THE INTERMEDIATE STATE.

THE practical consideration which we propose to give to our subject, has been suggested by the objections which, as far as we are able to know them, have been brought against the sermon of Mr. Morris not long since. It seems that a mere expression of hope, on his part, that the murdered Laud still intercedes for his beloved Church, is a notion full of terror to some people in these days. We believe, indeed, that the persons who disliked Mr. Morris's statement were on the lookout, as sailors say, for squalls, and that a predisposition was the main cause of their malady; still there must have been something more than this, which induced them to fix upon the passage in question as a vulnerable point in their adversary. They must have seen something in it which they did not like, and this something must either have been the opinion that the saints departed intercede for the saints on earth, or an indistinct idea that the admission of such a notion is inseparable from the abuse of it, and that to believe that departed saints are praying for us, is necessarily followed by our prayers to them. Now, we can hardly imagine the objectors to have been so utterly unreasonable as to entertain the latter opinion, forgetting that the fact of the ministry of angels is generally admitted, although men are not induced thereby to pray to them, any more than to any other gracious means of good, animate or inanimate, by which God works out the designs of His providence. We do not believe this of them, and therefore we are inclined to attribute their objections to an habitual fear of contemplating the nature and probable occupations of the intermediate state, as if to think of it were unsafe, and to speak of it presumptuous, except in that vague and erroneous manner which is too popular amongst us, and which, if it leaves any impression upon the mind of the hearer or the speaker, strengthens a mistake which makes some parts of Scripture a dead letter to them, and the burial service of the Church a form, into much of the spirit of which they cannot enter. We are confirmed in this opinion by the remarks which we have heard on Mr. Morris's sermon: for one friend of ours, who has become a woman of most catholic feeling and practice, but who has never had this subject brought before her, was shocked and hurt at the very thought of such intermediate occupations; and thus, through never having received any instruction upon the subject, she was liable, at any time, to have her confidence in her pastors, and in the Fathers of the Anglican and of the Catholic Church shaken, if not destroyed. In fact, from an idea that the subject is unpractical, and altogether uncertain, a doctrine which is expressed in the Prayer-book has been very generally excluded from our pulpits; and it is only a very short time since a clergyman, after preaching an excellent sermon on the parable of Lazarus and Dives, in which throughout he made the one the denizen of heaven, and the other of hell, informed us that he had done so deliberately, under the conviction that the doctrine of a middle state was not an intelligible or useful truth. To us it seems a rash thing to

speak thus of any doctrine of God, especially of one so prominent as was this in the minds of the apostles, and of all the martyrs and holy doctors who succeeded them; and which supplies some of its most cheering strains to the subdued triumph of our Burial Service. We earnestly wish, therefore, to call the attention of our readers, especially the clerical part of them, to the practical bearings of this doctrine. It will be necessary, in so doing, to state the truth as it is, with some of its evidences, combating only the notions popular with us, and not, except indirectly, the far worse and "most distressing" doctrine of the Romish communion.

I. The first of these popular errors is, the notion that the soul sleeps after death-an opinion which seems to have been broached about the time of the Reformation, and to have become more general since.* Now, we are not only prepared to find some truth in this, as well as in every doctrine, but are ready to admit the whole of the assertion that the dead sleep. So spake Daniel, when he foretold “that many who sleep in the dust of the earth" should awake: so, also, our Saviour, "He is not dead, but sleepeth." " David fell on sleep." S. Stephen, when he had breathed his dying words, "fell asleep." Thus, the Catholic Church believed and felt in her purest days, and thus our own Church adopts the word into her Service, feeling that she is consistent with herself, although elsewhere she asserts the conscious blessedness of the deceased. We make no question, therefore-we can make no question-that the dead sleep; but how?-in a state of unconsciousness? in a sleep of spirits?

