2 De Spectaculis, cap. xxx., Gibbon's trans.
3 Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 6 8.
4 Friends of Christ, p. 149.
soul of Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and loved the "unevangelical" young lawyer who was "not far from the kingdom of heaven," and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from the tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human race were placed in their hands, they would with scarcely a twinge of pain perhaps some of them even with a horrid satisfaction and triumph doom all except their own dogmatic coterie to hell. They are bound to do so. They profess to know infallibly that God will do so: if, therefore, the case being in their arbitration, they would decide differently, they thereby impeach the action of God, confess his decrees irreconcilable with reason and justice, and set up their own goodness as superior to his. Burnet has preserved the plea of Bloody Mary, which was in these words: "As the souls of heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in hell, there can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divine vengeance by burning them on earth." Thanks be to the infinite Father that our fate is in his hands, and not in the hands of men who are bigots,
"Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God,Who write down judgments with a pen hard nibb'd:Ushers of Beelzebub's black rod,Commending sinners, not to ice thick ribb'd,But endless flames to scorch them up like flax,Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribb'dThe impression of St. Peter's keys in wax!"
It may be thought that this doctrine and its awful concomitants, though once promulgated, are now nearly obsolete. It is true that, in thinking minds and generous hearts, they are getting to be repudiated. But by no means is it so in the recognised formularies of the established Churches and in the teachings of the popular clergy. All through the Gentile world, wherever there is a prevailing religion, the threats and horrors of a fearful doctrine of hell are still brandished over the trembling or careless multitudes. In Christendom, the authoritative announcement of the Roman and Greek Churches, and the public creeds confessed by every communicant of all the denominations, save two or three which are comparatively insignificant in numbers, show that the doctrine is yet held without mitigation. The Bishop of Toronto, only a year or two ago, published the authoritative declaration that "every child of humanity, except the Virgin Mary, is from the first moment of conception a child of wrath, hated by the blessed Trinity, belonging to Satan, and doomed to hell!" Indeed, the doctrine, in its whole naked and frightful extent, is necessarily, in strict logic, an integral part of the great system of the popular Christianity, that is, Christianity as falsely interpreted, paganized, and scholasticized. For if by the sin of Adam the entire race were totally depraved and condemned to a hopeless hell, and only those can be saved who personally appropriate by a realizing faith the benefits of the subsequent artifice carried out in the atoning blood of the incarnate God, certainly the extremist advocate of the doctrine concerning hell has not exceeded the truth, and cannot exceed it. All the necessities of logic rebuke the tame hearted theologians, and great Augustine's, great Calvin's, ghost walks unapproached among them, crying out that they are slow and inefficient in describing the enormous sweep of the inherited penalty! Many persons who have not taken pains to examine the subject suppose that the horrifying descriptions given by Christian authors of the state and sufferings of the lost were not intended to be literally received, but were meant as figures of speech, highly wrought metaphors calculated to alarm and impress with physical emblems corresponding only to moral and spiritual realities. The progress of thought and refinement has made it natural that recourse should often be had to such an explanation; but unquestionably it is a mistake. The annals of theology, both dogmatic and homiletic, from the time of the earliest Fathers till now, abound in detailed accounts of the future punishment of the wicked, whereof the context, the train of thought, and all the intrinsic characteristics of style and coherence, do not leave a shadow of doubt that they were written as faithful, though inadequate, accounts of facts. The Church, the immense bulk of Christendom, has in theory always regarded hell and its dire concomitants as material facts, and not as merely spiritual experiences.
