but abideth in death;" that is to say, a soul rankling with

bad passions is "in the gall of bitterness and the bond of

iniquity," but, when converted from hatred to love, it passes from

wretchedness to blessedness. "Let the dead bury their dead." No

one reading this passage with its context can fail to perceive

that it means, substantially, "Let those who are absorbed in the

affairs of this world, and indifferent to the revelation I have

brought from heaven, attend to the interment of the dead; but

delay not thou, who art kindled with a lively interest in the

truth, to proclaim the kingdom of God." When the returning

prodigal had been joyfully received, the father said, in reply to

the murmurs of the elder son, "Thy brother was dead and is alive

again;" he was lost in sin and misery, he is found in penitence

and happiness. Paul writes to the Romans, "Without the law sin was

dead, and I was alive; but when the law was made known, sin came

to life, and I died." In other words, when a man is ignorant of

the moral law, immoral conduct does not prevent him from feeling

innocent and being at peace; but when a knowledge of the law shows

the wickedness of that conduct, he becomes conscious of guilt, and

is unhappy. For instance, to state the thought a little

differently, to a child knowing nothing of the law, the law, or

its purposed violation, sin, does not exist, is dead: he therefore

enjoys peace of conscience; but when he becomes aware of the law

and its authority, if he then break it, sin is generated and

immediately stings, and spiritual happiness dies.

These passages are sufficient to show that Christianity uses the

words "death" and "life" in a spiritual sense, penetrating to the

hidden realities of the soul. To speak thus of the guilty,

unbelieving man as dead, and only of the virtuous, believing man

as truly alive, may seem at first a startling use of figurative

language. It will not appear so when we notice its appropriateness

to the case, or remember the imaginative nature of Oriental speech

and recollect how often we employ the same terms in the same way

at the present time. We will give a few examples of a similar use

of language outside of the Scriptures. That which threatens or

produces death is sometimes, by a figure, identified with death.

Orpheus, in the Argonautika, speaks of "a terrible serpent whose

yawning jaw is full of death." So Paul says he was "in deaths

oft." Ovid says, "The priests poured out a dog's hot life on the

altar of Hecate at the crossing of two roads." The Pythagoreans,

when one of their number became impious and abandoned, were

accustomed to consider him dead, and to erect a tomb to him, on

which his name and his age at the time of his moral decease were

engraved. The Roman law regarded an excommunicated citizen as

civilis mortuus, legally dead. Fenelon writes, "God has kindled a

flame at the bottom of every heart, which should always burn as a

lamp for him who hath lighted it; and all other life is as death."

Chaucer says, in one of his Canterbury Tales, referring to a man

enslaved by dissolute habits,

"But certes, he that haunteth swiche delices Is ded while that he

liveth in tho' vices."

And in a recent poem the following lines occur:

"From his great eyes The light has fled: When faith departs, when

honor dies, The man is dead."

To be subjected to the lower impulses of our nature by degraded

habits of vice and criminality is wretchedness and death. The true

life of man consists, the Great Teacher declared, "not in the

abundance of the things which he possesseth, but rather in his

being rich toward God," in conscious purity of heart, energy of

faith, and union with the Holy Spirit. "He that lives in sensual

pleasure is dead while he lives," Paul asserts; but he that lives

in spiritual righteousness has already risen from the dead. To sum

up the whole in a single sentence, the service and the fruits of

sin form an experience which Christianity calls death, because it

is a state of insensibility to the elements and results of true

life, in the adequate sense of that term, meaning the serene

activity and religious joy of the soul.

The second particular in the essential doctrine of Christianity

concerning the states of human experience which it entitles death

and life is their inherent, enduring nature, their independence on

the objects and changes of this world. The gospel teaches that the

elements of our being and experience are transferred from the life

that now is into the life that is to come, or, rather, that we

exist continuously forever, uninterrupted by the event of physical

dissolution. "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give

him," Jesus declares, "shall never thirst; but the water that I

shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into

everlasting life." John affirms, "The world passeth away, and the

lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever."

Paul writes to the Christians at Rome, "In that Christ died, he

died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but

alive unto God." Numerous additional texts of kindred import might

be cited. They announce the immortality of man, the unending

continuance of the Christian consciousness, unless forfeited by

voluntary defection. They show that sin and woe are not

arbitrarily bounded by the limits of time and sense in the grave,

and that nothing can ever exhaust or destroy the satisfaction of

true life, faith in the love of God: it abides, blessed and

eternal, in the uninterrupted blessedness and eternity of its

Object. The revelation and offer of all this to the acceptance of

men, its conditions, claims, and alternative sanctions, were first

divinely made known and planted in the heart of the world, as the

Scriptures assert, by Jesus Christ, who promulgated them by his

preaching, illustrated them by his example, proved them by his

works, attested them by his blood, and crowned them by his

resurrection.

And now there is opened for all of us, through him, that is to

say, through belief and obedience of what he taught and

exemplified, an access unto the Father, an assurance of his

forgiveness of us and of our reconciliation with him. We thus

enter upon the experience of that true life which is "joy and

peace in believing," and which remains indestructible through all

the vanishing vagrancy of sin, misery, and the world. "This is

eternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and

Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent:" that is, imperishable life is

to be obtained by union with God in faith and love, through a

hearty acceptance of the instructions of Christ.

The two points thus far considered are, first, that the sinful,

unbelieving, wretched man abides in virtual death, while the

righteous, happy believer in the gospel has the experience of

genuine life; and, secondly, that these essential elements of

human character and experience survive all events of time and

place in everlasting continuance.

