E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's benevolence.It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.[pg 1052]There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.F. The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel.The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's benevolence.It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.[pg 1052]There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.F. The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel.The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's benevolence.It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.[pg 1052]There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.F. The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel.The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's benevolence.It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.[pg 1052]There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.F. The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel.The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's benevolence.It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.[pg 1052]There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.F. The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel.The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's benevolence.It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.[pg 1052]There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.
It is maintained, however, by many who object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply:
(a) God is not only benevolent but holy, and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God's holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good which fully justifies the infliction.
Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.
Even love has dignity, and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing. Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner:“Love may not throw itself away.... We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.”We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God's holiness when he wrote:“If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!”Shakespeare, King John, 4:3—“Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!”Tennyson:“He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.”Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker:“What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,”he continued,“I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may—so help me—Horace Mann!”(Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love, but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness, and only righteous love is true love.
(b) In this life, God's justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform, and of afflictions which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.
There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.
There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sick-beds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity, but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God's benevolence,—any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain; and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment ofmanyincorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment ofoneincorrigibly impenitent person; if the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God's benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.
In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts:“What's the good of being good,”he asks,“if things are to turn out that way?”The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God's existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is“a certain fearful expectation of judgment”(Heb. 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from: 1. the fact that eternity is not endlesstime, but a state inconceivable to us; and 2. the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom.
(c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ's salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God's treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.
Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.
Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance“kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a“race”) that has fallen away from God. As through the church the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest“to principalities and powers in the heavenly places”(Eph. 3:10); so, through the punishment of the lost, God's holiness may be made known to a universe that without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin, and that God's holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.
With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned:“Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God's dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a‘pit,’a‘lake’; not an ocean. It is‘bottomless,’not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories which make God, and Satan or the Demiurge, nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated (Ps. 68:17;Deut. 32:2;Ps. 103:21;Mat. 6:13;1 Cor. 15:25;Rev. 14:1;21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that‘the fearful and unbelieving ... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’(Rev. 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense‘multitude which no man can number.’”Dr. Hodge:“We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”
The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd's article were sent to Mr. Beecher, whereupon he telegraphed from Denver[pg 1053]to the Review:“Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered.
(d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God's benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God's justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good.
A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”
A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil,—heathenism, prostitution, the saloon, the African slave-trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever? The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457—“If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?”We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ's weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God's heart:Mat. 23:37, 38—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”;cf.Hosea 11:8—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.”Dante, Hell, iii—the inscription over the gate of Hell:“Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”
A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267—“If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy who yielded to an inherited tendency—what has become of him? Those millions who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong—what of them? Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim—is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that, but, thank God, the number is not large.... No, penalty, remorse, despair, are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.... Retribution is a natural law; it is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.... Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not; but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fulness of the divine glory is revealed.”
(e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature; so benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.
But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.
But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his“strange work”of punishment (Is. 28:21). The sentence which the judge pronounces with tears is indicative of a tender and suffering heart, but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of“eternal judgment”(Heb. 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of[pg 1054]holiness among that number be forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an ever-growing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment.Mat. 7:13, 14—“few there be that find it”—“seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.
A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions; 2. Interpretation of the word“eternal”; 3. The doctrine of the immanence of God,—if God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature; 4. The influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness:“The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate,—I know His goodness and his love.”We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. that righteousness is only a form of love; 2. that righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful; 3. that man's freedom is incapable of endless abuse; 4. that not all men here have a fair probation; 5. that the amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God; 6. that the immanence of God does not leave room for free human action; 7. that God's object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love; 8. that the declarations of Scripture with regard to“an eternal sin”(Mark 3:29),“eternal punishment”(Mat. 25:46),“eternal destruction”(2 Thess. 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.
We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Müller, the distinguished Oxford philologist:“I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences, and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.”Max Müller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin; that God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment; that the very laws of man's nature express in this way God's righteousness; that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.
F. The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel.The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
The proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel, but is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries.—It is maintained by some, however, that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher's message. We reply:
(a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God; if he does this, God will care for the results.
Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”
Ez. 2:7—“And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”;3:10, 11, 18, 19—“Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.”
The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto:“Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God's anvil stands.”St. Jerome:“If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come, than that the truth be concealed.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:680—“Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.”The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment[pg 1055]are those of Jesus himself, as for example,Mat. 23:33—“Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?”Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”;Mat. 10:28—“be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment.”
(b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression, and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary, and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.
Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”
Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it, and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it“sneers at common sense, spits upon reason, and makes God a devil.”
But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man's danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man's Savior should himself be more than man; and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and with this that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God's holiness is but another name for benevolence; all proper foundation for morality is gone, and God's law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times; and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles; God is identified with nature, and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.
Theodore Parker passed through this process, and so did Francis W. Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result; and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue. Emory Storrs:“When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.”The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve:“Ye shall not surely die”(Gen. 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls“the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire”(Macbeth, 2:3).
Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671—“Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution.... If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.”Sonnet by Michael Angelo:“Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.”
(c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive, for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation which begins in fear of God's anger may end in the service of faith and love.
Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”
Luke 12:4, 5—“And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”;Jude 23—“and some save, snatching them out of the fire.”It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New. Only when God's mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men's view the[pg 1056]depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.
Michael Angelo's picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael's picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752—“What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.... Confession is the only way to light and peace.... The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.”Matthew Arnold said to his critics:“Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis”—“I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.”Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”Daniel Webster said:“I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew, and make me feel that the devil is after me.”
(d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul which eternally hates God is greater than the physical pains which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions, and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God's purpose in preaching, and to be the means of saving some who hear.
Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.
Acts 20:31—“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”;2 Cor. 2:14-17—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge in every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”;5:11—“Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”;1 Tim. 4:16—“Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.”
“Omne simile claudicat”as well as“volat”—“Every simile halts as well as flies.”No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is“God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe”(1 Cor. 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men's souls that moved Paul to say:“woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say:“I am clear! I am clear!”
So Richard Baxter wrote:“I preached as never sure to preach again. And as a dying man to dying men.”It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears. McCheyne's tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ. Such preaching of judgment and punishment were never needed more than now, when lax and unscriptural views with regard to law and sin break the force of the preacher's appeals. Let there be such preaching, and then many a hearer will utter the thought, if not the words, of the Dies Iræ, 8-10—“Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis. Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuæ viæ: Ne me perdas ilia die. Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tautus labor non sit cassus.”See Edwards, Works, 4:226-321; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 459-468; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 310, 319, 464; Dexter, Verdict of Reason; George, Universalism not of the Bible; Angus, Future Punishment; Jackson, Bampton Lectures for 1875, on the Doctrine of Retribution; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, preface, and Dogm. Theol., 2:667-754.