Tertullian says, "The damned burn eternally without consuming, as the volcanoes, which are vents from the stored subterranean fire of hell, burn forever without wasting." 5 Cyprian declares that "the wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze in those living fires." Augustine argues at great length and with ingenious varieties of reasoning to show how the material bodies of the damned may withstand annihilation in everlasting fire.6 Similar assertions, which cannot be figuratively explained, are made by Irenaus, Jerome, Athanasius, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Gerson, Bernard, and indeed by almost all the Christian writers. Origen, who was a Platonist, and a heretic on many points, was severely condemned for saying that the fire of hell was inward and of the conscience, rather than outward and of the body. For the strict materiality of the fire of hell we might adduce volumes of authorities from nearly every province of the Church. Dr. Barrow asserts that "our bodies will be afflicted continually by a sulphurous flame, piercing the inmost sinews." John Whitaker thinks "the bodies of the damned will be all salted with fire, so tempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely and yet never consume." Jeremy Taylor teaches that "this temporal fire is but a painted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire in hell." Jonathan Edwards soberly and believingly writes thus: "The world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe of fire, a vast ocean of fire, in which the wicked shall be overwhelmed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shall be tost to and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves or billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which they shall forever be full of a quick sense within and without: their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, their loins, and their vitals shall forever be full of a glowing, melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements; and also they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively sense
5 Apol. cap. 47-48.
6 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxi. cap. 2 4.
to feel the torments; not for one minute, nor for one day, nor for one age, nor for two ages, nor for a hundred ages, nor for ten thousands of millions of ages one after another, but for ever and ever, without any end at all, and never, never be delivered." 7 Calvin says, "Iterum quaro, unde factum est, ut tot gentes una cum liberis eorum infantibus aterna morti involveret lapsus Ada absque remedio, nisi quia Deo ita visum est? Decretum horribile fateor." 8 Outraged humanity before the contemplation cries, "O God, horror hath overwhelmed me, for thou art represented as an omnipotent Fiend." It is not the Father of Christ, but his Antagonist, whose face glares down over such a scene as that! The above diabolical passage at the recital of which from the pulpit, Edwards's biographers tell us, "whole congregations shuddered and simultaneously rose to their feet, smiting their breasts, weeping and groaning" is not the arbitrary exaggeration of an individual, but a fair representation of the actual tenets and vividly held faith of the Puritans. It is also, in all its uncompromising literality, a direct and inevitable part of the system of doctrine which, with insignificant exceptions, professedly prevails throughout Christendom at this hour. We know most persons will hesitate at this statement; but let them look at the logic of the case in the light of its history, and they must admit the correctness of the assertion. Weigh the following propositions, the accuracy of which no one, we suppose, will question, and it will appear at once that there is no possibility of avoiding the conclusion.
First, it is the established doctrine of Christendom that no one can be saved without a supernatural regeneration, or sincere faith in the vicarious atonement, or valid reception of sacramental grace at the hands of a priest, conditions which it is not possible that one in a hundred thousand of the whole human race has fulfilled. Secondly, it is the established doctrine of Christendom that there will be a general day of judgment, when all men will be raised in the same bodies which they originally occupied on earth, when Christ and his angels will visibly descend from heaven, separate the elect from the reprobate, summon the sheep to the blissful pastures on the right hand, but "Proclaim The flocks of goats to folds of flame."
The world is to be burnt up, and the damned, restored to their bodies, are to be driven into the everlasting fire prepared for them. The resurrection of the body, still held in all Christendom, taken in connection with the rest of the associated scheme, necessitates the belief in the materiality of the torments of hell. That eminent living divine, Dr. Gardiner Spring, says, "The souls of all who have died in their sins are in hell; and there their bodies too will be after the resurrection." 9 Mr. Spurgeon also, in his graphic and fearful sermon on the "Resurrection of the Dead," uses the following language: "When thou diest, thy soul will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it: but at the day of judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that which we have on earth thy body will lie,
7 Edwards's Works, vol. viii. p. 166.
8 Instit., lib. iii. cap. xxiii. sect. 7.
9 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 258.