The next consideration prominent in the Christian doctrine of

death and life is the distinction continually made between the

body and the soul. Man is regarded under a twofold aspect, as

flesh and spirit, the one a temporal accompaniment and dependent

medium, the other an immortal being in itself. The distinction is

a fundamental one, and runs through nearly all philosophy and

religion in their reference to man. In the Christian Scriptures it

is not sharply drawn, with logical precision, nor always

accurately maintained, but is loosely defined, with waving

outlines, is often employed carelessly, and sometimes, if strictly

taken, inconsistently. Let us first note a few examples of the

distinction itself in the instructions of the Savior and of the

different New Testament writers.

"That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born

of the spirit is spirit." "Fear not them which kill the body but

are not able to kill the soul." "Though our outward man perish,

yet the inward man is renewed." "He that soweth to his flesh shall

reap corruption; he that soweth to the spirit shall reap life

everlasting." "Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in

the spirit." "Knowing that I must shortly put off this

tabernacle." "The body without the spirit is dead." It would be

useless to accumulate examples. It is plain that these authors

distinguish the body and the soul as two things conjoined for a

season, the latter of which will continue to live when the other

has mixed with the dust. The facts and phenomena of our being from

which this distinction springs are so numerous and so influential,

so profound and so obvious, that it is impossible they should

escape the knowledge of any thinking person. Indeed, the

distinction has found a recognition everywhere among men, from the

ignorant savage, whose instincts and imagination shadow forth a

dim world in which the impalpable images of the departed dwell, to

the philosopher of piercing intellect and universal culture,

"Whose lore detects beneath our crumbling clay A soul, exiled, and

journeying back to day."

"Labor not for the meat which perisheth," Jesus exhorts his

followers, "but labor for the meat which endureth unto everlasting

life." The body and the luxury that pampers it shall perish, but

the spirit and the love that feeds it shall abide forever.

We now pass to examine some metaphorical terms often erroneously

interpreted as conveying merely their literal force. Every one

familiar with the language of the New Testament must remember how

repeatedly the body and the soul, or the flesh and the spirit, are

set in direct opposition to each other, sin being referred to the

former, righteousness to the latter. "I know that in my flesh

there is no good thing; but with my mind I delight in the law of

God." "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit

lusteth against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the

other." All this language and it is extensively used in the

epistles is quite generally understood in a fixed, literal sense;

whereas it was employed by its authors in a fluctuating,

figurative sense, as the critical student can hardly help

perceiving. We will state the real substance of Christian teaching

and phraseology on this point in two general formulas, and then

proceed to illustrate them. First, both the body and the soul may

be corrupt, lawless, empty of Divine belief, full of restlessness

and suffering, in a state of moral death; or both may be pure,

obedient, acceptable in the sight of God, full of faith, peace,

and joy, in a state of genuine life. Secondly, whatever tends in

any way to the former result to make man guilty, feeble, and

wretched, to deaden his spiritual sensibilities, to keep him from

union with God and from immortal reliances is variously

personified as "the Flesh," "Sin," "Death," "Mammon," "the World,"

"the Law of the Members," "the Law of Sin and Death;" whatever, on

the contrary, tends in any way to the latter result to purify man,

to intensify his moral powers, to exalt and quicken his

consciousness in the assurance of the favor of God and of eternal

being is personified as "the Spirit," "Life," "Righteousness,"

"the Law of God," "the Law of the Inward Man," "Christ," "the Law

of the Spirit of Life in Christ." Under the first class of terms

are included all the temptations and agencies by which man is led

to sin, and the results of misery they effect; under the second

class are included all the aspirations and influences by which he

is led to righteousness, and the results of happiness they insure.

For example, it is written, in the Epistle to the Galatians, that

"the manifest works of the flesh are excessive sensuality,

idolatry, hatred, emulations, quarrels, heresies, murders, and

such like." Certainly some of these evils are more closely

connected with the mind than with the body. The term "flesh" is

obviously used in a sense coextensive with the tendencies and

means by which we are exposed to guilt and degradation. These

personifications, it will therefore be seen, are employed with

general rhetorical looseness, not with definite logical exactness.

It is self evident that the mind is the actual agent and author of

all sins and virtues, and that the body in itself is unconscious,

irresponsible, incapable of guilt. "Every sin that man doeth is

without the body." In illustration of this point Chrysostom says,

"If a tyrant or robber were to seize some royal mansion, it would

not be the fault of the house." And how greatly they err who think

that any of the New Testament writers mean to represent the flesh

as necessarily sinful and the spirit as always pure, the following

cases to the contrary from Paul, whose speech seems most to lean

that way, will abundantly show. "Glorify God in your body and in

your spirit, which are his." "Know ye not that your body is the

temple of the Holy Ghost?" "Yield not your members as instruments

of unrighteousness unto sin, but as instruments of righteousness

unto God." "That the life of Jesus might be made manifest in our

mortal flesh." "Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy,

acceptable unto God." It is clear that the author of these

sentences did not regard the body, or literal flesh, as

necessarily unholy, but as capable of being used by the man

himself in fulfilling the will of God. Texts that appear to

contradict this must be held as figures, or as impassioned

rhetorical exclamations. We also read of "the lusts of the mind,"

the "fleshly mind," "filthiness of the spirit," "seducing

spirits," "corrupt minds," "mind and conscience defiled,"

"reprobate mind," showing plainly that the spirit was sometimes

regarded as guilty and morally dead. The apostle writes, "I pray

that your whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved

blameless." The scriptural declarations now cited teach explicitly

that both the body and the soul may be subjected to the perfect

law of God, or that both may abide in rebellion and wickedness,

the latter state being called, metaphorically, "walking after the

flesh," the former "walking after the spirit," that being sin and

death, this being righteousness and life.

