The central point of expectation having necessarily shifted, for those who received Jesus as the Messiah, from the first to the second advent, this event forms the focus of the Christian doctrine of last things. The expressions common among the Hebrews to denote respectively the existing and the coming dispensations—αiωιz oυτoς, “this age,” αιών ∕a∈λλωv, “the coming age”—were adopted, with a new reference. Theybecame“this life ,, and “the life tocome/’and in later language “time” and “eternity;” and the αιών, or age, became confused with the κo'σ-μ,oς, or visible order of things. With the momentous epoch that formed the dividing-point between these two periods remained associated all that ancient prophecy connected with the restoration of the Hebrew monarchy. The apocalyptic literature which began with the book of Daniel, and which belongs to the post-exile period, had, it is true, already changed the form of the primitive national hopes. The restoration had become the resurrection; the idea of judgment had been enlarged to include the dead; and the final consummation was depicted, not as a mere distinction of the heathen or their subjugation to Judaism, butas a universal catastrophe in which all who had ever lived would have their part. But the mode of presentation had not changed, and the old prophetic language was literally adopted, although the sphere of its application had so infinitely extended.

Christian eschatology, then, is especially occupied with the destinies of the church in the concluding act of the world’s drama. In formal treatises which trace the historical development of the opinion on the last things, they are usually arranged under the heads—Second Advent, Millennium, Resurrection, Judgment, Conflagration of the World, and the State of the Blessed and the Damned.

But experience taught the first generation of Christians to postpone the moment of the realization of their hopes. The second advent—which,however, as the fourth gospel teaches, had already been spiritually realized—was delayed. Already when St Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, some had died before the fulfilment of their desire, and the church was troubled with fears lest they should awake from the deathsleep too late for the divine appearing. A new epoch was therefore introduced. The destinies of the individual from the moment of departure from this life enter into the inquiry, and the already boundless field of speculation is increased by the addition of controversies about an intermediate state, purgatory, and the limboes into which the schoolmen partitioned hell. Nor is the area of theory substantially narrowed for Protestant theology, although it limits the last things to four—death, resurrection, judgment, end of the world, or more commonly, in practical dis courses, to death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

The history of eschatology is in great measure the history of “lawless and uncertain thoughts” on these matters. The best notion of the extravagances allowed to speculation is obtained by a glance at the concluding part of the Summa Theologice, where Aquina3 discusses these subjects. Thirty questions (besides an appendix devoted to purgatory) are proposed, each question being divided into several articles, and each article supported and opposed by many arguments. Then follows a conclusion, with the doctor’s remarks on his conclusion. We take a few of the propositions at random :—“Whether souls are conducted to heaven or to hell immediately after death;” “Whether the limbus of hell is the same as Abraham’s bosom;” “Whether the limbus puerorum is the same as the limbus patrum;” or, passing over a few pages, “Whether the sun and moon will be really obscured at the day of judgment;” “Whether the fire which is to purge the world will be like in kind to elemental fire;” or again, “Whether all the members of the human body will rise with it;” “Whether the hair and nails will reappear;” and so on to questions of age, size, and sex.

Of these and a thousand like inquiries modern thought of course takes no notice. But there are more tremeudous issues, which will never cease to engage the conscience and reason of man. The ultimate fate of the lost has created what has been called “a whirlpool of interminable controversy, roaring in endless circles over a dark and bottomless abyss.” “Only fragments of the dogma” are, as Neander remarks, to be found in Scripture. And of these by far the greater number are poetical, and admit all the variety of interpretation possible to figurative language. The very books which are most occupied with last things found their way into the canon under protest. And it has been remarked that, “in nearly every passage on which it is attempted to found the eternal misery of the lost, there is a less or greater difficulty in settling the text, or in reaching the conviction that we read as the author wrote.” The same uncertainty prevails all along the line of eschatological thought. In every age the popular opinion has been both more extravagant and more dogmatic than the expressed formulas of the church. It is, indeed, difficult to determine wħat, at any one time, the mind of the church has been. Reserve was wise, but reserve has its dangers. Licence was given to the unguided and uncontrolled popular imagination to create and people its own heaven and hell, while poetry and art were permitted to seize on the unseen future as their own domain, and, alas, to stamp their figured expressions indelibly as literal truths on the minds of men.

