he text speaks; and therefore, we may, I
hope, think a little of it to-day, but reverently, and cautiously,
like men who know a very little, and are afraid of saying more than
they know. These deep mysteries about heaven we must always meddle
with very humbly, lest we get out of our depth in haste and self-
conceit. As it is said,

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

For, if we are not very careful, we shall be apt to mistake the
meaning of Scripture, and make it say what we like, and twist it to
suit our own fancies, and our own ignorance. Therefore we must
never, with texts like this, say positively, 'It must mean this. It
can mean only this.' How can we tell that?

This world, which we do see, is far too wonderful for us to
understand. How much more wonderful must be the world which we do
not see? How much more wonderful must heaven be? How can we tell
what is there, or what is not there? We can tell of some things
that are not there, and those are sin, evil, disorder, harm of any
kind. Heaven is utterly good. Beyond that, we know nothing.
Therefore I dare not be positive about this text, for fear I should
try to explain it according to my own fancies. Wise fathers and
divines have differed very much as to what it means; how far any one
of them is right, I cannot tell you.

The ancient way of explaining this text was this. People believed
in old times that the earth was flat. Then, they held, hell was
below the earth, or inside it in some way: and the burning
mountains, out of which came fire and smoke, were the mouths of
hell. And when they believed that, it was easy for them to suppose
that St. Paul spoke of Christ's descending into hell. He went down,
says St. Paul, into the lower parts of the earth. What could those
lower parts be, they asked, but the hell which lay under the earth?

Now about that we know nothing. St. Paul himself never says that
hell is below the earth. Indeed (and this is a very noteworthy
thing) St. Paul never, in his epistles, mentions in plain words hell
at all; so what St. Paul thought about the matter, we can never
know. Whether by Christ's descending into the lower parts of the
earth, he meant descending into hell, or merely that our Lord came
down on this earth of ours, poor, humble, and despised, laying his
glory by for a while, this we cannot tell. Some wise men think one
thing, some another. Two of the wisest and best of the great old
fathers