t held personal
salvation to be a contingent problem, to be worked out, through
the permitting grace of God, by Christian faith, works, and
character. How plainly this is contained, too, in his doctrine of
"a resurrection of the just and the unjust," and of a day of
judgment, from whose august tribunal Christ is to pronounce
sentence according to each man's deeds! At the same time, the
undeniable fact deserves particular remembrance that he says, and
apparently knows, nothing whatever of a hell, in the present
acceptation of that term, a prison house of fiery tortures. He
assigns the realm of Satan and the evil spirits to the air, the
vexed region between earth and heaven, according to the demonology
of his age and country. 22

Finally, there is a fourth class of passages, from which we might
infer that the apostle's faith merely excluded the reprobate from
participating in the ascent with Christ, just as some of the
Pharisees excluded the Gentiles from their resurrection, and there
left the subject in darkness.

22 A detailed and most curious account of this region, which he
calls Tartarus, is given by Angustine. De Gen. ad. lit. lib. iii.
cap. 14, 15, ed. Benedictina.

"They that are Christ's," "the dead in Christ, shall rise."
"No sensualist, extortioner, idolater, hath any inheritance
in the kingdom of Christ and of God." "There is laid up a crown of
righteousness, which the Lord shall give in that day to all them
that love his appearing." In all these, and in many other cases,
there is a marked omission of any reference to the ultimate
positive disposal of the wicked. Still, against the supposition of
his holding the doctrine that all except good Christians would be
left below eternally, we have his repeated explicit avowals. "I
have hope towards God that there shall be a resurrection both of
the just and the unjust." "We must all appear before the judgment
seat of Christ." These last statements, however, prove only that
Paul thought the bad as well as the good would be raised up and
judged: they are not inconsistent with the belief that the
condemned would afterwards either be annihilated, or remanded
everlastingly to the under world. This very belief, we think, is
contained in that remarkable passage where Paul writes to the
Philippians that he strives "if by any means he may attain unto
the resurrection." Now, the common resurrection of the dead for
judgment needed not to be striven for: it would occur t