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SERMON XX.

1 PETER iii. 18, 19, 20.

Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit; by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, which sometime were disobedient, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah.

IN the first rudiments of our Christian faith, comprised in the Apostles' Creed, which we are made to get by heart in our earliest infancy, we are taught to believe that "our Lord Jesus Christ descended into hell;" and this belief is solemnly professed by every member of the congregation, when that creed is repeated in the daily service of the church. And it seemed of so much importance that it should be distinctly acknowledged by the Church of England, when we separated from the Roman communion, that our reformers thought proper to make it by itself the subject of one of the articles of religion. They were aware that upon the fact of our Lord's descent into hell the Church of Rome pretended to build her doctrine of purgatory, which they justly esteemed one of her worst corruptions; but, apprehensive that the zeal of reformation might in this, as in some other instances, carry men too far, and induce them to reject a most important truth, on which a dangerous error had been once ingrafted,-to prevent this intemperance of reform, they assert, in the third article

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of the Thirty-nine, "That as Christ died for us and was buried, so it is to be believed that he went down into hell." The terms in which they state the proposition, imply that Christ's going down into hell is a matter of no less importance to be believed than that he died upon the cross for men-is no less a plain matter of fact in the history of our Lord's life and death than the burial of his dead body. It should seem, that what is thus taught among the first things which children learn, should be among the plainest,-that what is thus laid down as a matter of the same necessity to be believed as our Lord's passion and atonement, should be among the least disputed, that what every Christian is required to acknowledge as his own belief, in the daily assemblies of the faithful, should little need either explanation or proof to any that have been instructed in the very first principles only of the doctrine of Christ. But so it is, that what the sagacity of our reformers foresaw, the precaution which they used has not prevented. The truth itself has been brought into discredit by the errors with which it has been adulterated; and such has been the industry of modern refinement, and unfortunately so great has been its success, that doubts have been raised about the sense of this plain article of our creed by some, and by others about the truth and authenticity of it. It will therefore be no unprofitable undertaking to show that the assertion in the Apostles' Creed, that" our Lord descended into hell," is to be taken as a plain matter of fact in the literal meaning of the words, to show what proof of this fact we have in holy writ,-and, lastly, to show the great use and importance of the fact as a point of Christian doctrine.

First, then, for the sense of the proposition, "He descended into hell." If we consider the words as they stand in the Creed itself, and in connection with what

immediately precedes and follows them, they appear evidently to contain a declaration of something which our Lord performed-some going of our Lord to a place called "hell," in the interval of time between the burial of his dead body and his rising to life again on the third day after that interment; for thus speaks the Creed of Jesus Christ: "was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead." It is evident that the descending into hell is spoken of as an action of our Lord, but as an action performed by him after he was dead and buried, and before he rose again. In the body, our dead Lord, more than any other dead man, could perform no action; for the very notion of death is, that all sensation, and activity, and power of motion of the body, is in that state of the man extinguished. This, therefore, was an act of that part of the man which continues active after death,—that is, of the soul separated by death from the body, as the interment must be understood of the body apart from the soul. The dead body could no more go into hell than the living soul could be laid in the grave. Considering the words, therefore, as they stand in the Creed as the church now receives it, they seem as little capable of any variety of meaning, and almost as little to require explanation, as the word "buried." That word describes not more plainly, to the apprehensions of all men, what was done with the inanimate body of our crucified Lord, than these words declare what was done by his rational soul in its intermediate state. The only question that can possibly arise to a plain man's understanding is, where or what the place may be which is here called hell, to which it is said our Lord in the state of death descended.

It is evident that this must be some place below the surface of the earth; for it is said that he " descended," that is, he went down to it. Our Lord's death took

place upon the surface of the earth, where the human race inhabit; that, therefore, and none higher, is the place from which he descended; of consequence, the place to which he went by descent was below it; and it is with relation to these parts below the surface that his rising to life on the third day must be understood. This was only a return from the nether regions to the realms of life and day, from which he had descended,-not his ascension into heaven, which was a subsequent event, and makes a distinct article in the Creed.

But although the hell to which our Lord descended was indeed below, as the word "descent" implies, it is by no means to be understood of the place of torment. This is a point which requires elucidation, to prevent a mistake into which the unlearned easily might fall. The word "hell" is so often applied, in common speech, and in the English translation of the New Testament, to the place of torment, that the genuine meaning of the word (in which, however, it is used in many passages of the English Bible) is almost forgotten; and the common people never hear of hell but their thoughts are carried to that dismal place "where the fallen angels are kept in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." But the word, in its natural import, signifies only that invisible place which is the appointed habitation of departed souls in the interval between death and the general resurrection. That such a place must be is indisputable; for when man dieth, his soul dieth not, but returneth unto him that gave it, to be disposed of at his will and pleasure,-which is clearly implied in that admonition of our Saviour, "Fear not them which kill the body, but cannot kill the soul." But the soul, existing after death, and separated from the body, though of a nature immaterial, must be in some place for however metaphysicians may talk of place as one of the adjuncts of body, as if nothing but

gross sensible body could be limited to a place, to exist without relation to place seems to be one of the incommunicable perfections of the Divine Being; and it is hardly to be conceived that any created spirit, of however high an order, can be without locality, or without such determination of its existence at any given time to some certain place, that it shall be true to say of it "Here it is, and not elsewhere." That such at least is the condition of the human soul, were it seasonable to go into so abstruse a disquisition, might be proved, I think, indisputably from holy writ. Assuming, therefore, that every departed soul has its place of residence, it would be reasonable to suppose, if revelation were silent on the subject, that a common mansion is provided for them all, their nature being similar; since we see throughout all nature creatures of the same sort placed together in the same element. But revelation is not silent. The sacred writers of the Old Testament speak of such a common mansion in the inner parts of the earth and we find the same opinion so general among the heathen writers of antiquity, that it is more probable that it had its rise in the earliest patriarchal revelations than in the imaginations of man, or in poetical fiction, The notion is confirmed by the language of the writers of the New Testament, with this additional circumstance, that they divide this central mansion of the dead into two distinct regions, for the separate lodging of the souls of the righteous and the reprobate. In this, too, they have the concurrence of the earliest heathen poets, who placed the good and the bad in separate divisions of the central region. The name which the Hebrew writers gave to this mansion of departed souls (without regard to any such division) expresses only that it is a place unknown, about which all are curious and inquisitive. The writers of the New Testament adopted the name which the earliest Greek writers had given it, which

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