in figures intelligible and acceptable to the Jewish mind.

As yet, then, we have not met a single passage which so much as alludes to the future state of the wicked. But you will find such a passage in St Matthew x. 28, which is repeated in St Luke xii. 5. St Matthew represents Christ as saying, "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna." St Luke reports Him as saying, "Be not afraid of those that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do ; but I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear fear him who, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into the Gehenna." Now as the disciples listened to this impressive warning, in what sense would they understand it? what thoughts and associations would it quicken in their minds? They had been trained to believe that at death the souls of the unrighteous would descend into a frightful region in much resembling the polluted and abhorred Valley outside the walls of Jerusalem ; that they would suffer dreadful torments in it for a brief space of time and that then their very souls would be burned up and scattered, like dust by a wind, under the feet of the just. They would therefore understand Christ to mean that, because men could only kill the body, they were not so much to be feared

as God, who could destroy both body and soul in Gehenna they would understand that it was better for them to dare the utmost wrath of man than to sin

against God. But can it be right to translate the word "Gehenna," in which after brief torment both soul and body might be destroyed, by our word "hell,” when, for us at least, "hell" is the name of a place in which both body and soul are not destroyed, but kept alive for ever in order that they may for ever be tormented in its flame?

In St Matthew xxiii. 15, our Lord pronounces a woe on the Scribes and Pharisees because they compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, and, when they had got him, "ye make him twofold more a son of Gehenna than yourselves." In Verse 33 of the same Chapter He demands of them, “How shall ye escape the judgment of Gehenna?” Both these phrases are of frequent recurrence in Jewish literature.

"A son

of Gehenna" meant very much what Son of Shaitan" means in the East now, viz., a wicked and abandoned man, "a child of the devil," a man born again from

below rather than from above. The judgment of Gehenna was the sentence to the torment and destruction of Gehenna-the verdict by which a man was doomed to be stoned in the valley of Hinnom, his body being left to the worm, the jackal, the raven, and the flame; or, when used in a figurative sense, the

sentence to the darker region of the Hadean world. Neither phrase has any meaning at all resembling that of our word "hell." What our Lord intended was that the Pharisees corrupted the proselytes they were so zealous to make "out of bad heathen making worse Jews," as Erasmus puts it; corrupted them by teaching them to veil greed, perjury, uncleanness, and even murder itself, behind a mask of religion and that they themselves, therefore, deserved that very sentence to the death and horrors of Ge-Hinnom to which they were so ready to doom men far less guilty than themselves.

The last passage in which the word occurs is James iii. 6. "The tongue is a fire; . . . . it defileth the whole body, both setting on fire the whole round of nature and being set on fire of Gehenna." And here, obviously, the meaning is that the unruly and malicious tongue, which kindles a fire wherever it falls, is like those noxious and infectious flames which burned night and day in the loathsome valley of Hinnom, or that it is tipped with that searching and destructive flame which, as the Jews thought, destroys both the body and the soul of the prisoners in the unseen world.

We have now examined every passage in the New Testament in which the word Gehenna occurs. We have found that for the most part it is used in a purely figurative sense; that, so often as it is used in a

literal sense, it denotes the punishments executed on criminal Jews in this present world: and that, in the one or two cases, in which it veils a reference to the punishments of the world to come, it would be understood by those who heard it as denoting that brief agony which, as they thought, would precede the entire destruction of the wicked. And, therefore, the word "hell," in the sense in which we use it, is in every case a monstrous mistranslation of the word Gehenna," and should be replaced by it. It is quite possible that, if the word Gehenna were transferred to our Version, many would be perplexed by it at first, as at first many were arrested by the Greek word "baptism." It is very probable that, for a time at least, its exact shade of meaning would be disputed, just as there are still those who dispute the meaning of "baptism." But these would be slight evils as compared with the immense evil of retaining the word 'hell," the meaning of which every reader fancies he knows, but the meaning of which, at least in the sense in which it is now commonly taken, is utterly alien to the mind of our Lord and his Apostles.

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Nay, as we have also seen, neither the Lord Jesus nor his Apostles had any such word as "hell" in their vocabulary, or any conception answering to it in their thoughts. The only words they use are Tartarus, which stands for the classical conception of an under

world, in which the shades of the dead enjoy some poor shadow of their former joys or suffer some faint shadow of their former woes; Hades, which stands for the Jewish conception of a similar underworld in which the souls of the good and of the bad alike await the trumpet of the Resurrection; and Gehenna, which stands for that dark province of the underworld in which the souls of the unrighteous are tormented for a time, and until it shall please God to put an end to their misery.

The word "hell," therefore, has no sort of right to a place in our Bible; and I cannot and will not doubt that those of you who have long felt that the dogma of an everlasting punishment inflicted for the sins of time threw dark shadows on the very throne, nay, on the very character, of God, will thankfully expunge it from the Inspired Record. But do not too hastily assume that, by getting rid of the word "hell," you also get rid of the doctrine of retribution. To sin is to suffer even here and now, and will be to suffer hereafter. No man can be freed from sin except by suffering, as our daily experience and observation of life plentifully avouch. And if any man abide in sin to the very last moment, we may well believe that he will then enter into a suffering so intense and so protracted as that he may feel it had been better for him had he never been born. The merciful God, simply