dicting manner.* But the words of the Apostolic Constitutions, † that contain possibly the earliest rubrical directions and form of prayer for the dead, are terribly definite. Immediately after that prayer occur these words: 'These things we say concerning the just, for as to the unrighteous, if thou givest all the world to the poor,' (Masses for the dead had not then been invented in the interests of priestly greed,) 'thou wilt not benefit him at all. For, to whom the Deity was an enemy while he was alive, it is certain He will be so also when he is departed.'

One other defence of this practice is taken from 'the allembracing power of prayer.' There is no thing nor event, it is argued, throughout the whole world, that can be beyond the touch and influence of prayer; and if that be granted with the most minute and trifling matters of this present life, why may not the hands of prayer embrace and enfold

Hilary, too, speaks of all, even the Virgin Mary, as to undergo the trial of fire at the day of judgment, in which souls must expiate their offences. Gregory Nyssen in like manner speaks of "a purgatorial fire after our departure hence," and of the "purging fire, which takes away the filth commingled with the soul."' 'On the Thirty-Nine Articles,' pp. 497-499. St. Augustine, borrowing this idea of a purification by fire, transfers it from the Day of Doom to the intermediate state, but only as a probable conjecture: 'forsitan verum est.'

* 'What hope,' he says, 'is there possible to those who depart with wilful sins upon them to that place where there is no remission of sin ?' Yet he is in this particular, at times, quite inconsistent with himself.

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+ The date of these Apostolic Constitutions is discussed by Bishop Lightfoot in the second part of his 'Apost. Fathers' (i., pp. 262-265), and it is said that, apart from the question whether they are a later recension of some earlier work or works, or an expansion of the condensed Syriac form, there is nothing in them inconsistent with a date earlier than the middle of the fourth century A. D.'

'De Civitate,' 24. For example, in the last words of St. Malachy given in his life (St. Bernard, Op. ii. 689), this is expressed: 'the help to be rendered to the dead by the suffrages of the living.'

also the unseen world? But this argument would, as the former, prove too much, for one confessed limitation destroys the whole validity of the contention. Now, Peter Lombard,

the great Master of the Sentences, in his fourth book ('Distinct.,' 21),* and his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, † as well as those more ancient Fathers, are compelled to admit that prayers do not avail for the lost who die in wilful sin and in a final impenitency, and that the Church does not sanction the praying for them. Thus a limitation to the efficacy of prayer is allowed even by the medieval as by the patristic advocates of prayers for the dead. Must, then, the glory of prayer set when it touches the horizon of time, and its sweet light sink and die in the cloudy borderland of death? For answer let it be remembered that one of the great rubrics of all prayer is this, that every desire must be offered so conditionally that in our prayer we submit ourselves wholly and unconditionally to the Divine Will. If it is not His Will that we pray for the dead, who are in His eternal keeping, any such prayer, offered without or in defiance of that Will, is not prayer, but rebellion.‡ In this life, even, it may happen that the lips of prayer are sealed. Jeremiah might not pray for a whole nation. 'Pray not thou for this people,' the terrible voice of the Divine Will said to the prophet of tears, 'for I will not hear.' In the New Testament certain are mentioned for whom prayer may not be made. 'There is a sin unto

* Cf. also Sent. iv. 'Dist.,' 45, where oblations for the dead are said 'only to be useful to those after death who lived in such sort that they can then avail for them.'

discussion upon the conVarious opinions, he says, one made them of

+ 'Summa Theol.,' iii. 7, 5. The whole fused opinions of his times is worth reading. were current of the value of prayers for the lost avail only during the period of awaiting the Doom; others thought they might be of some advantage for the 'non valde malis,' the 'not over-evil'! Cf. the admirable 'Homily concerning Prayer,' part iii.

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We con

death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.'* clude, therefore, with St. Augustine, that prayer is to be wholly ordered by the Will of God, and not His perfect Will 'twisted to the crooked measure of our desires;' for this would destroy the very idea and rationale of prayer. The subjection in true prayer of the human to the Divine Will is urged by St. Cyprian, in his treatise 'On the Lapsed' (12, Oxf. ed.) who agrees with the later and more eminent African Father.

