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Scriptural idea of a state of grace.

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state; and (2) that it is not to purgatorial sufferings in Hades they are to look for their spirits being made perfect. Their transaction with Christ here and now has been a conclusive one, in respect of their full deliverance from God's wrath, and of their hearts being turned from the love and dominion of sin to the love of holiness and the dominion of grace. Through faith they have got to an end of sin, so far as its curse and reign are concerned: what remains is their deliverance from its influence altogether by the Spirit of Christ, and that is eagerly longed for. In what way that complete deliverance is to be effected (in so far as it may still remain to be effected) at death, is precisely the point on which we are not informed; but it is impossible to suppose that souls already in living union with Christ, already absolutely forgiven, and whose wills are already wholly on God's side, shall be subjected to long undefined periods of purgatorial suffering.

Here all turns on a just and Scriptural conception of what is meant by a state of grace. Had the Roman, the sacramentarian conception of a state of grace, contained as much as ours, neither Newman nor Pusey would have pleaded for any purgatory; but, of course, if a state of grace means no more than that a man, unforgiven and unchanged in heart, is in fellowship with the Church through means of external rites, then there is room and need for much purgation. Canon Farrar, as we have shown, recoils from the grossly superstitious view of a state of grace; but he does not adopt that just stated as the common view of Evangelical Christians. Whatever he may say as to not dogmatising about a probation after death, that is what his reasonings necessarily involve; and as for any view of what a state of grace is, he escapes from the demand for precision of statement as the cuttle-fish eludes pursuit, by plentiful emission of ink. This is what we desire to make clear: the adoption of the proposed purgatory involves the letting go all the precious things involved in the orthodox belief regarding vital union to Christ by faith, that is, in being in a state of grace. "But let us, since we are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the obtaining of salvation

through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him."

"1

It follows that this theory would alter the meaning of the call of the Gospel, and would deprive it of the chief element which gives it urgency. "To-day!" "Now!" cease to have much force if I tell men, in the same breath, that, even should death surprise them the next hour, they may still hope to find mercy in Christ in the world beyond. It will then matter very little what other inducements I set before men to repent and believe in Christ: men will cling to their sinful pleasures, and will abuse the perhaps kindly-meant suggestion of a second probation to defer the more convenient season to a point beyond the grave.

"Your argument," says Cardinal Newman to Professor Plumptre, "may avail, in my opinion, with men of subtle intellects, or of heroic natures . . but will not serve for the run of men, or support them in their struggle here with evil. What's the good of my striving so hard to keep from sin and temptation if I am not safe when I die, and my neighbour who gives himself to the world, the flesh, and the devil, and so dies, may, for aught I know, after this life get to heaven, and I fail of it? Is it not best to go my own way here and chance the life to come? . . . There are many truths which may be startling and even dangerous in places where they have been long forgotten; but, if apostolic, we must return to them and preach them at whatever cost. Is this one of them? Must it be preached? Certainly it has a heavy onus probandi on it, both as cruel and as novel, and requires good evidence in order to be allowed." 2

If a Romanist can reason thus even from his view of what is meant by dying in a state of grace, how much more may we! The cruelty of so frustrating for men the urgent appeal which the Gospel makes to them to turn now and live is something incredible. The explanation, so far as Canon Farrar is personally concerned, lies in his altering the nature of the Gospel call, at the same time that he modifies its pressure. He does not teach that acceptance of Christ gives the believer instant and certain escape; but rather that "it may be doubted whether there be such a thing as a perfectly and irredeemably bad man," and that therefore it may be hoped processes tending to ultimate purification will be carried on hereafter toward those who have here neglected Christ's offer. This is a serious charge, but 11 Thess. v. 8-10.

2 Contemporary Review for May 1878, pp. 341, 342.

Farrar's arguments from Scripture.

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almost every page of the book before us contains the vindication of it. In his fear of encouraging antinomian delusion, Dr. Farrar has gone to an extreme if possible more deadly. How inconsistent it is with the whole tone of both the Old and New Testaments most readers will already feel; but our present point is merely that the hypothesis of a Purgatory would, if adopted, require us to alter our whole belief about the nature. and urgency of Christ's call in the Gospel.

