before the work was finished neither men nor angels understood the
mystery of it, and what is more likely than that the completion of His
redeeming work was first made known to them in the spirit by the
Redeemer Himself? If we accept this view, the preaching to the spirits
in prison was the intimation to those already blessed, who had while on
earth repented and believed, that Messiah by dying had brought in
everlasting salvation for His people.

There is still a difficulty in Peter's words. Christ is said to have
preached to those who were disobedient in the days of Noah. Peter says
that in the writings of Paul there are some things hard to be
understood, but what he himself writes regarding Christ's work in Hades
is also difficult, and the passage has found a great variety of
interpretations. It would seem to imply that Christ in the spirit
carried a special message to the antediluvians who had been disobedient
and had perished in the Flood. What that message was we are not told,
and human conjecture may not supply what the Spirit of God has seen fit
to conceal. While the passage is a difficult one, the inference is not
warranted which some have drawn from it, that those who are disobedient
to Christ and reject His Gospel may, though they die impenitent,
nevertheless obtain salvation after death. The plain teaching of
Scripture is that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that
the judgment.[123] And whatever the statement of Peter may mean, it does
not sanction belief in purgatory or in universal restoration. Romanists
teach that the department of Hades to which the spirit of our Lord
descended was that in which dwelt the souls of believers who died before
the time of Christ, and that the object of His descent was the
deliverance and introduction into heaven of the pious dead who had been
imprisoned in the _Limbus Patrum_, as they term that portion of Hades
which these occupied. This they say was the triumph of Christ to which