An explanation of the origin of these metaphors will cast further

light upon the subject. The use of a portion of them arose from

the fact that many of the most easily besetting and pernicious

vices, conditions and allurements of sin, defilements and clogs of

the spirit, come through the body, which, while it is itself

evidently fated to perish, does by its earthly solicitations

entice, contaminate, and debase the soul that by itself is invited

to better things and seems destined to immortality. Not that these

evils originate in the body, of course, all the doings of a man

spring from the spirit of man which is in him, but that the body

is the occasion and the aggravating medium of their manifestation.

This thought is not contradicted, it is only omitted, in the words

of Peter: "I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from

fleshly lusts, which war against the soul." For such language

would be spontaneously suggested by the fact that to be in bondage

to the baser nature is hostile alike to spiritual dignity and

peace, and to physical health and strength. The principles of the

moral nature are at war with the passions of the animal nature;

the goading vices of the mind are at war with the organic

harmonies of the body; and on the issues of these conflicts hang

all the interests of life and death, in every sense the words can

be made to bear.

Another reason for the use of these figures of speech,

undoubtedly, was the philosophy of the ineradicable hostility of

matter and spirit, the doctrine, so prevalent in the East from the

earliest times, that matter is wholly corrupt and evil, the

essential root and source of all vileness. An old, unknown Greek

poet embodies the very soul of this faith in a few verses which we

find in the Anthology. Literally rendered, they run thus:

"The body is the torment, hell, fate, load, tyrant,

Dreadful pest, and punishing trial, of the soul

Which, when it quits the body, flies, as from the bonds

Of death, to immortal God."

It was this idea that produced the wild asceticism prevalent in

the Christian Church during the Middle Age and previously, the

fearful macerations, scourgings, crucifixions of the flesh. It

should be understood that, though some of the phraseology of the

Scriptures is tinged by the influence of this doctrine, the

doctrine itself is foreign to Christianity. Christ came eating and

drinking, not abjuring nature, but adopting its teachings, viewing

it as a Divine work through which the providence of God is

displayed and his glory gleams. He was no more of a Pharisee than

nature is. As corn grows on the Sabbath, so it may be plucked and

eaten on the Sabbath. The apostles never recommend self inflicted

torments. The ascetic expressions found in their letters grew

directly out of the perils besetting them and their expectation of

the speedy end of the world. Christianity, rightly understood,

renders even the body of a good man sacred and precious, through

the indwelling of the Infinite. "We have this treasure in earthen

vessels," and the poor, dying tenement of flesh is hallowed as

"A vase of earth, a trembling clod, Constrain'd to hold the breath

of God."

The chief secret, however, of the origin of the peculiar phrases

under consideration consisted in their striking fitness to the

nature and facts of the case, their adaptedness to express these

facts in a bold and vivid manner. The revelation of the

transcendent claims of holiness, of the pardoning love of God, of

the splendid boon of immortality, made by Christ and enforced by

the miraculous sanctions and the kindling motives presented in his

example, thrilled the souls of the first converts, shamed them of

their degrading sins, opened before their imaginations a vision

that paled the glories of the world, and regenerated them,

stirring up the depths of their religious sensibilities, and

flooding their whole being with a warmth, an energy, a

spirituality, that made their previous experience seem a gross

carnal slumber, a virtual death. "And you hath he quickened, who

were dead in trespasses and sins." They were animated and raised

to a new, pure, glad life, through the feeling of the hopes and

the practice of the virtues of the gospel of Christ. Unto those

who "were formerly in the flesh, the servants of sin, bringing

forth fruit unto death," but now obeying the new form of doctrine

delivered unto them, with renewed hearts and changed conduct, it

is written, "If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin;

but the spirit is life because of righteousness;" that is, If

Christian truth reign in you, the body may still be tormented, or

powerless, owing to your previous bad habits; but the soul will be

redeemed from its abandonment to error and vice, and be assured of

pardon and immortal life by the witnessing spirit of God.

The apostle likewise says unto them, "If the Spirit of God dwell

in you, it shall also quicken your mortal bodies." This remarkable

expression was meant to convey a thought which the observation of

common facts approves and explains. If the love of the pure

principles of the gospel was established in them, their bodies,

debilitated and deadened by former abandonment to their lusts,

should be freed and reanimated by its influence. The body to a

great extent reflects the permanent mind and life of a man. It is

an aphorism of Solomon that "a sound heart is the life of the

flesh." And Plotinus declares, "Temperance and justice are the

saviors of the body so far as they are received by it." Deficiency

of thought and knowledge, laziness of spirit, animality of habits,

betray themselves plainly enough in the state and expression of

the physical frame: they render it coarse, dim, and insensible;

the person verges towards the condition of a clod; spiritual

things are clouded, the beacon fire of his destiny wanes, the

possibilities of Christian faith lessen, "the external and the

insensate creep in on his organized clay," he feels the chain of

the brute earth more and more, and finally gives himself up to

utter death. On the other hand, the assimilation of Divine truth

and goodness by a man, the cherishing love of all high duties and

aspirations, exert a purifying, energizing power both on the flesh

and the mind, animate and strengthen them, like a heavenly flame

burn away the defiling entanglements and spiritual fogs that fill

and hang around the wicked and sensual, increasingly pervade his

consciousness with an inspired force and freedom, illuminate his

face, touch the magnetic springs of health and healthful sympathy,

make him completely alive, and bring him into living connection

with the Omnipresent Life, so that he perceives the full testimony

that he shall never die. For, when brought into such a state by

the experience of live spirits in live frames, "We feel through

all this fleshly dresse Bright shootes of everlastingnesse."

