immediately precedes and follows them, they appear evidently to contain a declaration of something which our Lord performed-some going of our Lord to a place called “hell,” in the interval of time between the burial of his dead body and his rising to life again on the third day after that interment; for thus speaks the Creed of Jesus Christ: “_was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead.” It is evident that the descending into hell is spoken of as an action of our Lord, but as an action performed by him after he was dead and buried, and before he rose again. In the body, our dead Lord, more than any other dead man, could perform no action; for the very notion of death is, that all sensation, and activity, and power of motion of the body, is in that state of the man extinguished. This, therefore, was an act of that part of the man which continues active after death, that is, of the soul separated by death from the body,--as the interment must be understood of the body apart from the soul. The dead body could no more go into hell than the living soul could be laid in the grave. Considering the words, therefore, as they stand in the Creed as the church now receives it, they seem as little capable of any variety of meaning, and almost as little to require explanation, as the word “ buried.” That word describes not more plainly, to the apprehensions of all men, what was done with the inanimate body of our crucified Lord, than these words declare what was done by his rational soul in its intermediate state. The only question that can possibly arise to a plain man's un. derstanding is, where or what the place may be which is here called hell, to which it is said our Lord in the state of death descended.

It is evident that this must be some place below the surface of the earth; for it is said that he “ descended," that is, he went down to it. Our Lord's death took

place upon the surface of the earth, where the human race inhabit; that, therefore, and none higher, is the place from which he descended; of consequence, the

; place to which he went by descent was below it; and it is with relation to these parts below the surface that his rising to life on the third day must be understood. This was only a return from the nether regions to the realms of life and day, from which he had descended, -not his ascension into heaven, which was a subsequent event, and makes a distinct article in the Creed.

But although the hell to which our Lord descended was indeed below, as the word “descent” implies, it is by no means to be understood of the place of torment. This is a point which requires elucidation, to prevent a mistake into which the unlearned easily might fall. The word “hell” is so often applied, in common speech, and in the English translation of the New Testament, to the place of torment, that the genuine meaning of the word (in which, however, it is used in many passages of the English Bible) is almost forgotten; and the common people never hear of hell but their thoughts are earried to that dismal place “ where the fallen angels are kept in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” But the word, in its natural import, signifies only that invisible place which is the appointed habitation of departed souls in the interval between death and the general resurrection. That such a place must be is indisputable; for when man dieth, his soul dieth not, but returneth unto him that gave it, to be disposed of at his will and pleasure,—which is clearly implied in that admonition of our Saviour, “Fear not them which kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” But the soul, existing after death, and separated from the body, though of a nature immaterial, must be in some place: for however metaphysicians may talk of place as one of the adjuncts of body, as if nothing but gross sensible body could be limited to a place, to exist without relation to place seems to be one of the incommunicable perfections of the Divine Being; and it is hardly to be conceived that any created spirit, of however high an order, can be without locality, or without such determination of its existence at any given time to some certain place, that it shall be true to say of it “Here it is, and not elsewhere.” That such at least is the condition of the human soul, were it seasonable to go into so abstruse a disquisition, might be proved, I think, indisputably from holy writ. Assuming, there. fore, that every departed soul has its place of residence, it would be reasonable to suppose, if revelation were silent on the subject, that a common mansion is provided for them all, their nature being similar; since we see throughout all nature creatures of the same sort placed together in the same element. But revelation is not si. lent. The sacred writers of the Old Testament speak of such a common mansion in the inner parts of the earth: and we find the same opinion so general among the heathen writers of antiquity, that it is more probable that it had its rise in the earliest patriarchal revelations than in the imaginations of man, or in poetical fiction. The notion is confirmed by the language of the writers of the New Testament, with this additional circumstance, that they divide this central mansion of the dead into two distinct regions, for the separate lodging of the souls of the righteous and the reprobate. In this, too, they have the concurrence of the earliest heathen poets, who placed the good and the bad in separate divisions of the central region. The name which the Hebrew writers gave to this mansion of departed souls (without regard to any such division) expresses only that it is a place unknown, about which all are curious and inquisitive. The writers of the New Testament adopted the name which the carliest Greek writers had given it, which describes it by the single property of invisibility. But for the place of torment by itself, they had quite another appellation. The English word “hell,” in its primary and natural meaning, signifies nothing more than “ the unseen and covered place," and is properly used, both in the Old and the New Testament, to render the Hebrew word in the one, and the Greek word in the other, which denote the invisible mansion of disembodied souls, without any reference to suffering. But being used also in the translation of the New Testament for that other word which properly denotes the place of torment, the good sense of the word, if we may so call it, is unfortunately forgotten, and the common people know of no other hell but that of the burning lake.

This certainly was not the hell to which the soul of Christ descended. He descended to hell properly so called, to the invisible mansion of departed spirits, and to that part of it where the souls of the faithful, when they are delivered from the burthen of the flesh, are in joy and felicity.

That he should go to this place was a necessary branch of the general scheme and project of redemption, which required that the Divine Word should take our nature upon him, and fulfil the entire condition of humanity in every period and stage of man's existence, from the commencement of life, in the mother's womb, to the extinction and the renovation of it. The same wonder

. ful scheme of humiliation which required that the Son should be conceived, and born, and put to death, made it equally necessary that his soul, in its intermediate state, should be gathered to the souls of the departed saints.

That the invisible place of their residence is the hell to which our Lord descended, is evident from the terms of his own promise to the repentant thief upon the cross. "Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Paradise was certainly some place where our Lord was to be on the very day on which he suffer. ed, and where the companion of his sufferings was to be with him. It was not heaven; for to heaven our Lord after his death ascended not till after his resurrection, as appears from his own words to Mary Magdalen. He was not therefore in heaven on the day of the crucifixjon; and where he was not the thief could not be with him. It was no place of torment; for to any such place the name of paradise never was applied. It could be no other than that region of repose and rest where the souls of the righteous abide in joyful hope of the consummation of their bliss. And upon this single text we might safely rest the proof of this article of our Creed in the sense in which we explain it,-a sense so plain and prominent, in the bare words, to every one who is not misled by the popular misapplication of the word “ hell,” that it never would have been set aside to make room for expositions of more refinement, much less would the authenticity of the article ever even have been questioned, but for the countenance which it was supposed to give to the doctrine of purgatory as taught in the Church of Rome, with which however it has not even a remote connection. Time will not permit me to enter into a particular examination of the different interpretations of this article which have been attempted by those who have not gone the length of proposing to expunge it from the Creed, because they were well aware, that although it is not to be found in any copy of the Creed now extant of an earlier date than the latter end of the fourth century, yet that Christ, in some sense or other, descended into hell was the unanimous belief of the Christian church from the earliest ages. I will offer only this general observation,--that the interpretation which I have given: is the only literal interpretation which the words will bear, unless we would admit the extravagant