must be the subjects of it. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
The Lord, in treating of the judgment which He executed during His residence on earth, said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live."[1] In this passage it is distinctly said, not only that the hour is coming, but that it now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God. He also said, "The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day."[2] Now, who were the dead who are spoken of as then hearing the voice of the Son of God? Doubtless they were not only those who were insensible to His Divine teachings in the world; but those, also, who had passed out of it by natural death,—those living souls, who, being immortal, could not die, and who were then in the process of experiencing their judgment; hence, the scene of that event must have been the world of spirits.
The Lord said to the penitent malefactor, when dying upon the cross, "Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."[3] Now where was this? Doubtless it must have been some department in the spiritual world for the reception of souls emancipated from their bodies: both Jesus and the penitent were to enter it that very day. The promise certainly implied that the penitent would still continue to be a conscious living human being, notwithstanding the death of his material body: and where could that existence be enjoyed? The Lord spoke of it under the name of paradise, a name which only occurs in two other places throughout the Word:[4] in one, the apostle
