These considerations fall like a mighty avalanche across the way of the common interpretation. The thought is felt to be almost an insuperable objection, and many are the shifts devised to get around it. One thinks that the word preached does not necessarily mean to preach the gospel, notwithstanding almost every instance of the use of the word in the New Testament describes the preaching of the gospel by Christ or his apostles; but that Christ went there to announce to them that his sufferings had been accomplished, and the prophecies concerning him fulfilled. But what object could there be in that? How would that affect their condition? Was it to add poignancy to their pain by rendering their misery doubly sure? And were there not devils enough in hell to perform that work, without making it necessary that Christ should perform such a ghostly task, and that, too, right between those points of time when he laid down his life for our sins and was raised again for our justification? Another thinks these were the spirits of such as repented during the forty days’ rain of the flood; that they were with the saved in Paradise, a department of the under world where the spirits of the good are kept (the elysium, in fact, of ancient heathen mythology), but that they “still felt uneasy on account of having perished [that is, lost their bodies] under a divine judgment,” and “were now assured by Jesus that their repentance had been accepted.” Such resorts show the desperate extremities to which the popular exposition of this passage is driven. Others frankly acknowledge that they cannot tell what, nor for what purpose, Christ preached to the lost in hell. So Landis, p. 236. But he says it makes no difference if we cannot tell what he preached nor why he preached, since we have the assurance that he did go there and preach. Profound conclusion! Would it not be better, since we have the assurance that he preached, to conclude that he preached at a time when preaching could benefit them, rather than at a time when we know that it could not profit them, and there could be no occasion for it whatever? The whole issue thus turns on the question, When was this work of preaching performed? Some will say, “While they were in prison, and that means the state of death, and shows that the dead are conscious and can be preached to.” Then, we reply, the dead also can be benefited by preaching, and led to repentance; and the doctrine of purgatory springs in full blossom into our creed.