The more he believed, the more he felt the obstinacy of his unbelief. The brighter the light, the deeper the surrounding darkness. Sin became more hateful as he became more holy; and the more he was possessed with the spirit of Christ, the more he was conscious of the indwelling of the spirit of evil. As he rose to higher altitudes of spiritual attainment, he sunk lower in his own estimation; and the more elevated and comprehensive his views of salvation, the profounder and more personal became his sense of guilt.

The "body of death," to which the Apostle alludes, is not something that has come to us from without—a habit of evil, an infected garment, that may be thrown aside whenever we please. It is a part of our very selves. It is not, as some careless persons imagine, a spiritual monomania, a nightmare of the soul, a morbid hypochondriacal state of mind. It is our own corrupt self, our own wicked will, alienated from the will of God,-not our individual sins or evil habits, but our sinful nature,—that is the body of death, which we cannot ignore and from which we cannot separate. This sinful, guilty, "I," is the terrible reality. We dread ourselves far more than we dread any evil being or evil thing, when we see ourselves in our true character in the all-revealing light of God's holy law. And this sinful nature of ours is a body of death because it disintegrates the purity and unity of the soul, and destroys the love of God and man which is the true life of the soul. It acts like an evil leaven, corrupting and decomposing every good feeling and heavenly principle, and gradually assimilating our being to itself. There is a peculiar disease which often destroys the silkworm before it has woven its cocoon. It is caused by a species of white mould which grows with great rapidity within the body of the worm at the expense of its nutritive fluids; all the interior organs being gradually converted into a mass of flocculent vegetable mat

ter.

Thus the silkworm, instead of going on in the natural order of development to produce the beautiful winged moth, higher in the scale of existence and partaker of a freer and larger life, retrogrades to the lower condition of the inert

senseless vegetable. And like the growth of this fungus in the caterpillar is the effect of the body of death in the soul of man. The heart cleaves to the dust of the earth, and man, made in the image of God, instead of developing a higher and purer nature, is reduced to the low, mean condition of the slave of Satan.

None but those who have attained to some measure of the experience of St. Paul can know the full wretchedness caused by this body of death. The careless have no idea of the agony of a soul under a sense of sin; of the tyranny which it exercises and the misery which it works. They have no deep feeling of inward discord; of their true higher life being choked and degraded by an alien parasitic power of evil. They are asleep and at ease in Zion; their consciences do not accuse them, their memories do not haunt them. Worldly conformity is their practice; worldly expediency their principle. Their will being on the side of sin, they have no conflict, no sense of resistance. And even in the experience of many Christians there is but little of that peculiar wretchedness caused by the presence of the body of death. Conviction is in too many instances superficial, and a mere impulse or emotion is regarded as a sign of conversion; and hence many are deluded with a false hope, having little knowledge of the law of God or sensibility to the depravity of their own hearts. But such was not the experience of St. Paul. At his conversion for three days he lay blind and miserable, tasting no food, under a crushing sense of guilt; and throughout his whole subsequent life the remembrance and the burden of his sin drew from him a cry of wretchedness which the severest of his outward trials, and even the prospect of martyrdom, were powerless to extort. The body of corruption that he bore about with him,—the conscious living death, the sense of discord owing to the law in his members warring against the law of his mind,—this it was that darkened and embittered all his Christian experience. Even when struggling so earnestly against sin that he could honestly say, "It is not I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me," he felt the wretchedness of the body of death. And so

it is with every true Christian. It is not the spectre of the future, or the dread of the punishment of sin, that he fears, for there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus; but the spectre of the sinful past and the pressure of the present evil nature. Grafted in Christ, it seems as if, notwithstanding, he were bearing the evil fruit of the old depraved nature and not the fruit of the Spirit—the fruit of the graft of the new nature. The sin which he fancied was so superficial that a few years' running in the Christian course would shake it off, he finds in reality deep-rooted in his very nature, requiring a life-long battle. The fearful foes which he bears in his own bosom-sins of unrestrained appetite, sins that spring from past habits, frequently triumph over him; and all this fills him almost with despair-not of God, but of himself— and extort from him the groan, "Oh! wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?"

