ow that the prevailing
Hebrew conception was, that death led the naked soul into the
silent, dark, and dreary region of the under world, a doleful
fate, from which they shrank with sadness at the best, guilt
converting that natural melancholy into dread foreboding. In the
absence of any evidence or presumption whatever to the contrary,
we are authorized, nay, rather forced, to conclude that such a
conception is implied in the passages we are considering. Now, the
mission of Jesus was to deliver men from that fear and bondage, by
assuring them that God would forgive sin and annul its
consequence. Instead of banishing their disembodied spirits into
the sepulchral Sheol, he would take them to himself into the glory
above the firmament. This aim Christ accomplished by literally
exemplifying the truths it implies; that is, by personally
assuming the lot of man, dying, rising from among the spirits of
the dead, and ascending beyond the veil into heaven. By his death
and victorious ascent "he purged our sins," "redeemed
transgressions," "overthrew him that has the power of death," in
the sense that he thereby, as the writer thought, swept away the
supposed train of evils caused by sin, namely, all the
concomitants of a banishment after death into the cheerless
subterranean empire.

It will be well now to notice more fully, in the author's scheme,
the idea that Christ did locally ascend into the heavens, "into
the presence of God," "where he ever liveth," and

2 xi. 13, 16, et al. See chap. x. 36,

where to receive the promise most plainly means to obtain the thing
promised, as it does several times in the epistle.

So Paul, in his speech at Antioch, (Acts xiii. 32, 33,) says,
"We declare unto you glad tidings, how 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" that by
this ascent he for the first time opened the way for others to
ascend to him where he is, avoiding the doom of Hades.

"We have a great High Priest, who has passed through the
heavens, Jesus, the Son of God." "Christ is not entered into the
most holy place, made with hands, the figure of the true, but into
heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us."
Indeed, that Jesus, in a material and local sense, rose to heaven,
is a conception fundamental to the epistle and prominent on all
its face. It is much more necessary for us to show that the author
b