Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/84

 the Lord went and preached to them after His resnrrection. Men dying with corrupted lives, which they had voluntarily fixed upon themselves, proceeded with them into the spiritual world, and there they still retained them. "In the place where the tree falleth, there shall it be." "He that is unjust will be unjust still: he that is filthy will be filthy still." Those spirits, from age to age, increased in number and enormity, until at length they became so multiplied and powerful as to overspread the minds of men with darkness, and urge them to love and adopt those iniquities of which we have been speaking. Thus, when the Lord came into the world, "hell had enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure; and hell from beneath was moved to meet Him at His coming;" and it was from the influences of this terrible condition that mankind had to be redeemed.

Redemption obviously implies deliverance from a state of bondage. This is the idea which the term everywhere expresses in the Scriptures. The rescue of the Israelites from their captivity in Egypt is frequently spoken of as redemption; and that circumstance, as an historical event, was the type of that spiritual deliverance now under consideration. It was the rescue of mankind from the ascendency of that infernal influence by which they were held in bondage, and thereby the restoration of that spiritual liberty in which they might again co-operate with the Lord to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. Hence, the Lord said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

The assumption of humanity by the Lord was essential to this purpose. This may be evident from its adoption;