Spiritual sloth and sensual indulgence stupefy, blunt, and confuse

together in lifeless meshes, the vital tenant and the mortal

tenement; they grow incorporate, alike unclean, powerless, guilty,

and wretched. Then "Man lives a life half dead, a living death,

Himself his sepulchre, a moving grave." Active virtue, profound

love, and the earnest pursuit, in the daily duties of life, of

"Those lofty musings which within us sow The seeds of higher kind

and brighter being." Cleanse, vivify, and distinguish the body and

the soul, so that, when this tabernacle of clay crumbles from

around it, the unimprisoned spirit soars into the universe at

once, and, looking back upon the shadowy king bearing his pale

prey to the tomb, exclaims, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave,

where is thy victory?" The facts, then, of sin, guilt, weakness,

misery, unbelief, decay, insensibility, and death, joined with the

opposite corresponding class of facts, and considered in their

mutual spiritual and physical relations and results, originally

suggested, and now interpret and justify, that peculiar

phraseology of the New Testament which we have been investigating.

It has no recondite meaning drawn from arbitrary dogmas, but a

plain meaning drawn from natural truths.

It remains next to see what is the Christian doctrine concerning

literal, physical death, concerning the actual origin and

significance of that solemn event. This point must be treated the

more at length on account of the erroneous notions prevailing upon

the subject. For that man's first disobedience was the procuring

cause of organic, as well as of moral, death, is a doctrine quite

generally believed. It is a fundamental article in the creeds of

all the principal denominations of Christendom, and is

traditionally held, from the neglect of investigation, by nearly

all Christians. By this theory the words of James who writes,

"Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death" are interpreted

with strict literalness. It is conceived that, had not evil

entered the first man's heart and caused him to fall from his

native innocence, he would have roamed among the flowers of Eden

to this day. But he violated the commandment of his Maker, and

sentence of death was passed upon him and his posterity. We are

now to prove that this imaginative theory is far from the truth.

1. The language in which the original account of Adam's sin and

its punishment is stated shows conclusively that the penalty of

transgression was not literal death, but spiritual, that is,

degradation, suffering. God's warning in relation to the forbidden

tree was, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely

die." Of course, Jehovah's solemn declaration was fulfilled as he

had said. But in the day that man partook of the prohibited fruit

he did not die a physical death. He lived, driven from the

delights of Paradise, (according to the account,) upwards of eight

hundred years, earning his bread by the sweat of his brow.

Consequently, the death with which he had been threatened must

have been a moral death, loss of innocence and joy, experience of

guilt and woe.

2. The common usage of the words connected with this subject in

the New Testament still more clearly substantiates the view here

taken of it. There is a class of words, linked together by

similarity of meaning and closeness of mutual relation, often used

by the Christian writers loosely, figuratively, and sometimes

interchangeably, as has been shown already in another connection.

We mean the words "sin," "flesh," "misery," "death." The same

remark may be made of another class of words of precisely opposite

signification, "righteousness," "faith," "life," "blessedness,"

"eternal life." These different words frequently stand to

represent the same idea. "As the law hath reigned through sin unto

death, so shall grace reign through righteousness unto life." In

other terms, as the recognition of the retributive law of God

through rebellion and guilt filled the consciences of men with

wretchedness, so the acceptance of the pardoning love of God

through faith and conformity will fill them with blessedness. Sin

includes conscious distrust, disobedience, and alienation;

righteousness includes conscious faith, obedience, and

reconciliation. Sin and death, it will be seen, are related just

as righteousness and life are. The fact that they are sometimes

represented in the relation of identity "the minding of the flesh

is death, but the minding of the spirit is life" and sometimes in

the relation of cause and effect "the fruit of sin is death, the

fruit of righteousness is life" proves that the words are used

metaphorically, and really mean conscious guilt and misery,

conscious virtue and blessedness. No other view is consistent. We

are urged to be "dead unto sin, but alive unto God;" that is, to

be in a state of moral perfection which turns a deaf and

invincible front to all the influences of evil, but is open and

joyfully sensitive to every thing good and holy. Paul also wrote,

in his letter to the Philippians, that he had "not yet attained

unto the resurrection," but was striving to attain unto it; that

is, he had not yet reached, but was striving to reach, that lofty

state of holiness and peace invulnerable to sin, which no change

can injure, with which the event of bodily dissolution cannot

interfere, because its elements faith, truth, justice, and love

are the immutable principles of everlasting life.

