Tidal, or Tudgula, in Genesis, is seen, if he is the same as the Tudgula of the tablets, since in them is mentioned the assembling by Kudur-Lagmar of the "Umman-manda" or "nomad hordes," and Professor Sayce remarks: "In Tidal, therefore, I see a king of the nomad hordes who adjoined Elam on the North."

Here are coincidences of a very remarkable kind, and it is hard to believe that they are accidental. A very plain illustration may help us to see this more clearly. Suppose one is looking for three or four friends in a great crowd. At a distance in the throng he thinks he sees the face of one of them, but it is so far away that he cannot be certain that it is the face of his friend that he sees, though the likeness is very striking. At this moment another face is seen just by the first, and it looks like that of another member of the party for which he is looking. By this, the probability that he was right in his first supposition is not doubled only, but made almost a certainty. Then he sees another face and it seems to be that of a third member of the company he was searching for. It would be exceedingly improbable that three faces should happen to appear like the three he was expecting to see, unless they were those of his friends. When a fourth face is seen like that of the last member of the group, he was looking for, moral certainty is arrived at. He knows that these are his four friends. If each of these persons wore some insignia of rank which he could see in the distance, the recognition would be still more prompt and certain, if that were possible.

Now, let us make an advance in our supposition. Suppose that the friends he is looking for are not a Mr. Jones, a Mr. Smith, a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Green, but Emperor William of Germany, Francis Joseph of Austria, The Czar of the Russias and King Humbert of Italy, and that not

*Hommel puts this beyond doubt. See foot note on page 48.

only he, but other intelligent observers from different points of view, feel pretty certain that yonder in the great crowd is not only the face of William, with his waxed mustaches, but his German retinue and his German standard with its black cross and black eagle, and near him are the three other potentates with their standards and retinues. The crowd might consist of many thousands yet when several competent observers of the highest character concur in saying that these four persons are William, Humbert, F. Joseph and Nicholas, we could not doubt (especially if we had learned that these four princes were traveling together) that these were they. No one in his senses could doubt it.

So we see through the medium of the tablets-wonderful retrospective glasses-old Amraphel, King of Shinar; Arioch, King of Ellasar; Chedorlaomer, King of Elam, and Tidal, King of Nations, marching at the head of their hosts, with banners flying, out of the East into Palestine, as in the Bible, and out of the dreamland of the cities* into reality. The myths of the critics have materialized and become the kings-bad ones-cruel and ambitious onesof the Bible. In the view of some of the learned, this conduct is highly improper and entirely unpardonable on the part of Amraphel and his allies. Many were doubtless much displeased and not a little discourged to see these old kings come marching down the centuries to spoil so many fine theories and do such violence to the cherished results of "scholarship." This invasion of the four kings

"They have all agreed (and when they are agreed it seems that their science has spoken its final word and registered an irreversible decree) that we have no information regarding the patriarchal history. Some years ago Canon Cheyne stated in the Contemporary Review that this was one thing on which criticism positively insisted...... Henceforth, he said, no teacher of youth was to speak as if he knew, nor was he to suffer his pupils to imagine that he knew anything whatever of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob."-(Modern Discoveries and the Bible.Urquhart.

has been almost as disagreeable to many at the end of the nineteenth century as was that one of some thirty-nine centuries ago to the fine kings in Palestine and poor Lot. They have spoiled a fine region, carried off many muchprized goods-fine-spun, showy and much-wanted. But if the critics are taken, too, and carried into captivity, how hopeless is their case! for alas! alas! (unless they are mistaken) there is no Abraham to lead Amorite princes to rescue them, but only a poor bloodless myth.

Bethesda, Md.

PARKE P. FLOURNOY.

[Since this excellent article was prepared for publicacation, Mr. L. W. King, also of the British Museum, has issued a volume on "The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi," in which he claims that Father Scheil misread the name Chedorlaomer and that Mr. Pinches is probably mistaken in his transliteration of Tidal. The testimony for Arioch and Amraphel apparently remains the same. This fact is mentioned as bringing the latest word of archæology on this question, and also to make the point that the scholars, even the best of them, disagree about the more difficult inscriptions. Hence, when some discovery is announced contradicting Scripture history, the ordinary reader should possess his soul in patience until the final word of the scientists has been spoken. That word has been in multiplied instances a corroboration of the Bible account.-ED.]

IV. DID CHRIST PREACH TO DISEMBODIED

SPIRITS IN HADES?

This question has practical significance in the light of certain recent developments in theology. If probation extends beyond the present life, and if certain classes of the unsaved, as it is now held, may have an opportunity after death, to repent of sin, believe in Christ, and so attain to heaven. then Christ may have visited the world of departed spirits, and proclaimed to them the gospel of salvation. We do not wonder, then, that the advocates of the hypothesis of future probation push into prominence and emphasize strongly the passage of Scripture which seems to them to teach this benign mission of Christ to the world of spirits. That passage is found in 1 Peter, 3, 18, 20, and, quoting from the accepted version, is as follows: "For Christ, also, hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, 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 sometime were disobedient, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is eight souls were saved by water."

The question now is: Do those words teach that Christ, after his crucifixion and before his resurrection, entered the unseen world and preached the gospel of salvation to those who were destroyed in the Noachic deluge?

Candor compels us to say that many very able, and, in the main, evangelical expositors, hold this view, among whom we find that eminent critical scholar, Dean Alford, who gives the following interpretation of the passage:

"I understand these words to say that our Lord, in his disembodied state, did go to the place of detention of de

parted spirits, and did thus announce his work of redemption; preach salvation, in fact, to the disembodied spirits of those who refused to obey the voice of God when the judgment of the flood was hanging over them. Why these rather than others are mentioned-whether merely as a sample of the like gracious work on others, or for some special reason unimaginable by us we cannot say. It is ours to deal with the plain words of Scripture, and to accept its revelations as far as vouchsafed to us. And they are vouchsafed to us to the utmost limit of legitimate inference from revealed facts. That inference every intelligent reader will draw from the fact here announced; it is not purgatory, it is not universal restitution; but it is one which throws blessed light on one of the darkest enigmas of the divine justice; the cases where the final doom seems infinitely out of proportion to the lapse which has incurred it-and as we cannot say to what other causes this кηрʊуμа may have applied, so it would be presumption in us to limit its occurrence or its efficacy."

Before I proceed to give the opposite, and, as I conceive, the true view of this passage, attention is called to some of the difficulties presented by the interpretation of Dean Alford and his sympathizers.

There is here taken for granted that which has never been shown, and yet that which is absolutely essential to the hypothesis presented for our acceptance, viz., that there is in the future life "a place of detention" for souls in which the preaching of the gospel would be helpful to the unsaved. Alford says "it is not purgatory." What is it, then? and where does God's word assure us of any such place of detention?

The only passages of Scripture quoted by Alford in his long and labored exposition, and which, it is logical to conclude, are the only ones to which he could refer, are 2 Peter 2-4, "For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains