232 REV. CANON MACCULLOCH^ ON THE DESCENT 



of instruction by his Master in such matters, for we learn that 

 during the great Forty Days between His Resurrection and His 

 Ascension, He spake to His disciples concerning the things of the 

 kingdom of God. Besides, as the Canon has shoM^n, our Lord 

 Himself prophesied His Descent into Hades (or Sheol). We may 

 be sure that the Apostles of Christ were careful to follow His 

 w^arning against supplementing His teaching by the "traditions of 

 men." St. Peter, it is true, says nothing about a release ivom 

 Hades, and he appears to confine Christ's preaching to the 

 disobedient at the Deluge. Yet it would be strange if no results 

 came of that preaching, and there seems also no reason why the 

 Lord's work in Hades should be confined to the contemporaries of 

 Noah. St. Peter's indefinite language can, I believe, ov^y be 

 explained by the intentional reticence observed by our Lord and 

 His immediate disciples concerning the Intermediate State. 



I observe that Canon MacCulloch, in common with most writers 

 on Origen, imagines that this voluminous writer definitely taught 

 that the ransom Christ paid for us was paid to the devil. It is 

 true that Origen says so more than once. But few persons appear 

 to realize that Origen, the pioneer of free speculation on the truths 

 of religion, often dropped suggestions which fuller consideration 

 induced him to retract. Thus he frequently speaks of St. Peter as 

 the Rock. But when he comes to comment on Matt, xvi, 18, he 

 rightly interprets our Lord's words as referring, not to the Apostle, 

 but to his Confession. So in his sixth Homily on St. John (c. 37), 

 (as also elsewhere), he treats the sacrifice of Christ in a very 

 different fashion, saying that there " is more than one way by which 

 Christ accomplishes the work of redemption. Some of these are 

 clear to the mass of mankind, and some not." 



Again (p. 214) to " keep secret" the way of salvation (the phrase 

 used by Ignatius, is not, surely, equivalent to " deception "). Irenaeus 

 once more (p. 216 and elsewhere) says nothing about Hades, in 

 speaking of Christ's Redemption in the passages cited in the paper, 

 but he does not say that " Satan was vanquished by the keeping of 

 God's Commandment by the Son of God," a statement equivalent to 

 St. Paul's teaching in Rome. 



The definite statement of Clement of Alexandria (p. 217) that the 

 Saviour effected an " universal movement and translation " by His 

 visit to Hades, discloses to us a feature in Alexandrian theology 



