too plain to
be evaded. Would he not, then, in all probability, believe in a
local hell? Believing, as he certainly did, in a devil, the author
and lord of darkness, falsehood, and death, would he not conceive
a kingdom for him? In the development of ideas reached at that
time, it is evident that the conception of God implied an upper
world, his resplendent abode, and that the conception of Satan
equally implied an under world, his gloomy realm. To the latter
human souls were doomed by sin. From the former Christ came, and
returned to it again, to show that the Father would forgive our
sins and take us there.

Thirdly, John expected that Christ, after death, would return to
the Father in heaven. This appears from clear and reiterated
statements in his reports of the Savior's words. But after the
resurrection he tells us that Jesus had not yet ascended to the
Father, but was just on the point of going. "Touch me not, for I
am not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren, and say
unto them, I ascend unto my Father." Where, then, did he suppose
the soul of his crucified Master had been during the interval
between his death and his resurrection? Dormant in the body, dead
with the body, laid in the tomb? That is opposed to the doctrine
of uninterrupted life which pervades his writings. Besides, such a
belief was held only by the Sadducees, whom the New Testament
stigmatizes. To assume that such was John's conception of the fact
is an arbitrary supposition, without the least warrant from any
source whatever. If he imagined the soul of Jesus during that time
to have been neither in heaven nor in the sepulchre, is it not
pretty sure that he supposed it was in the under world, the common
receptacle of souls, where, according to the belief of that age,
every man went after death?

Fourthly, it is to be observed, in favor of this general
interpretation, that the doctrine it unfolds is in harmony with
the contemporary opinions, a natural development from them, a
development which would be forced upon the mind of a Jewish
Christian accepting the resurrection of Christ as a fact. It was
the Jewish opinion that God dwelt with his holy angels in a world
of everlasting light above the firmament. It was the Jewish
opinion that the departed souls of men, on account of sin, were
confined beneath the earth in Satan's and death's dark and
slumberous cavern of shadows. It was the Jewish opinion that the
Messiah would raise the r