A side-issue of some importance is involved in the doctrine of the local descent of Christ's human Soul, with its mysterious mission, into the unseen world—that world which bears the name of Hades in the Greek, and of Sheol in the Hebrew tongue. It has been, we will confess, attempted by some, who would deny the existence of any intermediate state, to evade rather than to interpret the force and intention of prophecies in the Old Testament that are relative to this descent, although they must, to an unprejudiced mind, be decisive; for their intention is not only too plain to be easily mistaken, but they have been interpreted by inspiration itself as foretelling such a true local descent. We may instance the prophecy found in Ps. xvi. 10. It has been urged that these words may be only intended of our Lord's 'blessed burying' (being undoubtedly used in such places as Gen. xxxvii. 35 for the grave),† and that the word 'soul' may be taken for the whole person; that, moreover, by a popular use, in which there is no careful distinction preserved between the state of the separated soul and that of the lifeless body, the condition of death may be so expressed, in which to us, who are still the living, the soul is, as if it were, entombed as well as the body. It is added,

* Cf. Alford's note (Greek Test.) to I John v. 16. + The Targum of Palestine renders 'to the house of the sepulchre,' and the Persian also, the Arabian translation being to the dust.'

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and truly so far as the fact goes, that the very word nephesh (soul)* is even used of a corpse in the Pentateuch. The two clauses of the verse would, however, thus present not a synthetical parallelism, but a tautological identity of meaning, and the whole argument seems most strained and unnatural. By other earlier interpreters the words have been mystically referred to the satisfactory pains of the Cross and Passion, in which it is most true the human Soul of Christ did suffer by a real imputation the infinite pains of the Divine justice for the expiation of sin. (Cf. Dorner, 'On the Person of Christ,' B. ii. 221.) But this also—and especially in the light of the Apostolic use of the words of the Psalm in Acts ii. 24-31†-is not a convincing mode of interpretation. Nor is Bishop Pearson's solution of the difficulty much more satisfactory. The words must, undeniably, by St. Peter's inspired appeal to them, refer to the separate and pre-resurrection state of the human Soul of God. They are strictly synthetical‡ in their relation to the other clause in the verse. But, it may then be objected, Is there not in them a half-stifled moan, an undertone of fear, that is almost a wail; of something, too like pain, sounding sadly to the ears of our faith, as if in dismal discord with that gentle Voice from the Cross itself, 'With Me in Paradise'? Do not the words of the prophetic song so darken into an eventide of sorrow, until they seem to close over the Soul of God, too terribly like a midnight of posthumous and penal suffering to be endured even after the satisfactory pains of the Tree? Do they not contradict the glorious 'It is finished,' and the peace and rest of the commendatory prayer, 'Father, into Thy hands'? Must

* Cf. Pearson, On the Creed,' art. v., and Delitzsch on Numb. vi. 6. + Cf. Bishop Wordsworth, on Ps. xvi. 10; Alford, Greek Test., in loc.; and Gesenius, 'Heb. Lex.,' p. 560.

Cf. Aug., 'Ep. 164,' tom. ii. 374, and Bishop Harold Browne, ' On the Art.,' p. 89.

they not take from our hearts, that would follow Him into Paradise with our thoughts of adoring love, all that consolation? For we can only bear to look back through the peace of Paradise and the glory of Easter upon the wounds and reproaches, upon the cross of shame, and upon the unknown sorrows of the Passion of God. That could scarcely be a 'blessed burying,' which had not yet, after all, left Christ's human Soul in the hands of the Eternal Father, whose hands only could heal and comfort that most sensitive Soul, so infinitely bruised and wounded for us, and called, with a great pathos, in the Passion Psalm, 'Mine only One;' imaged also in the types of Isaac's sacrifice, and of the devoted life of Jephthah's daughter, as 'an only One.'* For, most surely, Paradise, where the souls of the blessed walk in the light of God, cannot be a place of subterranean gloom, a cavernous and semi-infernal dungeon, from which this human Soul of God shudderingly desired deliverance? If we disallow the solution of this perplexed problem offered by Dr. Owen,† who would understand 'the pains of death' in the Apostolic words of the 'cords of death,' which pains 'ended in the Passion, but the consequents of which are reckoned unto them,' Christ's whole Person continuing for three days under the dominion of death-then we can only suggest that the dimly-burning lights of the Old Testament revelation were not allowed in that economical and preparatory dispensation to do more than half-discover and at the same time halfconceal, the post-mortem condition of man.‡ The revelation of truth made 'strange and mysterious pauses' in those ancient days. And a veil seems to be purposely thrown * Cf. Bishop Wordsworth's deeply interesting note to Gen. xxii. 2 and Judg. xi. 34.

'Discourse on the Holy Spirit,' vol. iii., p. 181. Cf. also Dr. Thomas Goodwin, 'Works,' i. 431.

Cf. the well-written section in the Introduction to the Psalms in the 'Speaker's Commentary.'