2 Cor. 5:1-8—“if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For verily in this we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life ... willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”—Paul hopes to escape the violent separation of soul and body—the being “unclothed”—by living till the coming of the Lord, and then putting on the heavenly body, as it were, over the present one (?pe?d?sas?a?); yet whether he lived till Christ's coming or not, he knew that the soul, when it left the body, would be at home with the Lord.

Luke 23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; 2 Tim. 4:18—“The Lord will deliver me from every evil work, and will save me unto [or, ‘into’] his heavenly kingdom” = will save me and put me into his heavenly kingdom (Ellicott), the characteristic of which is the visible presence of the King with his subjects. It is our privilege to be with Christ here and now. And nothing shall separate us from Christ and his love, “neither death, nor life ... nor things present, nor things to come” (Rom. 8:38); for he himself has said: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age” (Mat. 28:20).

Heb. 12:23—Ye are come “to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge of all”; cf. Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; John 20:17—“Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father”—probably means: “my body has not yet ascended.” The soul had gone to God during the interval between death and the resurrection, as is evident from Luke 23:43, 46—“with me in Paradise ... Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

1 Pet. 3:19—“In which [spirit] also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison”—there is no need of putting unconscious spirits under guard. Hovey: “Restraint implies power of action, and suffering implies consciousness.”

Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.”

Here many unanswerable questions may be asked: Had the rich man a body before the resurrection, or is this representation of a body only figurative? Did the soul still feel the body from which it was temporarily separated, or have souls in the intermediate state temporary bodies? However we may answer these questions, it is certain [pg 1000]that the rich man suffers, while probation still lasts for his brethren on earth. Fire is here the source of suffering, but not of annihilation. Even though this be a parable, it proves conscious existence after death to have been the common view of the Jews, and to have been a view sanctioned by Christ.

2 Pet. 2:9—“the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the day of judgment”—here “the unrighteous” = not only evil angels, but ungodly men; cf. verse 4—“For if God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.”

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the body is buried, yet still the torments of the soul are described as physical. Jesus here accommodates his teaching to the conceptions of his time, or, better still, uses material figures to express spiritual realities. Surely he does not mean to say that the Rabbinic notion of Abraham's bosom is ultimate truth. “Parables,” for this reason among others, “may not be made primary sources and seats of doctrine.” Luckock, Intermediate State, 20—“May the parable of the rich man and Lazarus be an anticipatory picture of the final state? But the rich man seems to assume that the judgment has not yet come, for he speaks of his brethren as still undergoing their earthly probation, and as capable of receiving a warning to avoid a fate similar to his own.”

John 4:24—“God is a Spirit [or rather, as margin, ‘God is spirit’]”; Heb. 1:14—“Are they [angels] not all ministering spirits?” Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”; Heb. 12:23—“to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect”; 1 Pet. 3:19—“in which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison”; 2 Cor. 5:8—“we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”; Dan. 12:2—“many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake”; Mat. 9:24—“the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth”; John 11:11—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep”; 1 Cor. 11:30—“For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep”; 1 Thess. 4:14—“For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him”; 5:10—“who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him.”

Against this doctrine we quote the following texts: Gal 2:21—“I do not make void the grace of God: for if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought”; Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once [or, ‘once for all’] offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Rom. 3:28—“We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law”; Eccl. 11:3—“if a tree fall toward the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth there shall it be”; Mat. 25:10—“And while they went away to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage feast: and the door was shut”; Luke 16:26—“And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross over from thence to us”; Heb. 9:27—“it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment”; Rev. 22:11—“He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him do righteousness still: and he that is holy, let him be made holy still.”

Rome teaches that the agonies of purgatory are intolerable. They differ from the pains of the damned only in this, that there is a limit to the one, not the other. Bellarmine, De Purgatorio, 2:14—“The pains of purgatory are very severe, surpassing any endured in this life.” Since none but actual saints escape the pains of purgatory, this doctrine gives to the death and the funeral of the Roman Catholic a dreadful and repellent aspect. Death is not the coming of Christ to take his disciples home, but is rather the ushering of the shrinking soul into a place of unspeakable suffering. This suffering makes satisfaction for guilt. Having paid their allotted penalty, the souls of the purified pass into Heaven without awaiting the day of judgment. The doctrine of purgatory gives hope that men may be saved after death; prayer for the dead has influence; the priest is authorized to offer this prayer; so the church sells salvation for money. Amory H. Bradford, Ascent of the Soul, 267-287, argues in favor of prayers for the dead. Such prayers, he says, help us to keep in mind the fact that they are living still. If the dead are free beings, they may still choose good or evil, and our prayers may help them to choose the good. We should be thankful, he believes, to the Roman Catholic Church, for keeping up such prayers. We reply that no doctrine of Rome has done so much to pervert the gospel and to enslave the world.