How, then, could Lazarus and Dives feel, and think, and speak, and, as the Gospel tells us, while yet the world was rolling on, filled with saints and sinners like them? How, then, did the Lord receive the spirit of S. Stephen? Wherefore did S. Paul "desire to depart and be with Christ," which was "far better than his conscious heaven of privileges, and of angelic and divine society on earth? How did the spirits in the Apocalypse call anxiously for the coming of their deliverance, "How long, how long?" Again, on such a supposition, we must believe the Church to have been in error from the first. The church of Smyrna writes of Polycarp, that "with the apostles and all the just he rejoices, and glorifies God the Father." (Sec. xix.) S. Clement says of Paul, that he "has gone to the holy place." (1 Epist. Sec. 5.) And Polycarp of Ignatius, Zosimus, Rufus, and others, and of Paul and of the rest of the apostles, that they are " in the place which is due to them with the Lord, with whom also they were fellow-sufferers." (Epist. Sec. ix.) Thus, also, S. Ambrose, "The glorious company of the apostles praise thee, The noble army of martyrs praise thee !" Tertullian also writes, "What then shall we do in the mean time? asleep? Souls do not sleep," (De animâ, cap. ult.)

Shall we be If the reader

*Calvin wrote his Psychopannychia against the German Anti-Pædobaptists, who held this doctrine.-See Wall, vol. ii. p. 344. Oxford Edition. + Collect in the Burial Service: "Them that sleep in him."

t Wall, vol. ii. p. 347.

wishes for more evidence of the opinion of Antiquity, we would refer him to the ancient liturgies, or, for brevity, to Usher's Treatise on Purgatory, reprinted in the Tracts for the Times, Vol. III.

Again, if the soul sleeps, how shall we hear our Church when she says "that they are in joy and felicity?" How, too, shall we escape the sceptic's objection, that, If the soul can sleep for a thousand years, it may sleep for ever? The whole argument for the immortality of the soul, which Bishop Butler states so admirably, is overturned.

Finally, How shall we reconcile the history of our Saviour's manhood with the destinies of our own, if we are to follow Him-if we only rise by being part of Him? for, as Bishop Andrewes says:

"He and we are σuupuro; that is, so 'grafted' one into the other, that He is part of us, and we of Him; so that, as S. Bernard well observeth, Christus etsi solus resurrexit tamen non totus."-Sermon on Rom. vi. 9.

How shall He have been in Paradise after death, and with the spirits in prison, whilst we are to lie inanimate atoms in the dust of the earth?

A very poor fraction of scriptural and other evidence against the notion of sleep in such a sense as this, is here furnished, but surely enough to decide the question with most of our readers.

II. On the other hand, a large mass of men believe that the righteous pass at once into heaven, and the wicked to hell-a notion which is no less unscriptural and uncatholic than the former.

"It is true, indeed, that some Fathers spoke of the soul as going directly to heaven, and that this became afterwards the prevailing opinion in the Western Church; which is also affirmed in a Homily of the Church of England,* set forth in the time of Queen Elizabeth."

But this must not alarm us, for,

1. Such an opinion is destructive of the arguments by which Christ and S. Paul prove the resurrection of the body, (Wall, vol. i. p. 350,) and indeed is wholly irreconcilable with the stress which is always laid upon the resurrection of the flesh.

If we are to value this blessed privilege, which has been so dearly purchased for us, must we not feel that as men we are incomplete without the body; that before the resurrection we are dismembered and divided beings, and that the cause of death is commuted rather than reversed? Without the body we shall be imperfect," For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house, which is from heaven; if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon," (2 Cor. v. 2. &c.) With the sinful body we shall have the full wretchedness of hell (1 Cor. vi. 18); with the glorified body we shall possess the happiness of heaven. Both misery and happiness are incomplete so long as man is incomplete, so long as his faculties of suffering and rejoicing are imperfect.

2. This notion interferes with the doctrine of the Judgment; it draws

Third part of the Sermon concerning Prayer.-Wall, vol. ii.

p. 319.

down the saints out of heaven, and raises up the wicked out of hell.* It contradicts also (Acts ii. 34,) and destroys the parallel between our Lord's human life and ours, as completely as does the doctrine of Sleep.

Our Church speaks plainly against this fancy in her Burial Service, when she prays God to hasten His kingdom, "that we, with all those who are departed in the true faith of God's holy name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul." We have carefully avoided the controverted question of Prayers for the Dead, but we may be allowed here to call forth the old Liturgies as witnesses to the belief of Antiquity, that the souls of the departed are not in heaven. The expression which was first used of the prison of Judas τόπον τοῦ ἴδιον, (Acts i. 25,) seems to have given rise to similar terms among the earlier writers. Thus Clement speaks of ἱδρουμένου αυτοῖς τόπου (1 Epist. xliv.); and Ignatius, "Every one is about to go się TOV idov Tónov. (Ad Magnes. sec. v.) And Polycarp has been before quoted as speaking of the place, ὀφειλόμενον αὐτοῖς. Irenæus again says that souls go into the place appointed them by God, and there wander until the resurrection, waiting for it; then, having received their bodies, and rising entirely, that is, with their bodies, as also the Lord arose, thus they will come to the sight of God."+

