might render him that has the
power of death that is, the devil idle, and deliver those who
through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage."
It is apparent at once that the mere death of Christ, so far from
ending the sway of Death, would be giving the grim monster a new
victory, incomparably the most important he had ever achieved.
Therefore, the only way to make adequate sense of the passage is
to join with the Savior's death what followed it, namely, his
resurrection and ascension. It was the Hebrew belief that sin,
introduced by the fraud of the devil, was the cause of death, and
the doomer of the disembodied spirits of men to the lower caverns
of darkness and rest. They personified Death as king, tyrannizing
over mankind; and, unless in severe affliction, they dreaded the
hour when they must lie down under his sceptre and sink into his
voiceless kingdom of shadows. Christ broke the power of Satan,
closed his busy reign, rescued the captive souls, and relieved the
timorous hearts of the faithful, by rising triumphantly from

11 Homil. Epist. ad Heb. in hoc loc.

12 Quod a Deo mitt. Somn., p. 643, ed. Mangey.

13 2 Sam. xxii. 6; Prov. xxiii. 14.

14 Ps. ix. 13. Prov. vii, 27.

15 Comm. in Epist. ad Rom., lib. vi. cap. 6, sect. 6.: "Inferni
locus in quo anima detinebantur a morte mors appellatur."

the long bound dominion of the grave, and ascending in a new path
of light, pioneering the saints to immortal glory.

In another part of the epistle, the writer, having previously
explained that as the high priest after the death of the expiatory
goat entered the typical holy place in the temple, so Christ after
his own death entered the true holy place in the heavens, goes on
to guard against the analogy being forced any further to deny the
necessity of Christ's service being repeated, as the priest's was
annually repeated, saying, "For then he must have died many times
since the foundation of the world; but, on the contrary, [it
suffices that] once, at the close of the ages, through the
sacrifice of himself he hath appeared [in heaven] for the
abrogation of sin."16 The rendering and explanation we give of
this language are those adopted by the most distinguished
commentators, and must be justified by any one who examines the
proper punctuation of the clauses and studies the context. The
simple idea is, that, by the sacrifice of his body through death,
Christ rose and showed himself in the pre