earth, ("qui dicunt inferos quidem esse hunc
mundum.")2 "I knew a man caught up to the third heaven, . . .
caught up into paradise." The threefold heaven of the Jews, here
alluded to, was, first, the region of the air, supposed to be
inhabited by evil spirits. Paul repeatedly expresses this idea, as
when he speaks of "the prince of the power of the air, the spirit
that worketh in the children of disobedience," and when he says,
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness, against wicked spirits in heavenly places." The second
heaven comprised the region of the planetary bodies. The third lay
beyond the firmament, and was the actual residence of God and the
angelic hosts. These quotations, sustained as they are by the
well known previous opinions of the Jews, as well as by numerous
unequivocal texts in the writings of the other apostles and by
many additional ones in those

1 Enarratio in Psalmum XC.

2 Adv. Hares. lib. v. cap. 31.

of Paul, are conclusive evidence that he believed in the received
heaven above the blue ether and stellar dome, and in the received
Hadean abyss beneath the earth. In the absence of all evidence to
the contrary, every presumption justifies the supposition that he
also believed as we know all his orthodox contemporaries did that
that under world was the abode of all men after death, and that
that over world was solely the dwelling place of God and the
angels. Nay, we are not left to conjecture; for he expressly
declares of God that he "dwelleth in the light which no man can
approach unto." This conclusion will be abundantly established in
the course of the following exposition.

With these preliminaries, we are prepared to see what was Paul's
doctrine of death and of salvation. There are two prevalent
theories on this subject, both of which we deem partly scriptural,
neither of them wholly so. On the one extreme, the consistent
disciple of Augustine the historic Calvinist attributes to the
apostle the belief that the sin of Adam was the sole cause of
literal death, that but for Adam's fall men would have lived on
the earth forever or else have been translated bodily to heaven
without any previous process of death. That such really was not
the view held by Paul we are convinced. Indeed, there is one
prominent feature in his faith which by itself proves that the
disengagement of the soul from the material