We have seen that the mission of Christ to the dead was spoken of by Isaiah in the forty-second chapter. The same great prophet utters a prediction in the twenty-fourth chapter as follows: "The earth is also defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinances, broken the everlasting covenant." The context shows clearly that this prophecy refers to the last days, because it predicts that "the inhabitants of the earth are burned and but few men left." The term "everlasting covenant" cannot refer to the Mosaic law, which existed under the lesser priesthood. This law consisted in the rites and ceremonies of the offering of sacrifice, pointing to the great sacrifice of the Messiah, and of the law of carnal commandments, which served, Paul says, as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ. The Mosaic law was done away in Him, because he fulfilled the law. It was not everlasting. Breaking the everlasting covenant must, therefore, refer to an apostasy from the fullness of the Gospel as instituted by the Savior. In connection with this apostasy Isaiah tells us in the same chapter: "And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high and the kings of the earth upon the earth. And they shall be gathered together as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited." In other words, we might say that they have rejected the Gospel during the Christian era, as the antediluvians rejected it in the days of Noah; the judgments of God destroyed them in the flesh, and their spirits were consigned to the prison house and could not be visited until after many days. Whether the Gospel dispensations in the spirit would correspond in their divisions of time to those delivered to men in the flesh, we do not know so far as preaching to the spirits in prison is concerned; but this much is evident, that when no Gospel dispensation exists upon the earth, those in the spirit world, whatever their opportunities to hear, cannot enjoy the blessings of the Gospel, because no one in the flesh has authority to receive the ordinances in their behalf. It, therefore, follows that the haughty ones spoken of by Isaiah could not receive the Gospel until it should be revealed again from heaven in the latter days; and to fulfill this prophecy such a revelation must come, comprehending the keys of a dispensation of the Gospel to the dead as well as to the living.