3. In confirmation of this conclusion, an argument amounting to

certainty is afforded by the way in which the disobedience of Adam

and its consequences, and the obedience of Christ and its

consequences, are spoken of together; by the way in which a sort

of antithetical parallel is drawn between the result of Adam's

fall and the result of Christ's mission. "As by one man sin

entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon

all men, so much more shall all receive the gift of God by one

man, Jesus Christ, and reign unto eternal life." This means, as

the writer himself afterwards explains, that "as by one man's

disobedience many were made sinners" and suffered the consequences

of sin, figuratively expressed by the word "death," "so by the

obedience of one shall many be made righteous" and enjoy the

consequences of righteousness, figuratively expressed by the word

"life." Give the principal terms in this passage their literal

force, and no meaning which is not absolutely incompatible with

the plainest truths can be drawn from it. Surely literal death had

come equally and fully upon all men everywhere; literal life could

do no more. But render the idea in this way, the blessedness

offered to men in the revelation of grace made by Jesus outweighs

the wretchedness brought upon them through the sin introduced by

Adam, and the sense is satisfactory. That which Adam is

represented as having lost, that, the apostle affirms, Christ

restored; that which Adam is said to have incurred, that Christ is

said to have removed. But Christ did not restore to man a physical

immortality on the earth: therefore that is not what Adam

forfeited; but he lost peace of conscience and trust in the Divine

favor. Furthermore, Christ did not free his followers from natural

decay and death: therefore that is not what Adam's transgression

brought upon his children; but it entailed upon them proclivities

to evil, spiritual unrest, and woe. The basis of the comparison is

evidently this: Adam's fall showed that the consequences of sin,

through the stern operation of the law, were strife, despair, and

misery, all of which is implied in the New Testament usage of the

word "death;" Christ's mission showed that the consequences of

righteousness, through the free grace of God, were faith, peace,

and indestructible happiness, all of which is implied in the New

Testament usage of the word "life." In the mind of Paul there was

undoubtedly an additional thought, connecting the descent of the

soul to the under world with the death of the sinful Adam, and its

ascent to heaven with the resurrection of the immaculate Christ;

but this does not touch the argument just advanced, because it

does not refer to the cause of physical dissolution, but to what

followed that event.

4. It will not be out of place here to demonstrate that sin

actually was not the origin of natural decay, by the revelations

of science, which prove that death was a monarch on the earth for

ages before moral transgression was known. As the geologist

wanders, and studies the records of nature, where earthquake,

deluge, and volcano have exposed the structure of the globe and

its organic remains in strata piled on strata, upon these, as upon

so many pages of the earth's autobiography, he reads the history

of a hundred races of animals which lived and died, leaving their

bones layer above layer, in regular succession, centuries before

the existence of man. It is evident, then, that, independent of

human guilt, and from the very first, chemical laws were in force,

and death was a part of God's plan in the material creation. As

the previous animals perished without sin, so without sin the

animal part of man too would have died. It was made perishable

from the outset. The important point just here in the theology of

Paul was, as previously implied, that death was intended to lead

the soul directly to heaven in a new "spiritual body" or "heavenly

house;" but sin marred the plan, and doomed the soul to go into

the under world, a naked manes, when "unclothed" of "the natural

body" or "earthly house." The mission of Christ was to restore the

original plan; and it would be consummated at his second coming.

5. There is a gross absurdity involved in the supposition that an

earthly immortality was the intended destiny of man. That

supposition necessarily implies that the whole groundwork of God's

first design was a failure, that his great purpose was thwarted

and changed into one wholly different. And it is absurd to think

such a result possible in the providence of the Almighty. Besides,

had there been no sin, could not man have been drowned if he fell

into the water without knowing how to swim? If a building tumbled

upon him, would he not have been crushed? Nor is this theory free

from another still more palpable absurdity; for, had there been no

interference of death to remove one generation and make room for

another, the world could not support the multitudes with which it

would now swarm. Moreover, the time would arrive when the earth

could not only not afford sustenance to its so numerous

inhabitants, but could not even contain them. So that if this were

the original arrangement, unless certain other parts which were

indisputable portions of it were cancelled, the surplus myriads

would have to be removed to some other world. That is just what

death accomplishes. Consequently, death was a part of God's primal

plan, and not a contingence accidentally caused by sin.

6. If death be the result of sin, then, of course, it is a

punishment inflicted upon man for his wickedness. In fact, this is

an identical proposition. But death cannot be intended as a

punishment, because, viewed in that light, it is unjust. It comes

equally upon old and young, good and bad, joyous and wretched. It

does not permit the best man to live longest; it does not come

with the greatest terror and agony to the most guilty. All these

things depend on a thousand contingencies strung upon an iron law,

which inheres to the physical world of necessity, and has not its

basis and action in the spiritual sphere of freedom, character,

and experience. The innocent babe and the hardened criminal are

struck at the same instant and die the same death. Solomon knew

this when he said, "As dieth the fool, so the wise man dieth."

Death regarded as a retribution for sin is unjust, because it is

destitute of moral discrimination. It therefore is not a

consequence of transgression, but an era, incident, and step in

human existence, an established part of the visible order of

things from the beginning. When the New Testament speaks of death

as a punishment, it always uses the word in a symbolic sense,

meaning spiritual deadness and misery, which is a perfect

retribution, because it discriminates with unerring exactness.

This has been conclusively proved by Klaiber,1 who shows that the

peculiar language of Paul in regard to the trichotomist division

of man into spirit, soul, and body necessarily involves the

perception of physical death as a natural fact.

7. Finally, natural death cannot be the penalty of

unrighteousness, because it is not a curse and a woe, but a

blessing and a privilege. Epictetus wrote, "It would be a curse

upon ears of corn not to be reaped; and we ought to know that it

would be a curse upon man not to die." 2 It cannot be the effect

of man's sin, because it is the improvement of man's condition.

Who can believe it would be better for man to remain on earth

forever, under any

1 Die Neutestamentliche Lehre von der Sunde and Erlosung, ss. 22

45.