For the Romanist doctrine, see Perrone, PrÆlectiones TheologicÆ, 2:391-420. Per contra, see Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:743-770; Barrows, Purgatory. Augustine, Encheiridion, 69, suggests the possibility of purgatorial fire in the future for some believers. Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless? page 69, says that Tertullian held to a delay of resurrection in the case of faulty Christians; Cyprian first stated the notion of a middle state of purification; Augustine thought it “not incredible”; Gregory the Great called it “worthy of belief”; it is now one of the most potent doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; that church has been, from the third century, for all souls who accept her last consolations, practically restorationist. Gore, Incarnation, 18—“In the Church of Rome, the 'peradventure' of an Augustine as to purgatory for the imperfect after death—'non redarguo', he says, 'quia forsitan verum est,'—has become a positive teaching about purgatory, full of exact information.”

Elliott, HorÆ ApocalypticÆ, 1:410, adopts Hume's simile, and says that purgatory gave the Roman Catholic Church what Archimedes wanted, another world on which to fix its lever, that so fixed, the church might with it move this world. We must remember, however, that the Roman church teaches no radical change of character in purgatory,—purgatory is only a purifying process for believers. The true purgatory is only in this world,—for only here are sins purged away by God's sanctifying Spirit; and in this process of purification, though God chastises, there is no element of penalty. On Dante's Purgatory, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 515-518.

That the intermediate state is one of incompleteness, appears from the following passages: Mat. 8:29—“What have we to do with thee, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” 2 Cor. 5:3, 4—“if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life”; cf. Rom. 8:23—“And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; Phil. 3:11—“if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead”; 2 Pet. 2:9—“the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the day of judgment”; Rev. 6:10—“and they [the souls underneath the altar] cried with a great voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”

In opposition to Locke, Human Understanding, 2:1:10, who said that “the soul thinks not always”; and to Turner, Wish and Will, 48, who declares that “the soul need not always think, any more than the body always move; the essence of the soul is potentiality for activity”; Descartes, Kant, Jouffroy, Sir William Hamilton, all maintain that it belongs to mental existence continuously to think. Upon this view, the intermediate state would be necessarily a state of thought. As to the nature of that thought, Dorner remarks in his Eschatology that “in this relatively bodiless state, a still life begins, a sinking of the soul into itself and into the ground of its being,—what Steffens calls ‘involution,’ and Martensen ‘self-brooding.’ In this state, spiritual things are the only realities. In the unbelieving, their impurity, discord, alienation from God, are laid bare. If they still prefer sin, its form becomes more spiritual, more demoniacal, and so ripens for the judgment.”

Even here, Dorner deals in speculation rather than in Scripture. But he goes further, and regards the intermediate state as one, not only of moral progress, but of elimination of evil; and holds the end of probation to be, not at death, but at the judgment, at least in the case of all non-believers who are not incorrigible. We must regard this as a practical revival of the Romanist theory of purgatory, and as contradicted not only by all the considerations already urged, but also by the general tenor of Scriptural representation that the decisions of this life are final, and that character is fixed here for eternity. This is the solemnity of preaching, that the gospel is “a savor from life unto life,” or “a savor from death unto death” (2 Cor. 2:16).

Descartes: “As the light always shines and the heat always warms, so the soul always thinks.” James, Psychology, 1:164-175, argues against unconscious mental states. The states were conscious at the time we had them; but they have been forgotten. In the Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, Prof. James denies that eternity is given at a stroke to omniscience. Lotze, in his Metaphysics, 268, in opposition to Kant, contends for the transcendental validity of time. Green, on the contrary, in Prolegomena [pg 1003]to Ethics, book 1, says that every act of knowledge in the case of man is a timeless act. In comparing the different aspects of the stream of successive phenomena, the mind must, he says, be itself out of time. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 306, denies this timeless consciousness even to God, and apparently agrees with Martineau in maintaining that God does not foreknow free human acts.

De Quincey called the human brain a palimpsest. Each new writing seems to blot out all that went before. Yet in reality not one letter has ever been effaced. Loeb, Physiology of the Brain, 213, tells us that associative memory is imitated by machines like the phonograph. Traces left by speech can be reproduced in speech. Loeb calls memory a matter of physical chemistry. Stout, Manual of Psychology, 8—“Consciousness includes not only awareness of our own states, but these states themselves whether we are aware of them or not. If a man is angry, that is a state of consciousness, even though he does not know that he is angry. If he does know that he is angry, that is another modification of consciousness, and not the same.” On unconscious mental action, see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 378-382—“Cerebration cannot be identified with psychical processes. If it could be, materialism would triumph. If the brain can do these things, why not do all the phenomena of consciousness? Consciousness becomes a mere epiphenomenon. Unconscious cerebration = wooden iron or unconscious consciousness. What then becomes of the soul in its intervals of unconsciousness? Answer: Unconscious finite minds exist only in the World-ground in which all minds and things have their existence.”

On the whole subject, see Hovey, State of Man after Death; Savage, Souls of the Righteous; Julius MÜller, Doct. Sin, 2:304-446; Neander, Planting and Training, 482-484; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 407-448; Bib. Sac., 13:153; Methodist Rev., 34:240; Christian Rev., 20:381; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Hades; Stuart, Essays on Future Punishment; Whately, Future State; Hovey, Biblical Eschatology, 79-144.