asbestos like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of Hell's Unutterable Lament!" And, if this doctrine be true, no ingenuity, however fertile in expedients and however fiendish in cruelty, can possibly devise emblems and paint pictures half terrific enough to present in imagination and equal in moral impression what the reality will be to the sufferers. It is easy to speak or hear the word "hell;" but to analyze its significance and realize it in a sensitive fancy is difficult; and whenever it is done the fruit is madness, as the bedlams of the world are shrieking in testimony at this instant. The Revivalist preachers, so far from exaggerating the frightful contents latent in the prevalent dogma concerning hell, have never been able and no man is able to do any thing like justice to its legitimate deductions. Edwards is right in declaring, "After we have said our utmost and thought our utmost, all that we have said and thought is but a faint shadow of the reality." Think of yourselves, seized, just as you are now, and flung into the roaring, glowing furnace of eternity; think of such torture for an instant, multiply it by infinity, and then say if any words can convey the proper force of impression. It is true these intolerable details are merely latent and unappreciated by the multitude of believers; and when one, roused to fanaticism by earnest contemplation of his creed, dares to proclaim its logical consequences and to exhort men accordingly, they shrink, and charge him with excess. But they should beware ere they repudiate the literal horrors of the historic orthodox doctrine for any figurative and moral views accommodated to the advanced reason and refinement of the times, beware how such an abandonment of a part of their system affects the rest.
Give up the material fire, and you lose the bodily resurrection. Renounce the bodily resurrection, and away goes the visible coming of Christ to a general judgment. Abandon the general judgment, and the climacteric completion of the Church scheme of redemption is wanting. Mar the wholeness of the redemption plan, and farewell to the incarnation and vicarious atonement. Neglect the vicarious atonement, and down crumbles the hollow and broken shell of the popular theology helplessly into its grave. The old literal doctrine of a material hell, however awful its idea, as it has been set forth in flaming views and threats by all the accredited representatives of the Church, must be uncompromisingly clung to, else the whole popular system of theology will be mutilated, shattered, and lost from sight. The theological leaders understand this perfectly well, and for the most part they act accordingly. We have now under our hand numerous extracts, from writings published within the last five years by highly influential dignitaries in the different denominations, which for frightfulness of outline and coloring, and for unshrinking assertions of literality, will compare with those already quoted.
Especially read the following description of this kind from John Henry Newman: "Oh, terrible moment for the soul, when it suddenly finds itself at the judgment seat of Christ, when the Judge speaks and consigns it to the jailers till it shall pay the endless debt which lies against it! 'Impossible! I a lost soul? I separated from hope and from peace forever? It is not I of whom the Judge so spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Savior, hold thy hand: one minute to explain it! My name is Demas: I am but Demas, not Judas, or Nicholas, or Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What! eternal pain for me? Impossible! it shall not be!' And the poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon which has hold of it, and whose every touch is torment. 'Oh, atrocious!' it shrieks, in agony, and in anger too, as if the very keenness of the infliction were a proof of its injustice. 'A second! and a third! I can bear no more! Stop, horrible fiend! give over: I am a man, and not such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport for thee! I have been taught religion; I have had a conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in science and art; I am a philosopher, or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a hero, or a statesman, or an orator, or a man of wit and humor. Nay, I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I died in communion with the Church: nothing, nothing which I have ever been, which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, and to the flame and stench which exhale from thee: so I defy thee, and abjure thee, O enemy of man!'
"Alas! poor soul! and, whilst it thus fights with that destiny which it has brought upon itself and those companions whom it has chosen, the man's name perhaps is solemnly chanted forth, and his memory decently cherished, among his friends on earth. Men talk of him from time to time; they appeal to his authority; they quote his words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, or write his history. 'So comprehensive a mind! such a power of throwing light on a perplexed subject and bringing conflicting ideas or facts into harmony!' 'Such a speech it was that he made on such and such an occasion: I happened to be present, and never shall forget it;' or, 'A great personage, whom some of us knew;' or, 'It was a rule with a very worthy and excellent friend of mine, now no more;' or, 'Never was his equal in society, so just in his remarks, so lively, so versatile, so unobtrusive;' or, 'So great a benefactor to his country and to his kind;' or, 'His philosophy so profound.' 'Oh, vanity! vanity of vanities! all is vanity! What profiteth it? What profiteth it? His soul is in hell, O ye children of men! While thus ye speak, his soul is in the beginning of those torments in which his body will soon have part, and which will never die!" 10
Some theologians do not hesitate, even now, to say that "in hell the bodies of the damned shall be nealed, as we speak of glass, so as to endure the fire without being annihilated thereby." "Made of the nature of salamanders," they shall be "immortal kept to feel immortal fire." Well may we take up the words of the Psalmist and cry out of the bottomless depths of disgust and anguish, "I am overwhelmed with horror!"
