death, and prayed to God to receive his spirit, he could have had no apprehension of sinking into a torpor, insensible alike to the things of earth or the state of the dead. We are told, "he fell asleep," but nothing can more glaringly expose the error that insists on the unconscious slumbers of the soul, than this opposition of all the corporeal senses thus dropping into the gloom of the grave, and of the etherial spirit thus ascending, and longing to be received into the realms of light and life! The immediate admission into at least some degree of happiness of which he expresses his sanguine hope-his perfect confidence, must furnish a strong presumption of the soul's sensibility uninterrupted by the death of the body.

Another strong passage indicating that the sleep at death does not mean an insensible one, or that the expression must not be taken literally, will be found at 1 Thess. v. 10. "Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him." Sleep, in this verse, can neither signify natural sleep, as in ver. 7, nor spiritual sloth, as in ver. 6; therefore it must signify death here. Now, they who are asleep in Christ in this sense, do still "LIVE together with him" in their souls, and shall live with him in their bodies also when raised from the dead. It were strange that we should be alive, and live with Christ, and yet do no act of life. The body when it sleeps can do many; and if the soul does none, the principal is less active than the instrument. But if it does any at all in separation, it must be an act or effect of understanding; there seems nothing else it can do ; but this it can. It is but a weak proposition to affirm that the soul can do nothing of itself without the assistance of the body. To be or to sleep with Christ, signifies no more than that our souls are received by him into his joyful and safe custody and care, to rest and repose in a delightful state of serenity till Hades shall deliver up all the souls which are in it, that they may go and rejoin their changed bodies, and in these be judged,—which does not,

* Acts vii. 55, 56.

however, imply that our spirits go immediately to heaven. This exposition will be seen to arise almost to a certainty of evidence of the soul living and waking in death.

The Apostle to the Hebrews recommends to his disciples, diligence in their Christian vocation, by the following argument :-"That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises." To what does this persuasion amount, if the Apostle knew, that they, who had gone before them in the race of immortality, were fast bound in the chains of a deep sleep, in which they were as unconscious of their own existence, and of the lapse of time, as was the dust into which their bodies were mouldered? Can a person in a state of utter insensibility, and unconscious of his own existence, inherit promises?

"When inaction, or a cessation from action," says Dr. Burnet, "is attributed to the souls of the dead, we are not to understand a total or an universal inaction only; because they have no operation, or action, which regards the corporeal world, nor are they affected by that any manner whatsoever. But still they have life and the faculty of thinking remaining for so I understand the words of Christ, when, to prove the immortality of the soul, he says that God calls himself the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. But he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for they all live unto him. By the dead here, Christ clearly seems to have meant those who are void of all life whatever; and in this sense he denies that these Patriarchs are dead. For they live, says he, unto God; that is, if I understand the thing rightly, though they do not live with regard to men, and the rest of the visible world, yet with regard to God, in the middle world, according to their intellectual faculties, they enjoy both life and vigour.'

There is a sublime passage in Isaiah, where the dead kings and princes are described as coming forth to meet the

* Burnet. "De statu mortuorum," (translated in the text.)

spirit of the King of Babylon, and insulting over him, saying" Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?"* The place where they are represented to be in, is called in the Hebrew Sheol, which term was applied to the region of departed spirits generally. “Sheol (or Hades) from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. And they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou become like unto us?-How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" Meaning, merely, in the latter part, metaphorically to express the greatness of his fall.

The Rev. Principal Campbell interprets Scripture, as informing us in the above passage, that-" in "Hades,' all the monarchs and nobles, not of one family or race, but of the whole earth are assembled. Yet their sepulchres are as distant from one another as the nations they governed. Those mighty dead are raised, not from their couches, which would have been the natural expression, had the Prophet's idea been a sepulchral vault, how magnificent soever, but from their thrones, as suited the notion of all antiquity, concerning not the bodies, but the shades or ghosts of the departed, to which were always assigned something similar in rank and occupation to what they had possessed upon the earth. Nay, as is well observed by Castalio,‡ those are represented in Hades, whose carcases were denied the honour of sepulture. In this particular, the opinions of the Hebrews did not coincide with those of the Greeks and Romans."§

Ezekiel says that the king of Egypt, with his people, should fall by the sword, and descend into hell, (sheol,) into the place, that is to say, of the dead, of departed spirits : and that other princes who had been cut off in war should

Or from their places, all those who were rulers upon earth in their life times. Defensio adv. Bezam. Adversarii Errores.

§ Campbell. Diss. VI. Part II.

come about him and speak to him, and that he should be comforted with the consideration that he had so many companions who had shared the same fate.*

Now, though even in a parable or poetic fiction, if these can be called so, every part is not to be urged as literally true, yet such representations as the above, fairly imply, that it was at least a common opinion, that the souls of the dead went to some common receptacle, and continued to be and to act, and were neither destroyed nor senseless. We have no good reason, however, for believing that these prophets intended what is here taken from their writings as mere parables or fictions, and it is much more likely that they meant what they said as true and real.

Referring to these passages from Isaiah and Ezekiel, Bishop Hobart affirms that there is no doubt, sheol signifies the place of the departed. The latter prophet, he says, represents "the strong among the mighty," as speaking to the king of Egypt "out of the midst of hell," in the above sense of that word. The elder Lowth, in his Commentary, considers the whole passage as "a poetical description of the infernal regions, where the ghosts of deceased tyrants, with their subjects, are represented as coming to meet the king of Egypt, and his auxiliaries, upon their arrival at the same place. Hell signifies here the state of the dead."

"Thus, then," as Dr. Magee observes, "in like manner, as Homer, in his Odyssey, sends the souls of the slaughtered wooers to Hades, where they meet with the mancs of Achilles, Agamemnon, and other heroes; so the Hebrew poet, in this passage of inimitable grandeur, describes the king of Babylon, when slain and brought to the grave, as entering Sheol, and there meeting the Rephaim, or manes of the dead, who had descended thither before him, and who are poetically represented as rising from their seats at his approach. And as, on the one hand, the passage in the Grecian bard has been always held, without any question, to be demonstrative of the existence of a popular belief

* Chap. xxxii.

among the Greeks, that there was a place called Hades, which was the receptacle for departed souls: so this poetic image of Isaiah must be allowed, upon the other, to indicate, in like manner, among the Jews, the existence of a popular belief that there was a region for departed souls called Sheol, in which the Rephaim or manes took up their abode."

Isaiah says, "The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He shall enter into peace."* The death of the righteous, (for, in the original, "perisheth" means nothing more,) is here represented, not as an evil, but as a favour. Some will perhaps reply that it is better to be dead than to be in anxiety and pain. A poor recompence this would be, and slender comfort, indeed, to the people of God.

St. Paul could not possibly have expected, when he wished to depart, merely to sink into forgetfulness, which could not be better to him than life on earth, and a gain, as he expressed it. The meaning of the Greek word avaλvora, which we translate to depart, clearly expresses his belief to be that his spirit could leave his body and be happy, which is shown by the words immediately following. "Nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you." Had this courageous Apostle felt so oppressed at the troubles he met with during the course of his ministry as to wish to exchange life for a state of nothingness, as it were, if he had imagined death would lay him for an indefinite time into a state of torpidity, only to be shaken off at the last day, his ardent wish to die, would have been the preference of utter despair, a complete sinking under the conflict of his sufferings. This cannot be denied; now, was he so reduced in spirit? Had his heart entirely failed him? By no means: hear himself on the subject.-"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”

* Chap lvii.