urch. May we not reverently see His own
anticipation of it in His departing words as He started on His mission,
"Father, into Thy hands do I commend My spirit" (in the journey on
which it is going). May we not read it in that "au revoir," not
"good-bye," to the thief beside Him, "To-day you shall be with Me in
Paradise"? May we not dwell on the wonder and joy and gratitude and
love which must have shaken that world within the veil, as the loving
conqueror came in amongst them? And may we not reverently follow Him
still in thought when He returned to earth and, as we conjecture,
somewhere in the Forty Days after the Resurrection, told His disciples
of His marvellous experience? I am not laying down this as a statement
of Scripture, but I think it is a fair conjecture, for how else could
they have learned it? And if we are right; think how the knowledge of
it would swell the glad confidence of St. Paul. "For I am persuaded
that neither DEATH, nor LIFE, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, is able to
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

I think we must see that this teaching of the Apostles and apostolic
men of the whole early Church is true. People sometimes ask, "Why,
then, is it new in our day?" The answer is easy. At the Reformation
time there were terrible abuses connected with the Church's doctrine of
the Intermediate life. The practice of purchased Masses, and Pardons,
and Indulgences, and all the absurdities connected with the Roman
purgatory, so exemplified in Tetzel's cry, "When money clinks at the
bottom of my box a soul is released from purgatory." With such
provocation one does not wonder--though one may greatly regret--that
the indignant reformers, in sweeping away the falsehood, sometimes
swept away also the underlying truth. The teaching about the
Intermediate Life, and the old practice of the Church in remembering
her faithful departed in prayer, were all put in the background as
leading to dangerous abuse; and so the people, getting no real teaching
about it, got the sad habit of trying to forget about the state of
their dear ones departed. In their ignorance, they could only guess
blindly what the Creed here means. So for centuries this has been the
"lost article of the Creed." But this teaching of the Creed is none
the less true, because it has been neglected in later days. And if it
be true, it is we