latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts."1 The Second Adam was far to exceed the first man in glory, and in Him the holy temple builded of living stones was to rise up to God, crowned with light, the home of love and joy and peace. As the dawn of the coming light drew near, the darkness began to melt away. Hence we find that among the Gentiles-the people that are especially said to have "sat in darkness"-there was a growing sense of the reality of the life after death, and in Plato we have many a foregleam of the hope of the Gospel, that death was the gate of a brighter, happier world of which "no earthly bard has ever yet sung, or ever will sing, in worthy strains." 2 After the close of the canon of the Old Testament Israel was brought into close contact with Greek thought. The deutero-canonical Scriptures were mostly written in Greek, and date in part from the Captivity, and in part from the last three centuries before Christ. The Hebrew prophet Malachi, and Plato-who may be called the prophet of ancient Greece-both lived in the fourth century before Christ. In the book called "The Wisdom of Solomon "-written in Greek at Alexandria —we have the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul clearly taught. To this book we owe the sublime thought that the "souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," words that were hallowed by the 1 Hag. ii. 9. 3 cry uttered in the darkness of Calvary, at the climax of the supreme sacrifice of the Incarnate Word Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit"; words which have lingered on in the Latin portion of the Western Church, to be repeated in her Compline Office night by night as she commits herself to the divine protection—“In manus Tuas Domine commen- do spiritum meum"; words that echo around the bed of death when in our own Office the priest commends the departing soul to God, "as into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Saviour." 1 1 "Visitation of the Sick" in the Book of Common Prayer. MORS REGNAVIT A little mirth, a little song, And then, farewell the merry throng : A little laughter and some tears; A sunrise clouded ere the sun R. E. H. VI. The Witness of Ancient Greece and Rome WE E have seen that among the Hebrew people, at the close of the canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament, the expectation of a resurrection of the body was the hope to which their thoughts were chiefly directed. It is only incidentally that we find in the Old Testament anything that helps us to form an idea of what the Jews thought about the intermediate state. The teaching contained in some of their uncanonical sacred Books is more definite as to the state of the disembodied soul, but on the whole we feel that, although there was a growing hope that the body would rise again at the last day, there was no dogmatic teaching on this subject, nothing that to use a modern expression could be called de fide. We have now briefly to consider what was the belief as to the state of the dead among the Gentiles before the coming of Christ. It is sometimes objected that it is waste of time, or worse, to discuss what was taught and believed in the Pagan world. There might be some ground for this attitude towards pre-Christian speculation if it were not for the fact that GOD from |