ALM OF DISEMBODIED SPIRITS.

Jesus the Christ died in the literal sense in which all men die. He
underwent a physical dissolution by which His immortal spirit was
separated from His body of flesh and bones, and that body was actually
dead. While the corpse lay in Joseph's rock-hewn tomb, the living Christ
existed as a disembodied Spirit. We are justified in inquiring where He
was and what were His activities during the interval between His death
on the cross and His emergence from the sepulchre with spirit and body
reunited, a resurrected Soul. The assumption that most naturally
suggests itself is that He went where the spirits of the dead ordinarily
go; and that, in the sense in which while in the flesh He had been a Man
among men, He was, in the disembodied state a Spirit among spirits. This
conception is confirmed as a fact by scriptural attestation.

As heretofore shown[1339] Jesus Christ was the chosen and ordained
Redeemer and Savior of mankind; to this exalted mission He had been set
apart in the beginning, even before the earth was prepared as the abode
of mankind. Unnumbered hosts who had never heard the gospel, lived and
died upon the earth before the birth of Jesus. Of those departed myriads
many had passed their mortal probation with varying degrees of righteous
observance of the law of God so far as it had been made known unto them,
but had died in unblamable ignorance of the gospel; while other
multitudes had lived and died as transgressors even against such moiety
of God's law to man as they had learned and such as they had professed
to obey. Death had claimed as its own all of these, both just and
unjust. To them went the Christ, bearing the transcendently glorious
tidings of redemption from the bondage of death, and of possible
salvation from the effects of individual sin. This labor was part of the
Savior's foreappointed and unique service to the human family. The shout
of divine exultation from the cross, "It is finished," signified the
consummation of the Lord's mission in mortality; yet there remained to
Him other ministry to be rendered prior to His return to the Father.

To the penitent transgressor crucified by His side, who reverently
craved remembrance when the Lord should come into His kingdom,[1340]
Christ had given the comforting assurance: "Verily I say unto thee,
Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." The spirit of Jesus and the
spirit of the repentant thief left their crucified bodi