ven, the first one ever
admitted there from among the dead, thus exemplifying the
fulfilled "expectation of the creature that was groaning and
travailing in pain" to be born into the freedom of the heavenly
glory of the sons of God. Fourthly, "justification by faith,"
therefore, means the redemption from Hades by acceptance of the
dispensation of free grace which is proclaimed in the gospel.
Fifthly, every sanctified believer receives a pledge or earnest of
the spirit sealing him as God's and assuring him of acceptance
with Christ and of advance to heaven. Sixthly, Christ is speedily
to come a second time, come in glory and power irresistible, to
consummate his mission, raise the dead, judge the world, establish
a new order of things, and return into heaven with his chosen
ones. Seventhly, the stubbornly wicked portion of mankind will be
returned eternally into the under world. Eighthly, after the
judgment the subterranean realm of death will be shut up, no more
souls going into it, but all men at their dissolution being
instantly invested with spiritual bodies and ascending to the
glories of the Lord. Finally, Jesus having put down all enemies
and restored the primeval paradise will yield up his mediatorial
throne, and God the Father be all in all.

The preparatory rudiments of this system of the last things
existed in the belief of the age, and it was itself composed by
the union of a theoretic interpretation of the life of Christ and
of the connected phenomena succeeding his death, with the elements
of Pharasaic Judaism, all mingled in the crucible of the soul of
Paul and fused by the fires of his experience. It illustrates a
great number of puzzling passages in the New Testament, without
the necessity of recourse to the unnatural, incredible,
unwarranted dogmas associated with them by the unique, isolated
peculiarities of Calvinism. The interpretation given above, moreover,
has this strong confirmation of its accuracy, namely, that it is
arrived at from the stand point of the thought and life of the
Apostle Paul in the first century, not from the stand point of the
theology and experience of the educated Christian of the
nineteenth century.

CHAPTER V.

JOHN'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

WE are now to see if we can determine and explain what were the
views of the Apostle John upon the subject of death and life,
condemnation and salvation, the resurrection and immortality. To
understand his opinions on these