Holding this abhorrent mass of representations, so grossly carnal and fearful, up in the free light of to day, it cannot stand the test of honest and resolute inquiry. It exists only by timid, unthinking sufferance. It is kept alive, among the superstitious vestiges of the outworn and out grown past, only by the power of tradition, authority, and custom. In refutation of it we shall not present here a prolonged detail of learned researches and logical processes; for that would be useless to those who are enslaved to the foregone conclusions of a creed and possessed by invulnerable prejudices, while those who are thoughtful and candid can make
10 Sermon on "Neglect of Divine Calls and warnings."
such investigations themselves. We shall merely state, in a few clear and brief propositions, the results in which we suppose all free and enlightened minds who have adequately studied the subject now agree, leaving the reader to weigh these propositions for himself, with such further examination as inclination and opportunity may cause him to bestow upon the matter.
We reject the common belief of Christians in a hell which is a local prison of fire where the wicked are to be tortured by material instruments, on the following grounds, appealing to God for the reverential sincerity of our convictions, and appealing to reason for their truth. First, the supposition that hell is an enormous region in the hollow of the earth is a remnant of ancient ignorance, a fancy of poets who magnified the grave into Hades, a thought of geographers who supposed the earth to be flat and surrounded by a brazen expanse bright above and black beneath. Secondly, the soul, on leaving the body, is a spiritual substance, if it be any substance at all, eluding our senses and all the instruments of science. Therefore, in the nature of things, it cannot be chained in a dungeon, nor be cognizant of suffering from material fire or other physical infliction, but its woes must be moral and inward; and the figment that its former fleshly body is to be restored to it is utterly incredible, being an absurdity in science, and not affirmed, as we believe, in Scripture. Thirdly, the imagery of a subterranean hell of fire, brimstone, and undying worms, as used in the Scriptures of the New Testament, is the same as that drawn from heathen sources with modifications and employed by the Pharisees before the time of Christ and his disciples; and we must therefore, since neither Persians nor Pharisees were inspired, either suppose that this imagery was adopted by the apostles figuratively to convey moral truths, or else that they were left, in common with their countrymen, at least partially under the dominion of the errors of their time. Thus in every alternative we deny that the interior of the earth is, or ever will be, an abode of souls, full of fire, a hell in which the damned are to be confined and physically tormented.
The elements of the popular doctrine of future punishment which we thus reject are the falsities contributed by superstition and the priestly spirit. The truths remaining in the doctrine, furnished by conscience, reason, and Scripture, we will next exhibit, in order not to dismiss this head, on the nature of future punishment, with negations. What is the real character of the retributions in the future state? We do not think they are necessarily connected with any peculiar locality or essentially dependent on any external circumstances. As Milton says, when speaking of the best theologians, "To banish forever into a local hell, whether in the air, or in the centre, or in that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos deeper from holy bliss than the world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishment so proper and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with sin."
God does not arbitrarily stretch forth his arm, like an enraged and vindictive man, and take direct vengeance on offenders; but by his immutable laws, permeating all beings and governing all worlds, evil is, and brings, its own punishment. The intrinsic substances and forces of character and their organized correlations with the realities of eternity, the ruling principles, habits, and love of the soul, as they stand affected towards the world to which they go, these are the conditions on which experience depends, herein is the hiding of retribution. "Each one," as Origen says, "kindles the flame of his own appropriate fire." Superior spirits must look on a corrupted human soul with a sorrow similar, though infinitely profounder, to that with which the lapidary contemplates a splendid pearl with a dark flaw in its centre. The Koran says, "Men sleep while they live, and when they die they wake." The sudden infliction of pain in the future state comes from the sudden unveiling of secrets, quickening of the moral consciousness, and exposure of the naked soul's fitnesses to the spiritual correspondences of its deserts. It is said, "Death does Away disguise: souls see each other clear, At one glance, as two drops of rain in air Might look into each other had they life."