This last passage beautifully describes the incompleteness for which we have been contending, φοιτῶσι περιμενούσαι. Need we add the cry of the spirits in the Apocalypse, "How long, how long?" And as to the likeness between our Lord and His many brethren, the same Father continues ::

"For the disciple is not above his master, but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. As, therefore, our Master did not presently fly up to heaven, but, waiting till the time of his resurrection that was appointed by the Father, which had been foreshown by Jonas, and rising the third day, was so taken to heaven; so we must also wait the time of our resurrection."-See Wall, vol. i. p. 349.

Though their souls be always in a state of blessedness, yet they want the consummation of this blessedness, extensively, at least, until the body be reunited unto the soul; and (as it is piously and probably believed,) intensively also, that the soul hath not yet so full and clear a vision of God as it shall have hereafter.”—Answer to M. De La Milletiere.

In what sense, then, is the middle state a sleep, and in what a heaven?

"Blessed are

It is a sleep because it is a rest-a rest from labour. the dead which die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours." And as Job says:-"There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor; the small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master.-(Chap. iii. ver. 13, &c.)

This of the righteous; but to all there is a sleep of the body, a dull, senseless, unconscious sleep, a sleep of death; a slumber which requires a miracle to break, which the force of "continuance" would preserve

for ever, but for the trump of God. (Butler, Anal. c. i. part i. p. 17, Oxford Ed. 1836.)

And if we are in heaven even here on earth, received to glory, (Rom. xv. 7,)" in heavenly places," (Ephes. i. 3,) arrived at Zion and living in the midst of celestial things and beings, (Heb. xii. 22,) "partakers of the divine nature," "temples of the Holy Ghost," and "brethren of Christ;" if we are justified by such privileges in looking upon our dwelling within the Church militant, as an inhabiting of heaven, how much more shall safety from the power of sinning, and rest for contemplation, and the sensible society of all saints, and the calm of Abraham's bosom, and "to be with Christ" in an higher sense, be justly termed a heaven, better than the heaven which is, although not the heaven which shall be?

We will conclude our statement of this doctrine in the words of Mr. Palmer::

"The righteous, after death, are immediately translated to a region of peace, refreshment, and joy, while the wicked are consigned to a place of torment, from whence there is no escape."-Orig. Lit. vol. ii. p. 97.

And now it may be permitted us to say a few words upon the probable occupations of the Intermediate State; which, although they cannot be very definite or certain, may, at least, make it appear that Mr. Morris's statement deserves more mercy than it obtained. We have already quoted the account of Polycarp's martyrdom, and the Te Deum, as witnesses to the consciousness of departed souls; but those same statements, it will be recollected, spoke of the deceased saints as occupied in praise. Again, we have already cited the wellknown passage in the Apocalypse, which represents the saints as praying for a speedy accomplishment of all things, and for the hastening of Christ's kingdom. To us, indced, it seems next to impossible that spirits which on earth continually prayed "Thy kingdom come," and which offered here the effectual fervent intercession of righteousness, in behalf of the Church which they so dearly loved, should cease their supplications when existing in that calm and leisure state, which follows upon the troubles of this life. If heavenly contemplation, spiritual intercourse, and praises of the Godhead, are admitted to form part of the occupations of the dead in Christ, surely we cannot thus arbitrarily exclude the office of intercession by which they most resembled their Saviour while they lived, and which, if it should seem the work of an imperfect state, must be remembered to be the gracious office of our Redeemer even now, and therefore surely not involving too much incompleteness in those who have not yet ascended into heaven.

Admit the intercession of the saints, the Romanist then will say, and why not request that intercession? If they do pray for us, and if it were not wrong to have asked of them this boon, while living, how can it be sinful now?

It seems to us, that this is a question which the moral sense will decide better than the reason. It is hard to say how the one petition is a prayer, and the other not; but it is not hard to feel that there is this difference; and a child would vanquish the divine by showing him that it felt it impossible to ask anything of a person with whom it