III. We wish to reserve our remaining space for direct reasoning from the Word of God, and therefore hasten now to consider the texts on which the notion of a Purgatory is rested. 1. It is inferred from the supposed descent of Christ into Hades. The doctrine is mainly built," says Canon Farrar, "on Eph. iv. 9; 1 Pet. iii. 19; Acts ii. 26."1

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As for the first of these passages, "Now this, He ascended, what is it but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?" We have been accustomed to understand it as a swift and telling side-stroke, after Paul's manner, thrown in to point attention to the language of the sixty-eighth Psalm as containing an implied proof of Christ's humiliation. Its main and obvious lesson relates to His exaltation; but the very manner in which that is spoken of contains evidence that His presence on earth and His suffering of death were altogether singular, and the result of a wonderful condescension. Had the passage stood alone no meaning besides this would have been suggested by any one. That the soul of Christ was in Hades between His dying and rising again, is, of course, obviously the matter of fact; and if nothing else be understood by "the lower parts of the earth," there is nothing to contend about: the whole question is what His being in the unseen world means.

This remark applies still more to the last of the three passages, Peter's quotation and exposition of the sixteenth Psalm in the second chapter of Acts,-" Because thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption." The text is most luminously interpreted for us by the last saying of our Lord on the Cross, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," and by the words addressed to the penitent thief shortly before, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise."2 We have to thank the

1 P. 81, note.

2 Luke xxiii. 46, 43.

learned Revisers for delivering our English New Testament from the shockingly unfit word "hell" in this place; and if any one can think that a place which Jesus described as Paradise, and as being consciously in His Father's hands was also one in which impenitent souls were suffering, we must be excused for supposing they are hard pushed for arguments.

The passage in 1 Pet. iii. 19, 20, is the principal Scripture proof relied on by Dr. Farrar: his words regarding it have been already quoted.

The interpretation put on the words is that the separate spirit of Christ went to the prison, in which were the spirits of the unbelievers who had rejected the preaching of Noah, and preached to them. Supposing for a moment this to be the meaning of the words,

a. How is the presence of Christ in the prison of unbelieving spirits to be reconciled with His own words, just quoted, as to Paradise and the Father's hands?

B. This extraordinary grace was limited to one class of the unbelieving dead, those destroyed in the Flood. Why so?

7. No hint is given that the effect was their repentance. Hitherto the preaching of Christ on earth had been with little result; it was by the mission of the Comforter that thousands were brought in: and during the forty days, our Lord never once preached to the impenitent.

We have long been persuaded, however, that the true interpretation of the passage is not that on which Dr. Farrar relies, but that which will be found given by Archbishop Leighton in his exposition of First Peter, and by Bishop Pearson in his work on the Creed. This interpretation turns upon the sense attached to "quickened in the spirit" at the close of verse 18. The Revisers have unfortunately committed themselves, by the use of a small instead of a capital letter, to the opinion that it was the Lord's own spirit and not the Holy Spirit by which His quickening or resurrection was effected; whereas the teaching of Scripture seems to us to be plain that it was by the Holy Spirit this consummation of the redeeming work was effected. "But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you," etc. (Rom. viii. 11), and the same thing is taught in the appeal quoted from the sixteenth Psalm; the Lord's righteous Servant had trust in Him that He would

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not leave His soul in Hades. This being so, the passage has a meaning awfully different from that put on it by Canon Farrar and others. All the preaching of Divine mercy is represented as being the preaching of Christ by His Holy Spirit, even that which the antediluvians enjoyed through Noah; and the spirits of those who were then disobedient to the call of grace are represented as now, after the lapse of so long a time, "in prison." This seems to us the true interpretation; and if so, the whole doctrine of our Lord's descent into Hades, in so far as that means going among lost spirits, disappears.

2. The only other passage on which the notion of an offer of pardon beyond the grave is rested is Matt. xii. 32: "Whosoever shall speak a word against the Holy Spirit it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this age nor in that which is to come" (R. V. marg.). On which it is to be observed

(1.) That the general opinion, that our Lord is here making a strong asseveration, accords well with the sin He is speaking of, the sin against the remedy, the sin which excludes the possibility of pardon by rejecting offered grace. It accords well also with the parallel place (Mark iii. 29): "Whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin,"-where the R. V. admirably brings out the meaning of the sacred Word. This is the view taken by the Bishop of Winchester, as well as by very many others.1

(2.) The following remark of Dean Alford (in loco) is worth quoting : “ The expressions αἰών οὗτος and αἰὼν μέλλων were common among the Jews, and generally signified respectively the time before and after the coming of the Messiah." In that case we obtain a very plausible explanation of our Lord's using the words He did: when the Comforter had come, the sins which His hearers were now committing against Himself would be forgiven, but the sin of those who positively rejected the Spirit would not be forgiven.

We may close this part of our subject with another sentence from Dean Alford: "In the entire silence of Scripture on any such doctrine" as forgiveness after death, "every principle of sound interpretation requires that we should resist the introduction of it on the strength of two difficult passages, in

1 Harold Browne on the Articles, p. 523.

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