out of Sheol
and taken up into heaven, as testimony to men that the power of sin and
death was at last defeated. The way henceforth to avoid death and escape
the exile to Sheol was to live spiritually like Jesus, and with him to
be dead to sensual requirements. Faith, in Paul's apprehension, was not
an intellectual assent to definitely prescribed dogmas, but, as
Matthew Arnold has well pointed out, it was an emotional striving after
righteousness, a developing consciousness of God in the soul, such as
Jesus had possessed, or, in Paul's phraseology, a subjugation of the
flesh by the spirit. All those who should thus seek spiritual perfection
should escape the original curse. The Messiah was destined to return to
the earth to establish the reign of spiritual holiness, probably during
Paul's own lifetime (1 Cor. xv. 51). Then the true followers of Jesus
should be clothed in ethereal bodies, free from the imperfections of
"the flesh," and should ascend to heaven without suffering death, while
the righteous dead should at the same time be released from Sheol, even
as Jesus himself had been released.

To the doctrine of the resurrection, in which ethical and speculative
elements are thus happily blended by Paul, the new religion doubtless
owed in great part its rapid success. Into an account of the causes
which favoured the spreading of Christianity, it is not our purpose
to enter at present. But we may note that the local religions of
the ancient pagan world had partly destroyed each other by mutual
intermingling, and had lost their hold upon people from the circumstance
that their ethical teaching no longer corresponded to the advanced
ethical feeling of the age. Polytheism, in short, was outgrown. It was
outgrown both intellectually and morally. People were ceasing to believe
in its doctrines, and were ceasing to respect its precepts. The learned
were taking refuge in philosophy, the ignorant in mystical superstitions
imported from Asia. The commanding ethical motive of ancient republican
times had been patriotism,--devotion to the interests of the community.
But Roman dominion had destroyed patriotism as a guiding principle of
life, and thus in every way the minds of men were left in a sceptical,
unsatisfied state,--craving after a new theory of life, and craving
after a new stimulus to right action. Obviously the only theology which
could now be satisfactory to philosophy or to common-sense was some form
of monotheism;--