in prison to be the spirits of deceased men in hell, as he assuredly does, he has ventured to tamper with a passage which, taking its connected expression with this application of his, explodes his whole theory of no grace, no mercy, no change after death, proving that the blessed Saviour, since his resurrection, visits that dark abode, and preaches there the gospel of love, grace and salvation.

But we do not avail ourself of this argument for the abolition of our opponent's hell. We have shown it never to have been.

We have several reasons for discrediting the idea that Peter here spoke of deceased men, then in prison, or in the heathen fabulous under-world.

1st. No such thing is revealed in any other part of the Bible; and Peter does not introduce the idea which he meant here to express, as a new revelation, nor as the main subject of discourse. He was urging upon his brethren the example of Christ, who attested the faithfulness of his love to men even by his death; and who, being raised from the dead, pursued their interests still, by enlightening the prisoners of darkness.

2d. If Peter designed to teach that all who had died in unbelief before the death of Christ were then in prison, it is unaccountable that he should have singled out the persons in particular who were drowned in the flood. The reference to the antediluvians, and the few of them who were saved upon the water by the influence of Noah, indicates a comparison between this as a historical incident, and

something in the ministry of Christ which was the main subject of discourse.

3d. As this ministry to prisoners is introduced as a reference to some familiar fact, we are led to inquire, what is the fact referred to? What information do we gather from the Scriptures, in relation to the mission of Christ to prisoners after his death and resurrection? On this subject we have much and diversified information. The prophets had variously foretold that Christ should be a covenant of Israel and light of the Gentiles. And the latter were usually described as in darkness and the prison-house. "I will give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house." But this ministry of light to the Gentiles could not be carried out until after the death and resurrection of Christ. Не charged his disciples, while he was yet with them, not to go in the way of the Gentiles, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. from the dead, he commissioned his ambassadors to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. But in all their gospel labors the disciples went out in the spirit and power of Christ. Thus it was the spirit of Christ which wrought in and through them, in all the gospel ministry to the Gentiles, or to the spirits, or, as Wakefield renders it, the minds of men in prison. And the wonderful success of the ministry of the gospel to the Gentiles now, by the spirit of the risen Jesus, is made to appear noteworthy

But when he was risen

by a strong contrast, referring to the few who were influenced by the preaching of a servant of God of old, that is, Noah. Wakefield gives the passage a rendering which directly expresses this comparison, -thus: "By which he went and preached to the minds of men in prison, who were disobedient as those upon whom the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah." But the sense appears to us as clear without the supply of the comparative as. There is a sense in which people of one class, in different generations, are called the same people. So were the Jews, and so are they to this day, the people to whom God spoke by the prophets. And so were the heathen to whom Christ's ambassadors preached by his spirit in Peter's time, the same people characteristically as were the heathen in Noah's time.

Not only the learned and orthodox Wakefield, but Newcomb, and Lindsey, and the London Improved Version, take the same view of this passage. These all agree in the following exposition:

By which, “i. e. by the Holy Spirit, which, after his ascension (see v. 22), he communicated to his apostles, he preached to spirits, i. e, to persons in prison, to idolatrous heathen, the slaves of ignorance and vice; he thus proclaimed liberty to the captives; Isa. xlii. 6, 7; xlix. 9." "He preached, not to the same individual persons, but to men like them, in the same circumstances, to the race of the Gentiles, to the descendants of those who had formerly been disobedient, and refused the call of the spirit in Noah's

time. But it was now very different. Many had been obedient. The apostle is contrasting the success of the gospel with the unsuccessfulness of Noah's preaching under the direction of the same spirit of God." Newcomb, and London Im. Ver. in loco-Lindsey's Sequel, p. 288.

We cannot doubt the correctness of this view of the passage. But if our opponent insists on having the "prison" here to be the Orthodox hell, he gives the passage a force which abolishes his own hell, by the introduction there of the gospel of grace and salvation.

For, chop and transpose as he will, he cannot expunge the fact that it was to the spirits in prison, whoever they might be, by the spirit of Christ after he was quickened, that this ministry of grace was given.

This brings us to the close of Dr. A.'s ingeniously conducted argument for endless punishment, from "the terms used with regard to the resurrection of the dead." But we find that even his great learning and practised skill in theological tactics, are utterly futile, in the attempt, by the handling of a few incidental metonomies, and figurative expressions in connection with entirely different subjects, to mar or obscure the glorious gospel doctrine of life and immortality for the dying family of man, "according to the purpose and grace of God." We would that all might be brought to an enlightened faith in this Gospel of God, that they might live and breathe and act in the elevating consciousness that they are children of God and brothers of angels, being heirs of a blessed immortality.

CHAPTER IV.

The Curse of the Law.

We now come to Dr. Adams' fifth great proposition, to wit:

V. THE SCRIPTURES TEACH THAT THE LAW OF GOD HAS A CURSE-WHICH IT HAS NOT IF FUTURE PUNISHMENT BE

DISCIPLINARY.

This position he proceeds to argue thus:

"The punishment, however long and severe, which shall result in restoring a soul to holiness and an endless heaven, under the kind and faithful administration of its heavenly Father, it would be unsuitable to call a curse.""

The implication in this paragraph, that we hold it to be the mission of punishment "to restore the soul to holiness and an endless heaven," is simply chimerical. We do not think the Doctor intended to misrepresent, but it has not entered into his mind to see, nor into his heart to conceive, of the beauties and harmonies of Universalism. If his mind could emerge from the artificial and discordant theory of Calvinism, into the sweet and beautiful light of Bible Evangelism, he would feel to be born again, by the word of God which liveth and abideth forever.