2 Dissert. ii. 6, 2.

circumstances, than it is for him to go to heaven to such an

experience as the faithful follower of Christ supposes is there

awaiting him? It is not to be thought by us that death is a

frowning enemy thrusting us into the gloom of eternal night or

into the flaming waves of irremediable torment, but rather a

smiling friend ushering us into the endless life of the spiritual

world and into the unveiled presence of God. According to the

arrangement and desire of God, for us to die is gain: every

personal exception to this if there be any exception is caused

through the marring interference of personal wickedness with the

Creator's intention and with natural order. Who has not sometimes

felt the bondage of the body and the trials of earth, and peered

with awful thrills of curiosity into the mysteries of the unseen

world, until he has longed for the hour of the soul's liberation,

that it might plume itself for an immortal flight? Who has not

experienced moments of serene faith, in which he could hardly help

exclaiming, "I would not live alway; I ask not to stay: Oh, who

would live alway away from his God?"

A favorite of Apollo prayed for the best gift Heaven could bestow

upon man. The god said, "At the end of seven days it shall be

granted: in the mean time, live happy." At the appointed hour he

fell into a sweet slumber, from which he never awoke.3 He who

regards death as upon the whole an evil does not take the

Christian's view of it, not even the enlightened pagan's view, but

the frightened sensualist's view, the superstitious atheist's

view. And if death be upon the whole normally a blessing, then

assuredly it cannot be a punishment brought upon man by sin. The

common hypothesis of our mortality namely, that sin, hereditarily

lodged in the centre of man's life, spreads its dynamic virus

thence until it appears as death in the periphery, expending its

final energy within the material sphere in the dissolution of the

physical frame is totally opposed to the spirit of philosophy and

to the most lucid results of science. Science announces death

universally as the initial point of new life.4

The New Testament does not teach that natural death, organic

separation, is the fruit of sin, that, if man had not sinned, he

would have lived forever on the earth. But it teaches that moral

death, misery, is the consequence of sin. The pains and

afflictions which sometimes come upon the good without fault of

theirs do yet spring from human faults somewhere, with those

exceptions alone that result from the necessary contingencies of

finite creatures, exposures outside the sphere of human

accountability. With this qualification, it would be easy to show

in detail that the sufferings of the private individual and of

mankind at large are, directly or indirectly, the products of

guilt, violated law. All the woes, for instance, of poverty are

the results of selfishness, pride, ignorance, and vice. And it is

the same with every other class of miseries.

"The world in Titanic immortality Writhes beneath the burning

mountain of its sins."

3 Herod. i. 31; Cic. Tusc. Quast. i. 47.

4 Klencke, Das Buch vom Tode. Entwurf einer Lehre vom Sterben in

der Natur und vom Tode des Mensehen insbesondere. Fur denkende

Freunde der Wissenschaft.

Had there been no sin, men's lives would have glided on like the

placid rivers that flow through the woodlands. They would have

lived without strife or sorrow, grown old without sadness or

satiety, and died without a pang or a sigh. But, alas! sin so

abounds in the world that "there is not a just man that lives and

sins not;" and it is a truth whose omnipresent jurisdiction can

neither be avoided nor resisted that every kind of sin, every

offence against Divine order, shall somewhere, at some time, be

judged as it deserves. He who denies this only betrays the

ignorance which conceals from him a pervading law of inevitable

application, only reveals the degradation and insensibility which

do not allow him to be conscious of his own experience. A

harmonious, happy existence depends on the practice of pure morals

and communion with the love of God. This great idea that the

conscientious culture of the spiritual nature is the sole method

of Divine life is equally a fundamental principle of the gospel

and a conclusion of observation and reason: upon the devout

observance of it hinge the possibilities of true blessedness. The

pursuit of an opposite course necessitates the opposite

experience, makes its votary a restless, wretched slave, wishing

for freedom but unable to obtain it.

The thought just stated, we maintain, strikes the key note of the

Christian Scriptures; and the voices of truth and nature accord

with it. That Christianity declares sin to be the cause of

spiritual death, in all the deep and wide meaning of the term, has

been fully shown; that this is also a fact in the great order of

things has been partially illustrated, but in justice to the

subject should be urged, in a more precise and adequate form. In

the first place, there is a positive punishment flowing evidently

from sin, consisting both in outward inflictions of suffering and

disgrace through human laws and social customs, and in the private

endurance of bodily and mental pains and of strange misgivings

that load the soul with fear and anguish. Subjection to the animal

nature in the obedience of unrighteousness sensibly tends to bring

upon its victim a woeful mass of positive ills, public and

personal, to put him under the vile tyranny of devouring lusts, to

induce deathlike enervation and disease in his whole being, to

pervade his consciousness with the wretched gnawings of remorse

and shame, and with the timorous, tormenting sense of guilt,

discord, alienation, and condemnation.

In the second place, there is a negative punishment for impurity

and wrong doing, less gross and visible than the former, but

equally real and much more to be dreaded. Sin snatches from a man

the prerogatives of eternal life, by brutalizing and deadening his

nature, sinking the spirit with its delicate delights in the body

and its coarse satisfactions, making him insensible to his highest

good and glory, lowering him in the scale of being away from God,

shutting the gates of heaven against him, and leaving him to

wallow in the mire. The wages of sin is misery, and its gift is a

degradation which prevents any elevation to true happiness. These

positive and negative retributions, however delayed or disguised,

will come where they are deserved, and will not fail. Do a wrong

deed from a bad motive, and, though you fled on the pinions of the

inconceivable lightning from one end of infinite space to the

other, the fated penalty would chase you through eternity but that

you should pay its debt; or, rather, the penalty is grappling with

you from within on the instant, is a part of you.