There are two distinct modes of treatment for these difficult subjects. In the philosophy of them we meet with the ever-recurrent antagonism between thePlatonic and Aristotelian systems. Thus the speculative argument on which the schoolmen and Calvinists chiefly rely in support of a theory of unending penalty for sin—that the violated majesty of an Infinite Being demands infinite pain—is founded on a sentence in Aristotle’s Ethics, while a gentler creed appears with every revival of the Platonic philosophy, which, as Neander observes, extended its spiritualizing influence to eschatology as to other doctrines of the faith.

But without entering on the region of pure speculation, the New Testament itself discloses two entirely different eschatological methods. The one is moral, spiritual, idealist, employing outward forms only as symbols, viewing the future rather in regard to development of character than as a mode of existence. This is the Christian as contrasted with the J ewish method. The other follows the natural tendency of Hebrew thought. It is literal, material, sensuous. It delights in chronological arrangements of the unknown future, and topographical arrangements of the unseen world. Missing the repeated warnings of Christ, delivered both in parables and in express admonitions— warnings to prepare for a slow and gradual development of His kingdom, and to leave “the times” in His Father’s keeping—this method aims in all its representations at abrupt catastrophe and at a consummation depending on startling and supernatural surprises.

These distinctive tendencies appear within the New Testament most prominently—the one in the fourth gospel the other in the Apocalypse. The Pauline theology exhibits them side by side, showing their discordance in the absence of all attempt on the part of the apostle to reconcile them. Thus in his treatment of the resurrection, in the one view it is the sudden appearing of Christ which will begin the heavenly life for all, in the other this life in Christ—begun already on earth—will attain its perfection at the death of the individual. As the moment of the second advent receded, the church’s expectation necessarily transferred the object of Christian hope—the communion with Christ in the kingdom of glory—to the earlier event, death; but St Paul retains the old terminology without endeavouring to adapt it to this change {cf. Phil. i. 22, 23, iii. 10, 11, with 1 Cor. xv. 52 f.; 1 Thess. iv. 15, drc.). The same discordance is observable in his treatment of the judgment and of the end of the world. In his use of terms and reference to times the apostle follows his Jewish training. “The day of the Lord,” with all its prophetic associations as “day of judgment,” is preserved; the sudden and final award of wrath or favour appears in its forensic form; and all is ended by a separation between the heirs of eternal life and the lost.

But the spirit of the apostolic teaching is independent of this form. The idea that regards the development of the higher life as a constant process varying in each individual, but having its roots in the common life of the church,—that looks on to the ultimate perfection as a unity of all with the Redeemer in God, the whole universe having been gradually subdued by Christ to himself,—this, which we may call the essentially Christian idea, is what we receive as the innermost feeling of the man who, from a Pharisee and a zealous upholder of the law, was called to be a chosen instrument of the gospel of the favour of God in Christ.

In the patristic period the conflict between the two rival systems is apparent in every detail. Here, as everywhere else, the opposition is marked in regard to the duration of punishment. But it rages most fiercely, perhaps, round the doctrine of the millennium. The earthly reign of Messiah was transferred from Jewish to Christian expectation. But the Christian hope could not without inconsistency take a Jewish form. Christ’s kingdom of heaven refused to realize itself as a period of sensual enjoyment, and the poetic chronology of the apocalypse was soon found to have raised difficulties of an insurmountable kind which were not diminished when a locality was sought for the promised earthly reign. If it was found at Jerusalem before the final judgment, how could the expectations connected with the second advent be fulfilled? In the Apocalypse the completion of the kingdom of God takes place in the New Jerusalem—the millennium appearing only as an interval of rest after the crisis of the conflict with Antichrist. Thus a new decisive epoch is introduced, the consummation of things having thus gradually receded from the incarnation, which was the focus of Jewish eschatology, to the second advent, and still further to the close of the millennial reign. The later interpretation, fixing the beginning of the thousand years kingdom at the incarnation, though decidedly opposed to the Apocalypse, is a recurrence to the primitive Jewish view. In accordance with this opinion, the end of the world was very generally expected about the year 1000. Another view dated the millennium from the formal adoption of Christianity by the empire under Constantine, and caused the expectation of the end of things which was so prevalent in the 14th century.

