I think we must see that this teaching of the Apostles and apostolic men of the whole early Church is true. People sometimes ask, "Why, then, is it new in our day?" The answer is easy. At the Reformation time there were terrible abuses connected with the Church's doctrine of the Intermediate life. The practice of purchased Masses, and Pardons, and Indulgences, and all the absurdities connected with the Roman purgatory, so exemplified in Tetzel's cry, "When money clinks at the bottom of my box a soul is released from purgatory." With such provocation one does not wonder--though one may greatly regret--that the indignant reformers, in sweeping away the falsehood, sometimes swept away also the underlying truth. The teaching about the Intermediate Life, and the old practice of the Church in remembering her faithful departed in prayer, were all put in the background as leading to dangerous abuse; and so the people, getting no real teaching about it, got the sad habit of trying to forget about the state of their dear ones departed. In their ignorance, they could only guess blindly what the Creed here means. So for centuries this has been the "lost article of the Creed." But this teaching of the Creed is none the less true, because it has been neglected in later days. And if it be true, it is well worth our attention, for it confirms what we have already learned from the previous teaching of the Lord, that the life of the departed is a clear, vivid, conscious life, since Christ could teach them and they could learn. And it suggests that the departed souls of the old world who had no chance of knowing Him have not by death lost all capacity for repenting and receiving Christ. Those men that St. Peter thinks of had perished in God's great judgment, but it would seem in their terrible fate they had not hardened themselves irrevocably against God. Those who do that on earth seem to close the door for ever. That is the sin against the Holy Ghost--the only sin which our Lord says hath never forgiveness either in this world or in the world to come. These evidently had still their capacity for repentance. And this gives one stirrings of hope in the perplexities of God's awful judgments. Don't be afraid to think this. There is not one word in Scripture to forbid our thinking it. It merely means that in the terrible fate which they had brought on themselves they had not utterly hardened their hearts--and Christ had not forgotten them in their misery. § 6