752. So much for Josephus. Mr. Harbaugh subjoins as follows: “This extract is exceedingly interesting. It shows to what extent of distinctness the Jewish ideas of the future state had attained. The dreamlike underworld is here considerably illuminated. The righteous and the wicked are separated, and already share the first fruits of their eternal reward. The righteous are surrounded with intimations and shadowy promises of better things to come, in the expectation of which they are already happy; the wicked are surrounded with tokens and forebodings of more fearful ill, much of which they already suffer in awful expectation. 753. “Through this picture,” says our good parson, “we see in faint but terrible glimmerings, in the distance, the region of eternal fire, which awaits the wicked when the judgment-day shall remove them from Hades; on the other hand, we see also the dawning of an eternal day for the just, the rest and eternal new life which is to succeed this region. This kingdom of the dead, beyond which the thoughts of men in the early ages did not wander, is considered only as a place of detention for judgment, while the idea of a final state, both for the righteous and the wicked, is believed to exist beyond it.” 754. How can any person sincerely pretend that those who rely on a happy idea of our immortal life are indebted for it to the source from which this Hebrew Pharisee derived the impressions given in the preceding quotation? Yet the Pharisees were the only conspicuous Hebrew sect who believed in heaven. The Sadducees did not believe in immortality. 755. The history of Lazarus and the rich man, (says Harbaugh, page 168,) “plainly teaches that both the righteous and the wicked on death pass into a fixed and eternal abode, where no change is possible;” and he further states (pp. 169-70) that “the misery of the wicked commences immediately after death, and before the resurrection, and their condition is unchangeably fixed.” According to St. Luke, (chapter xvi.) in the page alluded to above by Harbaugh, we are informed that the wicked, while in the torture of hell-fire, are within the view of the righteous, (verse 23.) The righteous are near enough to converse with those in torment, and yet there is an impassable barrier between them. The rich man is not tortured for his sins, but simply because he had “_enjoyed good things_.” Yet Abraham, who turned his son and son’s mother out in the wilderness to starve, and twice exposed his wife to prostitution, is represented as enjoying the reward due to the righteous. 756. How little sincere, heartfelt belief there can be in the words of Christ, may be estimated from the fact that scarcely any Christian but seeks for the good things of this life, instead of qualifying themselves for heaven by undergoing the rewarded privations of a Lazarus.