By the Rev. BENJAMIN BELL, B.D., Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of England

The subject is certainly one of solemn and perennial interest, and it cannot be long absent from the minds of most readers in these days of national anxiety and war, when death may be very near to our dear ones or ourselves.

I write from the standpoint of a Christian who believes in the supreme authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ on all such questions, and recognises the testimony of the New Testament as our only sure guide to truth through His Holy Spirit.

Those seventeenth century divines who framed the standards of the Presbyterian Churches of Great Britain and America, like most of the Reformers who preceded them, were led to reject entirely the idea of an intermediate state of either weal or woe into which souls pass at death. This was natural enough as a protest against the fantastic system of purgatory, but it led them further, in my opinion, than New Testament Scripture sanctions. When Our Lord assured the penitent thief on the cross: "This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise," He chose a word familiar to the Hebrew teaching of His day, but which we have no right confidently to identify with Heaven, His Father's House, especially as St. Paul uses the same word in his account of the man in Christ (almost certainly himself), "who was caught up into Paradise and heard unspeakable words."

Further, as all readers of the Revised Version know, the Greek word Hades, like the corresponding Hebrew term Sheol, is used in the New Testament as the place of departed souls generally, whether they are in peace or woe. For myself I believe that Our Lord went into Hades between His death and resurrection, and perhaps preached His Gospel there as the passage in 1. Peter seems to tell us, "to the spirits in keeping, who once were disobedient."

Our Lord and His Apostles represent the death of Christians as a "falling asleep." But that is not inconsistent with the belief that they awake again immediately into a happy conscious life. Indeed, some of us have had the joy of seeing the face of our friends light up with a glad surprise just before death, and have heard them addressing by name dear ones who have already passed behind the veil as if they saw them.

In Our Lord's parable of Dives and Lazarus, "Abraham's bosom" represents, I think, the blessed side of the intermediate state, and the "Hades" where the rich man lay, the abode of the selfish, God-forgetting man. It is not possible, according to the parable, for any to pass from the one side to the other, but that does not prove that when the day of final judgment comes, there may not be hope for such as Dives. Yet we must recognise that Our Lord was wont to speak with sad severity of the future of those who refuse to believe and follow Him here and now.

In that intermediate state it seems probable that there will be some form of embodiment, sufficient to allow of intercourse, and thus to facilitate growth in holiness.

One is often called to speak to and pray with dying persons who have neglected the call of Christ throughout life, and earnestly ask for guidance at its close. Occasionally one has seen what appeared to be true penitence and eager faith in such persons. Is it not more likely, and more according to God's methods of dealing with us in this life, that such new-born souls should pass at death into a place of training for Heaven, than into Heaven itself?

Again, I have known many Christian men and women taken away suddenly from this world in their early prime, when they had just entered or were in the very midst of highly useful service of their fellows - men and women singularly fitted to commend religion to others by their example and their words.

Does it not help us to say "Amen" to such mysterious withdrawals of the very choicest instruments of Christian blessing, to think that they may be needed even more elsewhere, in co-operating with their Divine Lord in the upholding in faith and holiness of those who passed out of this world in the early stages of the new life?