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'In whose hands it shall continue safe and inviolate': Bishop Bull and the Middle State after death

From Bishop Bull's sermon 'The Middle State of Happiness or Misery', an extract illustrating how Wisdom 3:1 was understood as summarising the Scriptural hope for the post-mortem state, over and against the teaching of purgatory:

even in the Old Testament, we have a full testimony given to this truth, that the soul subsists after the death of the body, by Solomon, where, describing man's death and dissolution, he saith, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Whereas man consists of two parts, body and soul, the condition of these two, when a man dies, will be very different: for the body being at first taken out of the dust of the earth, and so of a corruptible constitution, shall go back into the earth again, and moulder into dust; but the soul, as it is of another and more excellent original, (as being at first inspired immediately by God Himself into the body,) shall not perish with the body, but return to that God, from whom it came; in whose hands it shall continue safe and inviolate, according to that of the author of the Book of Wisdom; "But the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and there shall no torment touch them". For Solomon seems to speak of the end of man according to God's first intention and ordination, which was, that the soul of man, after death, should go to God and the heavenly beings; and not of the accidental event of things, happening through man's sin and wickedness, whereby it comes to pass, that the souls of many men, when they die, instead of going to God, go to the devil and the infernal regions. Though it is true also, that the spirit of every man after death, good or bad, in some sense goes to God, either as a Father or as a Judge, to be kept somewhere under the custody of His almighty power, in order to the receiving of His final sentence at the last judgment, either of happiness or misery.

Bull's use of the Wisdom text in his sermon points to the significance of that text for Church of England divines in discussion of the post-mortem state. The Homily against the Fear of Death had invoked Wisdom 3:1 when setting forth a radically different approach to death and the piety surrounding it, contrasting "this quietness, rest, and everlasting joy" with the teaching of purgatory. Jeremy Taylor referred to this Wisdom text as "pregnant against the Roman purgatory". Although not used in the Prayer Book Burial of the Dead, the text was clearly echoed in its prayers: "Almighty God, with whom do live the  spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity". 

Bull's use of the text, therefore, reflects its wider standing in Anglican teaching and piety. Perhaps nothing quite so powerfully and beautifully captures this, and how Wisdom 3:1 shaped the 17th and 18th century Anglican approach to death, as the gentle, comforting tones of James Nares' 1734 anthem 'The Souls of the Righteous' (1734).

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