cance. 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 triump