The evil to be cured is past human remedy. The various influences that act upon us from without,-instruction, example, education, the discipline of life,―cannot deliver us from this body of death. The work is Christ's, and not man's. In the same breath in which we cry for deliverance we can acknowledge with the Apostle the power of the Deliverer and the grace of deliverance, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." We are to fight the battle in His name and in His strength, and to leave the issue in His hands. The strength is ours if we have only the will, for, through Christ strengthening us, we can do all things. He will deliver us in His own way and in His own time. Not at once, for we must remember "the long day and the long way of the Lord." Through the struggle our spiritual discipline is carried on. The new life, like all life, must grow slowly and painfully, and by growth take full possession of our whole being as its own and transform us in the renewing of our minds.

We can reverse the illustration with which I began this meditation. If behind our renewed self is the spectral form of our old self, let us remember that behind all is the image of God in which we were created. The soul, however lost,

however darkened and defaced, still retains some lingering traces of the glory in which it was first created, some lineaments of the Divine impression with which it was once stamped. That image haunts us always; it is the ideal from which we have fallen and towards which we are to be conformed. To rescue that image of God from its dishonour and pollution, and to make it shine in all its original beauty and lustre, the Son of God assumed our nature, lived our life, and died our death; and His Spirit becomes incarnate in our heart and life, and prolongs the work of Christ in us, in His own sanctify. ing work. And as our nature becomes more and more like Christ's, so by degrees the old nature photographed by sin upon the soul will cease to haunt us, and the image of Christ will become more and more vivid and distinct. And at length only one image will remain on the pure heart that shall see God, and the holy life that shall maintain unbroken communion and fellowship with Him. We shall see Him as He is, and we shall become like Him, presented faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.

Glasgow.

HUGH MACMILLAN, LL.D.,

Author of "Bible Teachings in Nature," etc.

Notes on the Apostles' Creed.-9. “He descended into

Hell."

"HIS SOUL WAS NOT LEFT IN HELL."—Acts ii. 31.

for a season.

F the soul of our Blessed Lord " was not left in hell," the very words imply He once was there, but only Where? The word should be translated Hades, which means etymologically the whole invisible world, the entire realm of spirit. At the outset of a somewhat difficult theme of meditation, we must remember that the words of Peter narrate a fact, that the Creed utters belief in a fact. Different theories may be sought to explain it, but still it is a fact. Though all reason may fail to understand it, Let us notice,—

it remains a fact.

I. Some of the

been given.

MANY EXPLANATIONS of the fact, that have

1. One asserts, it is simply an emphatic way of saying that Christ was actually buried. But (a) is not that sufficiently described in the assertion that His flesh did not see corruption? and (8) then there would be no description of the sphere of His soul while His body was in the grave.

2. Another says, that there is not any "local motion" of His soul here described, but simply a figurative statement of the effects on Hades of His death. To which the answer is, that such an influence would not have been spoken of even as a passing calamity; and, moreover, that the influence itself was not temporary, but lasting.

3. Another says, The Saviour actually went to Hell, and endured its torments, that He might literally pay in exact kind of anguish the full penalty of human guilt. This not only gives an unscriptural and unphilosophic theory of Atonement, but ignores the fact that He could not endure remorse or despair, which are the chief elements of retributive misery. So, even if He went to the sphere, He could not have gone into the state, of lost souls.

4. Another says, He went to the great gathering of the spirits of those whose bodies have died, and are in the grave. Those holding this view say, He went either (1) To the heavenly realm of such spirits, where only the good are, and from which the evil are excluded. But it is replied, This view of Hades (a) Does not meet the Scriptural statement about His being "left" there, as though it were a calamity; nor the other Scriptural statement about the same event, that He went to "the lower parts of the earth." (3) Suggests, which is unlikely, that Jairus' daughter and the widow's son and Lazarus came back from fullest blessedness, and that at Judgment millions will be so recalled. (7) To think of Hades, the world of disembodied spirits, as Heaven, contradicts Pauline teaching about a resurrection body, and what seems to be implied too by Christ's ascension. Others, believing Christ went to the realm of the spirits of the dead, hold it was not to the perfect Heaven, but (2) To an intermediate state of partial blessedness, where all the spirits of the good are now.