“SPIRITS IN PRISON.”

            “Not the spirits ‘now’ in prison, but the spirits once in prison, while the Ark was preparing, which is, indeed, the key of interpretation. Peter’s key must open Peter’s lock.” But this happens not to be Peter’s key. It is Mr. Campbell’s, and completely fails of even passing the key-hole. He says, the prison was “a figurative prison.” True it was not a gaol; but then a gaol is not the only literal prison. Any place of confinement is a literal prison, be it a gaol, a grave, or a nation enclosing a captive nation. The prison referred to by Peter is manifestly literal; for in speaking of “the spirits” he says they are “in prison.” It is admitted that by “the spirits” are meant “the antediluvians;” now while the ark was preparing they had as much liberty as the unbelieving Jews of Peter’s day, or the people of the United States in ours. They did just what was right in their own eyes. In Noah’s time, they married and gave in marriage, caroused, and enjoyed themselves to their heart’s content, but how was it in Peter’s? They were literally in prison “body, soul, and spirit.” They knew nothing and could do nothing; and so they remain to this day—literally “in prison.”

            To ascertain the nature or character of the prison, instead of referring to Moses and the Prophets, Mr. C. speculates on words in usu loquendi. He finds that “the specific idea” of the Greek family of words to which phulakee, “prison,” belongs, “is confinement.” This is doubtless a great discovery. The next revelation is, that “confinement has respect to time, as well as to place.” He ought to have said, “it has reference to place as well as to time,” for a place cannot be a prison independent of time. You may call a building a prison; but if it is to receive persons for no time it never can have an inmate, and therefore cannot be in fact a prison. Thus, whenever men are confined involuntarily for a longer or shorter time, there they are imprisoned, or in prison. Mr. Campbell says, Noah’s contemporaries were imprisoned for 120 years, unless they repented during that term; and he represents the deluge as the limit, or bound, or wall, as it were, of their figurative prison. He does not say where they were to go when set at liberty on repentance or death. Noah, I suppose, was set at liberty when he entered upon a year’s confinement in the Ark! But let that pass. If Noah’s contemporaries were in prison only for 120 years, were they set at liberty when engulfed in the deluge? Will Mr. Campbell tell us? And where do they enjoy their freedom? For liberty implies enjoyment. But, if the antediluvians were “in prison” while they were doing their own pleasure for 120 years, it is evident that Peter’s contemporaries of Israel were also “in prison” “on pain of destruction by a deluge” of war—Daniel 9: 26. Peter’s generation was the antitype of Noah’s; so that if the latter were in prison during Noah’s preaching by the Spirit for 120 years; the former were likewise for the forty years the same Spirit preached to them by Jesus and his apostles. “Noah,” says he, “by word and deed, preached to them repentance or death.” He preached to them in prison, did he? Yes. They did not repent? —No; therefore they were put to death at the end of their imprisonment! If this be granted, when sentence was executed they were then no longer in prison! This is the conclusion we are led to by Mr. Campbell’s premises!

            Death, in the scriptures is styled “captivity” which was “led captive” by Jesus in rising from among the dead as the first fruits of a future resurrection. But Mr. Campbell’s speculation makes death, liberality; and by consequence, all the dead, freemen escaped from the figurative prison above ground! This is “the key of interpretation” Mr. Campbell uses in his attempt to demonstrate, that his own former rendering of Peter’s phrase “the spirits in prison” by “the spirits now in prison,” is “a mere speculative fancy.” This is another among many instances adducible, of “Campbell against himself.” But there is no telling what lengths a man will go to in stultifying himself when he undertakes to interpret the apostles without regard to Moses and the Prophets. He has not found Peter’s key yet. The apostle’s is a lock that cannot be picked by any human invention. Immortal-soulism is a pick that cannot reach the bolt; and disables all that work by it from opening the prison door. But for this crotchet, Mr. C. would not have forged so fanciful an interpretation, which he has just constructed for the occasion to get quit of the editor of the “Magazine’s” opinion, which is a natural inference from his own speculations upon “Life and Death.”

            There is nothing in the text or context to prove that the antediluvians were in prison in any other sense than that all mankind are in the “bondage of corruption,” during Noah’s preaching. Speaking of the Holy Spirit it says “having gone he preached to the spirits * * * formerly disobedient.” When? “In the days of Noah.” Where were they in Peter’s day? “In prison;” therefore they are called “spirits in prison.” Where the prison is must be determined by “the law and the testimony,” not by reference to “the established laws of” sectarian “criticism,” however “sound” it may be supposed to be.

EDITOR.

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