Thirdly, if, by the searing of his conscience and absorption in

the world, a sinner escapes for a season the penal consequences

threatened in the law, and does not know how miserable he is, and

thinks he is happy, yet let him remember that the remedial,

restorative process through which he must pass, either in this

life or in the next, involves a concentrated experience of

expiatory pangs, as is shown both by the reason of the thing and

by all relevant analogies. When the bad man awakes as some time or

other he will awake to the infinite perfections and unalterable

love of the Father whose holy commands he has trampled and whose

kind invitations he has spurned, he will suffer agonies of

remorseful sorrow but faintly shadowed in the bitterness of

Peter's tears when his forgiving Master looked on him. Such is the

common deadness of our consciences that the vices of our corrupt

characters are far from appearing to us as the terrific things

they really are. Angels, looking under the fleshly garment we

wear, and seeing a falsehood or a sin assimilated as a portion of

our being, turn away with such feeling as we should experience at

beholding a leprous sore beneath the lifted ermine of a king. A

well taught Christian will not fail to contemplate physical death

as a stupendous, awakening crisis, one of whose chief effects will

be the opening to personal consciousness, in the most vivid

manner, of all the realities of character, with their relations

towards things above and things below himself.

This thought leads us to a fourth and final consideration, more

important than the previous. The tremendous fact that all the

inwrought elements and workings of our being are self retributive,

their own exceeding great and sufficient good or evil, independent

of external circumstances and sequences, is rarely appreciated.

Men overlook it in their superficial search after associations,

accompaniments, and effects. When all tangible punishments and

rewards are wanting, all outward penalties and prizes fail, if we

go a little deeper into the mysterious facts of experience we

shall find that still goodness is rewarded and evil is punished,

because "the mind is its own place, and can itself," if virtuous,

"make a heaven of hell, if wicked, "a hell of heaven." It is a

truth, springing from the very nature of God and his irreversible

relations towards his creatures, that his united justice and love

shall follow both holiness and iniquity now and ever, pouring his

beneficence upon them to be converted by them into their food and

bliss or into their bane and misery. There is, then, no essential

need of adventitious accompaniments or results to justify and pay

the good, or to condemn and torture the bad, here or hereafter. To

be wise, and pure, and strong, and noble, is glory and blessedness

enough in itself. To be ignorant, and corrupt, and mean, and

feeble, is degradation and horror enough in itself. The one abides

in true life, the other in moral death; and that is sufficient.

Even now, in this world, therefore, the swift and diversified

retributions of men's characters and lives are in them and upon

them, in various ways, and to a much greater extent than they are

accustomed to think. History preaches this with all her revealing

voices. Philosophy lays it bare, and points every finger at the

flaming bond that binds innocence to peace, guilt to remorse. It

is the substance of the gospel, emphatically pronounced. And the

clear experience of every sensitive soul confirms its truth,

echoing through the silent corridors of the conscience the

declarations which fell in ancient Judea from the lips of Jesus

and the pen of Paul: "The pure in heart shall see God;" "The wages

of sin is death."

We will briefly sum up the principal positions of the ground we

have now traversed. To be enslaved by the senses in the violation

of the Divine laws, neglecting the mind and abusing the members,

is to be dead to the goodness of God, the joys of virtue, and the

hopes of heaven, and alive to guilt, anguish, and despair. To obey

the will of God in love, keeping the body under, and cherishing a

pure soul, is to be dead to the evil of the world, the goading of

passions, and the fears of punishment, and alive to innocence,

happiness, and faith. According to the natural plan of things from

the dawn of creation, the flesh was intended to fall into the

ground, but the spirit to rise into heaven. Suffering is the

retributive result and accumulated merit of iniquity; while

enjoyment is the gift of God and the fruit of conformity to his

law. To receive the instructions of Christ and obey them with the

whole heart, walking after his example, is to be quickened from

that deadly misery into this living blessedness. The inner life of

truth and goodness thus revealed and proposed to men, its personal

experience being once obtained, is an immortal possession, a

conscious fount springing up unto eternity through the beneficent

decree of the Father, to play forever in the light of his smile

and the shadow of his arm. Such are the great component elements

of the Christian doctrine of life and death, both present and

eternal.

The purely interior character of the genuine teachings of

Christianity on this subject is strikingly evident in the

foregoing epitome. The essential thing is simply that the hate

life of error and sin is inherent alienation from God, in slavery,

wretchedness, death; while the love life of truth and virtue is

inherent communion with God, in conscious freedom and blessedness.

Here pure Christianity leaves the subject, declaring this with

authority, but not pretending to clear up the mysteries or set

forth the details of the subject. Whatever in the New Testament

goes beyond this and meddles with minute external circumstances we

regard as a corrupt addition or mixture drawn from various Gentile

and Pharisaic sources and erroneously joined with the authentic

words of Christ. What we maintain in regard to the apostles and

the early Christians in general is not so much that they failed to

grasp the deep spiritual principles of the Master's teaching, not

that they were essentially in error, but that, while they held the

substance of the Savior's true thoughts, they also held additional

notions which were errors retained from their Pharisaic education

and only partially modified by their succeeding Christian culture,

a set of traditional and mechanical conceptions. These errors, we

repeat, concern not the heart and essence of ideas, but their form

and clothing. For instance, Christ teaches that there is a heaven

for the faithful; the apostles suppose that it is a located region

over the firmament. The dying Stephen said, "Behold, I see the

heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of

God." Again: Christ teaches that there is a banishment for the

wicked; the apostles suppose that it is into a located region

under the earth. In accordance with the theological dogmas of

their time and countrymen, with such modification as the peculiar

character, teachings, and life of Jesus enforced, they believed

that sin sent through the black gates of Sheol those who would

otherwise have gone through the glorious doors of heaven; that

Christ would return from heaven soon, raise the dead from the

under world, judge them, rebanish the reprobate, establish his

perfect kingdom on earth, and reascend to heaven with his elect.