The quality of the soul's character decides the elements of the soul's life; and, as this becomes known on crossing the death drawn line of futurity, conscious retribution then arises in the guilty. This is a retribution which is reasonable, moral, unavoidable, before which we may well pause and tremble. The great moral of it is that we should not so much dread being thrust into an eternal hell as we should fear carrying a hell with us when we go into eternity. It is not so bad to be in hell as to be forced truly to say, "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."
If these general ideas are correct, it follows even as all common sense and reflection affirm that every real preparation for death and for what is to succeed must be an ingrained characteristic, and cannot consist in a mere opinion, mood, or act. Here we strike at one of the shallowest errors, one of the most extensive and rooted superstitions, of the world. Throughout the immense kingdoms of the East, where the Brahmanic and Buddhist religions hold sway over six hundred millions of men, the notion of yadasanna that is, the merit instantaneously obtained when at the point of death fully prevails. They suppose that in that moment, regardless of their former lives and of their present characters, by bringing the mind and the heart into certain momentary states of thought and feeling, and meditating on certain objects or repeating certain sacred words, they can suddenly obtain exemption from punishment in their next life.11 The notion likewise obtains almost universally among Christians, incredible as it may seem. With the Romanists, who are three fourths of the Christian world, it is a most prominent doctrine, everywhere vehemently proclaimed and acted on: that is the meaning of the sacrament of extreme unction, whereby, on submission to the Church and confession to a priest, the venal sins of the dying man are forgiven, purgatory avoided or lessened, and heaven made sure. The ghost of the King of Denmark complains most of the unwarned suddenness of his murder, not of the murder itself, but of its suddenness, which left him no opportunity to save his soul: "Sleeping, was I by a brother's hand Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
11 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 489.
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd; No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head."
Hamlet, urged by supernatural solicitings to vengeance, finds his murderous uncle on his knees at prayer. Stealing behind him with drawn sword, he is about to strike the fatal blow, when the thought occurs to him that the guilty man, if killed when at his devotions, would surely go to heaven; and so he refrains until a different opportunity. For to send to heaven the villain who had slain his father,
"That would be hire and salary, not revenge. He took my father grossly full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May; And how his audit stands who knows save Heaven? But, in our circumstance and course of thought, 'Tie heavy with him. And am I then revenged To take him in the purging of his soul, When he is fit and season'd for his passage? No; but when he is drunk, asleep, enraged, Or in the incestuous pleasures of his bed, At gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in't: Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damn'd and black As hell, whereto it goes."
This, though poetry, is a fair representation of the mediaval faith held by all Christendom in sober prose. The same train of thought latently underlies the feelings of most Protestants too, though it is true any one would now shrink from expressing it with such frankness and horrible gusto. But what else means the minute morbid anatomy of death beds, the prurient curiosity to know how the dying one bore himself in the solemn passage? How commonly, if one dies without physical anguish, and with the artificial exultations of a fanatic, rejoiceful auguries are drawn! if he dies in physical suffering, and with apparent regret, a gloomy verdict is rendered! It is superstition, absurdity, and injustice, all. Not the accidental physical conditions, not the transient emotions, with which one passes from the earth, can decide his fate, but the real good or evil of his soul, the genuine fitness or unfitness of his soul, his soul's inherent merits of bliss or bale. There is no time nor power in the instant of death, by any magical legerdemain, to turn away the impending retributions of wickedness and guilt. What is right, within the conditions of Infinite wisdom and goodness, will be done in spite of all traditional juggles and spasmodic spiritual attitudinizations. What can it avail that a most vile and hardened wretch, when dying, convulsed with fright and possessed with superstition, compels, or strives to compel, a certain sentiment into his soul, conjures, or tries to conjure, his mind into the relation of belief towards a certain ancient and abstract dogma?
"Yet I've seen men who meant not ill, Compelling doctrine out of death, With hell and heaven acutely poised Upon the turning of a breath."
