chaos, seeing Lazarus rejoiced in Abraham's bosom." And from the same consideration, Cyprian comforted the Christians of his age against the fear of death, and exhorted them chearfully to receive it; "let us embrace," saith he, "the day that assigns to every one his habitation, that delivers us from these worldly snares, and restores us to the heavenly kingdom: who being abroad, would not hasten to return into his own country? Who, hastening to sail home, would not heartily wish for a good wind, that he might speedily embrace his friends? We may reckon paradise for our country; we have begun already to have the patriarchs for our parents; why then do we not hasten and run to see our country, and to salute our parents? A great humber of friends expect us there; a numerous Company of parents, brethren and sons, desire us, already secure of their own immortality, but now solicitous about our salvation. How great must their and our joy be, in the mutual seeing and embracing of each other? What must be the pleasure of the heavenly kingdoms, where there is no fear of death, but a certainty of eternal life? There is a glorious choir of the apostles, there is the number of the exulting prophets, there is the innumerable company of martyrs, crowned for the vic-.

a

tory of their fight and passion; there are the triumphing Virgins, who by the strength of continency subdued the concupiscence of the flesh and body; there are the charitable, who are rewarded for their works of righteousness, in feeding and giving to the poor; who by keeping the precepts of the Lord, conveyed their earthly patrimony unto the heavenly treasury: To these, dearly beloved brethren, let us hasten, and wish to be speedily with these, that so we may speedily come to Christ." And many other such like passages might be easily produced, to shew the opinion of the primitive writers to have been, that the souls of the godly, immediately after their separation from the body, pass into a place of bliss and happiness: but that I may not be tedious, I shall designedly omit them, and proceed to the proof of the principal point, which is, that it was the general belief of the primitive church, that the separated souls of good men went into hell, or hades, as it is termed in the creed, where they remained in a condition suitable to their merits in this life, in an expectation of the resurrection, and the general judgment-day.

Now the first, whom I shall produce for this end, shall be the venerable Irenæus, bishop

of Lyons, who relates this to be the order of the resurrection and glorification of all true Christians, "that upon the disunion of their two essential parts by death, their souls shall go to hell, or to an invisible place appointed them by God, where they shall tarry till the resurrection, in a continued expectation of it; after which, receiving their bodies, and rising perfectly, that is, corporally, they shall come to the presence of God." Not much unlike to which, it is affirmed by Justin Martyr, “ that all souls did not die, but that those of the godly remained in a better place, and those of the ungodly in a worse, expecting the day of judg ment."

Tertullian writes, "that both Dives and La zarus, or Eleazar," as he calls him," were in hell, the former in the torment of fire, the lat ter in a place of refreshment, viz. in Abraham's bosom;" making Abraham's bosom to be a part of hell, according to those verses against Marcion, which commonly pass under his

name:

" Sub corpore terra

In parte ignotâ quidam locus extat apertus,
Luce fuâ fretus, Abraha sinus ifle vocatur,
Altior á tenebris, longe femotus ab igne
Sub terrâ tamen hac, &c.

In which verses, he comprehends the place of damned and blessed souls under the general

term of the word hell, or of a place under ground; only making this difference, that the wicked were in the lowermost parts thereof, in a place of darkness, fire and torment; but the righteous in the superior parts thereof, in a place of light, freedom and happiness.

But, to return to the unquestionable works of Tertullian, in his book concerning the soul, he proposes to dispute of several questions relating to it; one whereof is, concerning the corporiety of the soul, which he holds in the affirmative, and thinks it undeniably evinced from the soul's passivity, or receptibility either of joy or misery in its separate state: for the proof of which, he doth not only alledge the example of Dives and Lazarus, but also the detaining of all souls in hell, both good and bad, till the judgment-day; "what is that, saith he, that is translated unto hell after the divorce of the body, which is there detained, and reserved unto the day of judg ment, to which Christ by dying did descend? Even to the souls of the patriarchs, I think. How if the soul be nothing, can it be detained under the earth? For, it is nothing if it be not a body; for, incorporiety is free from all kind of custody, and incapable of either pain or pleasure." And, in the same book, one of

the last questions which he ́ handles relating to the soul, is concerning its receptacle after its separation from the body; where he first proposes the various opinions of those philos sophers, who acknowledged its immortality, as of the Platonists, Stoicks, and others, who generally allotted to wise and pious souls, seats exalted in the air, sublimated according to their wisdom and excellency, but main tained, that other souls were, according to their folly and corruption, depressed towards the earth, and hovered thereabouts; which conceit he condems, as contrary to that part of the Christian faith which placed all souls in hell: "For, as for us, saith he, we never be lieve hell to be a naked cavity, nor an open sink of the world, but it is a vastness in the body and depth of the earth, and an abstruse profundity in its bowels; for we read, that Christ was conquered by death, three days in the heart of the earth, that is, in its most in ward and internal recess, covered over by the earth, shut within it, and built about by yet more inferior abysses :" And a little farther, he professedly debates that question, “Whether all souls go to hell," which he positively affirms referring his reader to a book, now Jost, which he had formerly written concern ing Paradise, wherein he had declared, That every soul was sequestred in hell till the day