That these distinctive notions came into the New Testament

through the mistakes and imperfect knowledge of the apostles,

how can any candid and competent scholar doubt?5 In the

first place, the process whereby these conceptions were

transmitted and assimilated from Zoroastrian Persia to Pharisaic

Judea is historically traceable. Secondly, the brevity and

vagueness of the apostolic references to eschatology, and their

perfect harmony with known Pharisaic beliefs, prove their mutual

consonance and the derivation of the later from the earlier. If

the supposed Christian views had been unheard of before, their

promulgators would have taken pains to define them carefully and

give detailed expositions of them. Thirdly, it was natural almost

inevitable that the apostles would retain at least some of their

original peculiarities of belief, and mix them with their new

ideas, unless they were prevented by an infallible inspiration. Of

the presence of any such infallibility there is not a shadow of

evidence; but, on the contrary, there is a demonstration of its

absence. For they differed among themselves, carried on violent

controversies on important points. Paul says of Peter, "I

withstood him to the face." The Gentile and Judaic dissensions

shook the very foundations of the Apostolic Church. Paul and

Barnabas "had a sharp controversy, insomuch that they parted

asunder." Almost every commentator and scholar worthy of notice

has been compelled to admit the error of the apostles in expecting

the visible return of Christ in their own day. And, if they erred

in that, they might in other matters. The progress of positive

science and the improvement of philosophical thought have rendered

the mechanical dogmas popularly associated with Christianity

incredible to enlightened minds. For this reason, as for many

others, it is the duty of the Christian teacher to show that those

dogmas are not an integral part of the gospel, but only an

adventitious element imported into it from an earlier and

unauthoritative system. Take away these incongruous and outgrown

errors, and the pure religion of Christ will be seen, and will be

seen to be the everlasting truth of God.

In attempting to estimate the actual influence of Christianity,

wherever it has spread, in establishing among men a faith in

immortality, we must specify six separate considerations. First,

the immediate reception of the resurrection and ascension of

Christ as a miraculous and typical fact, putting an infallible

seal on his teachings, and demonstrating, even to the senses of

men, the reality of a heavenly life, was an extremely potent

influence in giving form and vigor to faith, more potent for ages

than every thing else combined. The image of the victorious Christ

taken up to heaven and glorified there forever, this image,

pictured in every believer's mind, stimulated the imagination and

kept an ideal vision of heaven in constant remembrance as an

apprehended reality. "There is Jesus," they said, pointing up to

heaven; "and there one day we shall be with him."

Secondly, the obloquy and desertion experienced by the early

Christians threw them back upon a double strength of spiritual

faith, and opened to them an intensified communion with God. As

worldly goods and pleasures were sacrificed, the more powerful

became their

5 Eschatologie, oder die Lebre von den Letzten Dingen. Mit

besonderer Rucksicht anf die gangbare Irriehre vom Hades. Basel,

1840. De Wette interprets the doctrine of Christ's descent into

Hades as a myth derived from the idea that he was the Savior not

only of his living followers but also of the heathen and the dead.

Bibl. Dogmatik, s. 272.

perception of moral truths and their grasp of invisible treasures.

The more fiercely they were assailed, the dearer became the cause

for which they suffered, and the more profoundly the moral springs

of faith were stirred in their souls. The natural revulsion of

their souls was from destitution, contempt, peril, and pain on

earth to a more vivid and magnified trust in a great reward laid

up for them in heaven.

Thirdly, the unflinching zeal kindled in the early confessors of

Christianity, the sublime heroism shown by them amidst the awful

tortures inflicted on them by the persecuting Jews and Romans,

reacted on their brethren to give profounder firmness and new

intensity to their faith in a glorious life beyond the grave. The

Christians thrown into the amphitheatre to the lions calmly

kneeled in prayer, and to the superstitious bystanders a bright

nimbus seemed to play around their brows and heaven to be opened

above. As they perished at the stake, amidst brutal jeers and

shrivelling flames, serenely maintaining their profession, and

calling on Christ, over the lurid vista of smoke and fire broke on

their rapt vision the blessed splendors of Paradise; and their joy

seemed, to the enthusiastic believers around, no less than a

Divine inspiration, confirming their faith, and preaching, through

the unquestionable truthfulness of martyrdom, the certainty of

immortal life. The survivors celebrated the anniversaries of the

martyrs' deaths as their birthdays into the endless life.

Fourthly, another means by which Christianity operated to deepen

and spread a belief in the future life was, indirectly, through

its influence in calling out and cultivating the affections of the

heart. The essence of the gospel in theory, as taught by all its

teachers, in fact, as incarnated by Christ, and in practice, as

working in history is love. From the first it condemned and tended

to destroy all the coldness and hatred of human hearts; and it

strove to elicit and foster every kindly sentiment and generous

impulse, to draw its disciples together by those yearning ties of

sympathy and devotion which instinctively demand and divinely

prophesy an eternal union in a better world. The more mightily two

human hearts love each other, the stronger will be their

spontaneous longing for immortality. The unrivalled revelation of

the disinterested love of God made by Christianity, and its effect

in refining and increasing the love of men, have contributed in a

most important degree to sanction and diffuse the faith in a

blessed life reserved for men hereafter. One remarkable

specification may be noticed. The only pagan description of

children in the future life is that given by some of the classic

poets, who picture the infant shades lingering in groups around

the dismal gates of the under world, weeping and wailing because

they could never find admittance.

"Continuo audita voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque

animaflentes in limine primo."