We would seem to find the needed explanation in the words of the inspired Apostle Peter in verses ten to twenty of the third chapter of his first epistle, in which he informed his readers that our Lord, subsequent to his death, and during the short interval that his dead body lay in its earthly tomb, went by the spirit and preached the Gospel to those who, on account of their disobedience, had forfeited their lives in the universal flood some 2,200 years previously, and therein he termed the place of their detention in the spirit world a "prison." The natural conclusion would thereby seem to be that, while at the hour of death the freed spirits of the good and righteous enter into that portion of the spirit world which the Lord himself termed "Paradise," a place which has been somewhere described felicitously as the ante-chamber of heaven, those of the unrighteous pass on into that condition of detention which the antedeluvians had experienced for so protracted a period of time, and where our Lord is said to have visited and preached to them. It could have been nothing but the Gospel of hope and salvation that he so mercifully brought to these waiting spirits, inasmuch as his chosen work we know was to carry the message of salvation, either personally or by means of his servants, to all the human race; hence there is every reason to suppose that, as the divine mercy endures for ever, so it will be extended in God's own good time, equally and in a similar manner, to all the unrighteous dead, that they too may receive the like joyful message that their ransom has been paid, and that their future freedom and happiness depends upon their obedience to the laws and principles of the everlasting Gospel.