SERMON XIV. OUR LORD'S DESCENT INTO HELL. BY BISHOP HORSLEY. SAMUEL HORSLEY was born in 1733. He was made Bishop of St. David's in 1788; was translated to St. Asaph in 1802; and died in 1606.] SERMON XIV. 1 PETER, III. 18-20. Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit; by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, which sometimes were disobedient, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah. In the first rudiments of our Christian faith, comprised in the apostles' creed, which we are made to get by heart in our earliest infancy, we are taught to believe that." our Lord Jesus Christ descended into hell;" and this belief is solemnly professed by every member of the congregation, when that creed is repeated in the daily service of the church. And it seemed of so much importance that it should be distinctly acknowledged by the Church of England when we separated from the Roman communion, that our reformers thought proper to make it by itself the subject of one of the articles of religion. They were aware, that upon the fact of our Lord's descent into hell the church of Rome pretended to build her doctrine of purgatory, which they justly esteemed one of her worst corruptions; X but, apprehensive that the zeal of reformation might in this, as in some other instances, carry men too far, and induce them to reject a most important truth, on which a dangerous error had been once ingrafted, to prevent this intemperance of reform, they assert, in the third article of the thirtynine, "That as Christ died for us and was buried, so it is to be believed that he went down into hell." The terms in which they state the proposition, imply that Christ's going down into hell is a matter of no less importance to be believed, than that he died upon the cross for men-is no less a plain matter of fact in the history of our Lord's life and death, than the burial of his dead body. It should seem, that what is thus taught among the first things which children learn, should be among the plainest, that what is thus laid down as a matter of the same necessity to be believed as our Lord's passion and atonement, should be among the least disputed, that what every Christian is required to acknowledge as his own belief, in the daily assemblies of the faithful, should little need either explanation or proof to any that have been instructed in the very first principles only of the doctrine of Christ. But so it is, that what the sagacity of our reformers foresaw, the precaution which they used has not prevented. The truth itself has been brought into discredit by the errors with which it has been adulterated; and such has been the in dustry of modern refinement, and unfortunately so great has been its success, that doubts have been raised about the sense of this plain article of our creed by some, and by others, about the truth and authenticity of it. It will, therefore, be no unprofitable undertaking to show that the assertion in the apostles' creed, that "our Lord descended into hell," is to be taken as a plain matter of fact in the literal meaning of the words; to show what proof of this fact we have in holy writ; and, lastly, to show the great use and importance of the fact as a point of Christian doctrine. "He First, then, for the sense of the proposition, descended into hell." If we consider the words as they stand in the creed itself, and in connexion with what immediately precedes and follows them, they appear evidently to contain a declaration of something which our Lord performed-some going of our Lord to a place called “hell," in the interval of time between the burial of his dead body and his rising to life again on the third day after that interment; for thus speaks the creed of Jesus Christ: was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead." It is evident that the descending into hell is spoken of as an action of our Lord, but as an action performed by him after he was dead and buried, and before he rose again. In the body, our dead Lord, more than any other dead man, I could perform no action; for the very notion of death is, that all sensation and activity, and power of motion of the body, is in that state of the man extinguished. This, therefore, was an act of that part of the man which continues active after death,—that is, of the soul separated by death from the body,-as the interment must be understood of the body apart from the soul. The dead body could no more go into hell than the living soul could be laid in the grave. Considering the words, therefore, as they stand in the creed, as the church now receives it, they seem as little capable |