The most important of all the questions that arise in connection with eschatology relates, of course, to the teaching of our Lord. A true view of the future must be a Theodicea. It must correspond to the highest human conception of the nature and character of God. The revelation in and through Christ affords this highest conception. And yet it is in the discourses of Christ himself that men find the passages which seem toprove the doctrine most irreconcilable with the insight He has elsewhere given into the Divine heart.

Now, Christ was not the first to “stamp ideas of immortality on the minds of men under the forms of heaven and hell.” His gospel brought life and immortality to light, but it was by illuminating obscure and completing partial truths. It is therefore most important to ascertain what forms of belief on these subjects He found existing.

Eternity of punishment is often assumed to be a truth of natural religion,—an intuitive human belief. It would be truer to say that in all races the first vague guesses at immortality include no thought of retribution at all. The continued existence was “something between being and not being.” Man survived only as a shadow of himself. Intellectually and morally he ended at death. Homer speaks of life and form in Hades, but says there is no mind there at all. The movement, freedom, joy of existence, ended for the Greek at death. The best that could then happen to him was to kuow that his body had been buried. All else was featureless, lifeless, inane,—an existence without even the excitement of the possibility of dying again. The bourne once reached, not only was there no return, but no further bourne remained to be aimed at. Thus the intense consciousness of the apparent finality of death determined the form of the earliest hopes of immortality when they began to dawn. Progress did not enter into them; there would be no discipline because nothing to exercise it on, no change of condition, for this implies power of adaptation if not of choice.

The primitive Hebrew conception was even less tolerable than the Greek. Sheol,—translated by the LXX. Hades, and by the Authorized Version, with curious impartiality, thirty-one times “grave” and thirty one times “hell,” —was, as originally conceived, a vast subterranean tomb, with the barred and bolted gates common to Hebrew tombs, in which the ghosts (Rephaim) did not even flit about, but lay like corpses in a sepulchre. No thought of retribution was connected with this deep and gloomy under-world. It was the common receptacle of all. The distinctions there were social or national, not moral. The only approach to a retributive idea is found in the exile time, in an expression of Ezekiel’s, who locates the uncircumcised heathen in the “sides of the pit,” possibly the deepest and darkest part of Sheol. (See Ps. lxiii. 9, lxxxix. 19, cxliii. 3, cvii. 18; Job X. 20-22, xi. 8, iii. 14, xxx. 23; Is. vii. 11, xviιi. 18; 1 Kings ∑i. 2; Ezek. xxxii. 23.)

This primitive idea had, by the time of Christ, developed under influences of a very different kind. In the first place, the horror with which an ancient Hebrew had contemplated death, because in Sheol he would be cut off from all communion with the covenant God, was dissipated under the truer religious feeling struggling into life in the later Psalms and the book of Job. At first it had been believed that Jehovah’s control did not reach to the under-world. The King of Terrors was its only king. They who had been God’s sheep when alive, in Sheol had a new shepherd, Death (Ps. xlix. 14, Perowne’s translation). But truer views of God’s nature dissipated this horror, and pious souls who despaired of redress in this life, began to look even in Sheol for a manifestation of divine justice and a proof of divine love. At length was grasped the hope of a deliverance from the prison house of the dead, and the doctrine of the resurrection crowned this hope, and gave a definite shape to the eschatology of the Jews.

The release from the under-world which the Jew contemplated in a bodily resurrection was found by Aryan thought in a metempsychosis. According to Josephus (fJeU. Jud., ii. 8, 14), this was also a doctrine of the Pharisees and the

Essenes, and the notion of pre-existence has even been traced in the New Testament. The idea of retribution has now entered into eschatology, and there is a curious analogy between the Hebrew conception and Plato’s. The Greek philosopher leaves incurables to suffer in the lower regions (fiep., X. G15, cf. Phoedo, 114), when other men have choice of new lives. So the Hebrews believed that the heathen and unjust would remain in the death-sleep of Sheol, while faithful Israel received back the soul in the resurrection (2 Macc. vii. 14, cf. Jos., Ant., xviii. 1, 3). In different forms this thought reappears in Christian eschatology. Some find it in St Γaul. It was the origin of the belief in a two-fold resurrection: the unjust, not being worthy to participate when the saints awake at their Lord’s second coming, remain below till the final judgment.

But iu the post-exile days—that veritable middle age of Israel—other influences appeared. Intolerable wrongs drove men to seek solace for themselves in visions of paradise, vengeance on their foes in visions of hell. Now appear the divisions of Sheol into receptacles for the good and bad. Their origin is seen in the apocalyptic book of Enoch. In chap, xxii. of that remarkable book, which, in the permanence of its influence as well as its form, resembles the Inferno of Dante, the seer is shown the “delightful places” where the souls of the good will be collected till judgment, and the “separations” existing between the just and unjust, “made by chasm, by water, by light above it.” And here first is express mention of “the castigation and the torment of those who eternally execrate and whose souls are punished and bound there for ever.”

Analogies have been found between the Greek Tartarus and the Hebrew hell, and the influence of the Western mythology traced in the latter; but in order to supply symbolism of torment of surpassing horror, no foreign influence was necessary. Gehenna (f.e., the valley of Hinnom or the sons of Hinnom) and its ghastly associations were ready to supply images terrible beyond any that the mind of heathen poet or philosopher had conceived. Already known as the perpetual abode of corruption and fire, “the place where lie the corpses of those who have transgressed against Jehovah—and their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched,” it had become the apt symbol of utter moral depravity and ruin. But it was the unknown author of the book of Enoch who first saw it as “the accursed of the accursed for ever,” who first placed in the dark ravine one of the mouths of hell, and thus from an emblem of the moral ruin attending sin, made it the actual place of punishment for sinners.

Henceforth Gehenna—hell—becomes known as a part of Hades, or Sheol. There is yet another place of torment reserved for the final reception of fallen angels and wicked men. It is the lake of fire and brimstone of the Apocalypse. Its origin also appears in Enoch, though the descriptions are too confused to allow of certain identification of the locality. It is situated to the west near the “mountain of metals,” and has by some been referred to the solfatara in South Italy. But more probably the region is that of the Dead Sea, to which Jude refers by name in his account of the fate awaiting the fallen angels. When in the Apocalypse the New Jerusalem is about to descend from heaven, Hell itself with Death is cast into this sulphureous lake—not only symbolizing the final disappearance of all evil, but also the removal as far as possible from the heavenly city of all the dread associations of the dark valley of Hιnnom.

On the other side of Hades was placed Paradise—a term whose origin is self-evident. Apocalyptic literature loved to imagine a restored Eden, and fill it with all the delights of sense—streams of milk and honey, twelve trees laden with divers fruits, mighty mountains whereon grow lilies and roses (2 Esdras ii. 19). Prophetical language supplied other symbols of joy—especially the happy banquet with the forefathers of the race (Luke xiιi. 29, xvi. 22, cf. Isa. xxv. 6, &c.). In later times long controversies have turned on those localities; the “minds at once logical and sensuous ask questions, and the answers are wildly conjectural;” and no one can yet decide whether paradise, Abraham’s bosom, and the third heaven are identical or different places.

Further extravagancies may be found in the Rabbinical writings and in the many apocalypses which the early church produced. The limboes of patristic speculation have their antitypes in the chambers {promptuaria) out of which...