which were faintly shadowed forth by the sickening horrors of the detestable Ge-Hinnom.

(2). This is the derivation of the word., In what sense it was used and understood in the time of Christ and his Apostles, it is not so easy to say. To determine that point requires no little learning and research. But we may reasonably conclude that, if we can recover the sense in which the word was commonly used by the Jews some nineteen centuries ago, we may be sure that that is the sense in which Christ used it; for we cannot doubt that He would have defined the word afresh, that He would openly have put a new sense into it, unless He used it in the sense in which his hearers already understood it. Whatever certain modern teachers and ministers may do, we may be quite sure that the Great Teacher did not use in one sense words which He knew that those who listened to Him took in another and a very different

sense.

Now, all the Jewish writings which date from three centuries before Christ to three centuries after Christ have been carefully ransacked, with a view to ascertain the meaning then placed on the word Gehenna.1 And

1 Among others, and chief among those who have ransacked the Hebrew literature of this period, with an express view of determining the significance of Gehenna, I may mention the Rev. Alfred Dewes, D.D., LL.D., perpetual curate of St Augustine's, Pendlebury, Manchester, who has published the result of his researches in a

the result of the search- -a result confirmed to me personally by that eminent Hebrew scholar, Emmanuel

small volume, not so well known as it deserves to be, entitled "A Plea for a New Translation of the Scriptures." To him I am indebted for the references which follow, and for many hints which have helped me to make this and the next sub-division of my Lecture more complete. In order that my readers may know more exactly the ground covered, and the care with which it has been covered, by this erudite and laborious scholar, I cite a few sentences from his work. After animadverting on the "rather pitiable way" in which one Commentator after another has defined and repeated Lightfoot's somewhat ambiguous words, taking him to assert, or making him assert, "that Gehenna was the abode of the damned, a place of eternal fire, and that there are endless examples to prove it," he adds (p. 21): "With a view to test the truth of an assertion so continually made, the present writer has searched all the Jewish writings that can with any probability be assigned to any date within three centuries from our Saviour's birth. And whenever he asserts that an idea is not to be found in any work, he wishes it to be understood that the whole work has been read through, not that its index only has been searched. It did not seem worth while to read any of the later Jewish works; it was quite out of the question to think of wading through the Talmuds; but the earlier of them is assigned to the middle of the fourth century and the later to the end of the fifth. Every passage, however, has been carefully examined even from them, which is quoted in the works of Lightfoot, Schoettgen, Buxtorf, Castell, Schindler, Glass, Bartoloccius, Ugalino, and Nork: and the result of the whole examination is this: there are but two passages which even a superficial reader could consider to be corroborative of the assertion that the Jews understood Gehenna to be a place of everlasting punishment." Among the works read by Dr Dewes were, of course, the several books of the Apocrypha, the writings of Philo and Josephus, the Targums, and, as he has said, those passages in the Talmuds which are commonly cited in favour of the popular dogma. And surely it is a wonderful result of his examination of these and other works that only two sentences-I only know of one -were discovered which even appeared to favour that dogma, and that neither of these, when investigated, could be held to lend it any support.

Deutsch-is that, without a single exception, or with only one very doubtful exception,2 these writings lend no countenance to, that they positively discountenance, the modern dogma of everlasting torment. That is to say, the uninspired Jewish writings for the six centuries nearest to Christ know nothing, absolutely nothing, of "hell." What, then, do we find in these writings? We constantly find such sentences as

1 On the only occasion on which I had the privilege and pleasure of a long talk with Mr Deutsch, I cited as many of the passages adduced by Dr Dewes as I could recall, and asked him whether the impression in his mind at all harmonized with the conclusion to. which these citations naturally led. His answer, given very emphatically, was that they very fairly represented the teaching of the Jewish rabbis; and he added, "Of this you may be quite sure, that there is not a word in the Talmud which lends any support to that damnable dogma of endless torment." Since then his incomparable essay on the Talmud has been given to the world, and in that essay this private opinion of his is publicly affirmed. So that if any one should think that Dr Dewes might have found passages in the Talmud, had he searched it for himself, which would have modified his conclusion, Mr Deutsch comes to the rescue, and declares, with all the authority of his unrivalled knowledge of the Talmud, that it throws its whole weight in favour of that conclusion, and not against it.

2 This one exception is a sentence from the Talmud (Rosc. hasciana, ch. I.), which declares that "Christians and apostates descend into Gehenna, and are judged in it for generations of generations." But the passage is of late date; it is obviously inspired by the hatred and scorn felt by the Jewish rabbis for those Christians who seek to "convert" Jews, and for those Jews who apostatize from the faith of their fathers; and, after all, "generations of generations" is not precisely equivalent to "for ever and for ever." It is a fine sign of Mr Deutsch's fairness that even in his brief abstract of the Talmudic teaching on this point, he includes in it the solitary passage which seems opposed to its general spirit (see his " Remains," p. 53).

:

"1

these "Gehenna is ordained of old because of sins." "In Gehenna the fire is kindled every day.

(( God hath prepared Gehenna for the ungodly who transgress his commandments." "13 "The ungodly will be judged in Gehenna, to shew that there is none in whom is the virtue of innocence against the day of judgment. "The ungodly shall be judged in Gehenna until the righteous shall say of them, We have seen enough! "4 “The judgment of the ungodly is for twelve months.”5 "Noah, seeing the Angel of Death, hid himself in the ark twelve months, because the judgment on sinners lasts for twelve months." The impious shall be burned up by the heat of the sun."7 Gehenna is nothing but a day in which the impious will be burned."8 "The sinners of Israel and the sinners of the Gentiles shall descend with the body into Gehenna, and for twelve months shall be condemned in it ; at the end of twelve months the body shall be consumed, and the soul burned up, and the wind shall scatter it under the feet of the just."

Now, of course, these ancient Hebrew sayings carry no authority on points of Christian doctrine. We are not to take them as yielding any real help to our

1 Targum of Jonathan Ben Uzziel on Isaiah xxx. 33.

2 Ibid., on lxv. 5.

4 Ibid., on Isaiah lxvi. 24.

6 The Cabalistic Book of Zohar, col.

7 Talmud, Avodah Zarah, ch. 1.

8 9 Talmud, Rosc. hasciana, ch. 1.

3 Ibid., on 1 Samuel ii. 8, 9.

5 Mishna, Adyoth, ch. 2, s. 9. 205.

theory of the future life. Nay, as Bartoloccius, in his "Bibliotheca Rabbinica," long since complained, "the propositions which they contain are so variable and unstable" that "no firm and unshifting dogma can be deduced from them " as to the future punishment of the guilty. But this much we may learn from them, as he reluctantly confesses, that the Jewish rabbis did not believe in "a material fire," and that they thought such fire as they did believe in would one day be put out.1 And the conclusion of this learned Talmudist is abundantly confirmed by the most eminent and erudite Hebraist of our own day, Emmanuel Deutsch. In his celebrated essay on the Talmud, he writes: "There is no everlasting damnation according to the Talmud. There is only a temporary punishment even for the worst of sinners. 'Generations upon generations' shall last the damnation of idolaters, apostates, and traitors. But there is a space of only two fingers' breadth between hell and heaven;' the sinner has but to repent sincerely, and the gates to everlasting bliss will spring open. No human being is excluded from the world to come. Every man, of whatever creed or nation, provided he be of the righteous, shall be admitted into it."

And there is another point on which these sentences

1 See Dr Dewes' Plea, pp. 23, 24.

2 Literary Remains, p. 53.