Cruelly racking the soul with useless probes of theological questions and statements, they stand by the dying to catch the words of his last breath, and, in perfect consistence with their faith, they pronounce sentence accordingly. If, as the pallid lips faintly close, they hear the magic words, "I put my trust in the atoning blood of Christ," up goes the soul to heaven. If they hear the less stereotyped words, "I have tried to do as well as I could: I hope God will be merciful towards me and receive me," down goes the soul to hell. Strange and cruel superstition, that imagines God to act towards men only according to the evanescent temper and technical phrase with which they leave the world! The most popular English preacher of the present day, the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, after referring to the fable that those before whom Perseus held the head of Medusa were turned into stone in the very act and posture of the moment when they saw it, says, "Death is such a power. What I am when death is held before me, that I must be forever. When my spirit goes, if God finds me hymning his praise, I shall hymn it in heaven: doth he find me breathing out oaths, I shall follow up those oaths in hell. As I die, so shall I live eternally!" 12
No: the true preparation for death and the invisible realm of souls is not the eager adoption of an opinion, the hurried assumption of a mood, or the frightened performance of an outward act: it is the patient culture of the mind with truth, the pious purification of the heart with disinterested love, the consecrated training of the life in holiness, the growth of the soul in habits of righteousness, faith, and charity, the organization of divine principles into character. Every real preparation of the soul for death must be a characteristic rightly related to the immortal realities to which death is the introduction of the soul. An evil soul is not thrust into a physical and fiery hell, fenced in and roofed over from the universal common; but it is revealed to itself, and consciously enters on retributive relations. In the spiritual world, whither all go at death, we suppose that like perceives like, and thus are they saved or damned, having, by the natural attraction and elective seeing of their virtues or vices, the beatific vision of God, or the horrid vision of iniquity and terror.
It cannot be supposed that God is a bounded shape so vast as to fill the entire circuits of the creation. Spirit transcends the categories of body, and it is absurd to apply the language of finite things to the illimitable One, except symbolically. When we die, we do not sink or soar to the realm of spirits, but are in it, at once, everywhere; and the resulting experience will depend on the prevailing elements of our moral being. If we are bad, our badness is our banishment from God; if we are good, our goodness is our union with God. In every world the true nature and law of retribution lie in the recoil of conduct on character, and the assimilated results ensuing. Take a soul that is saturated with the rottenness of depravity into the core of heaven, and it is in the heart of hell still. Take a soul that is compacted of divine
12 Sermons, 3d Series. Sermon XIV., Thoughts on the Last Battle.
realities to the very bottom of hell, and heaven is with it there.
We are treading on eternity, and infinitude is all around us. Now, as well as hereafter, to us, the universe is action, the soul is reaction, experience is the resultant. Death but unveils the facts. Pass that great crisis, in the passage becoming conscious of universal realities and of individual relations to them, and the Father will say to the discordant soul, "Alienated one, incapable of my embrace, change and come to me;" to the harmonious soul, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."
Having thus considered the question as to the nature of future punishments, it now remains to discuss the question concerning their duration. The fact of a just and varied punishment for souls we firmly believe in. The particulars of it in the future, or the degrees of its continuance, we think, are concealed from the present knowledge of man. These details we do not profess to be able to settle much about. We have but three general convictions on the subject. First, that these punishments will be experienced in accordance with those righteous and inmost laws which indestructibly express the mind of God and rule the universe, and will not be vindictively inflicted through arbitrary external penalties. Secondly, that they will be accurately tempered to the just deserts and qualifications of the individual sufferers. And thirdly, that they will be alleviated, remedial, and limited, not unmitigated, hopeless, and endless.
Upon the first of these thoughts perhaps enough has already been said, and the second and third may be discussed together. Our business, therefore, in the remainder of this dissertation, is to disprove, if truth in the hands of reason and conscience will enable us to disprove, the popular dogma which asserts that the state of the condemned departed is a state of complete damnation absolutely eternal. Against that form of representing future punishment which makes it unlimited by conceiving the destiny of the soul to be an eternal progress, in which their initiative steps of good or evil in this life place different souls under advantages or disadvantages never relatively to be lost, we have nothing to object. It is reasonable, in unison with natural law, and not frightful.13 But we are to deal, if we fairly can, a refutation against the doctrine of an intense endless misery for the wicked, as that doctrine is prevailingly taught and received.
The advocates of eternal damnation primarily plant themselves upon the Christian Scriptures, and say that there the voice of an infallible inspiration from heaven asserts it. First of all, let us examine this ground, and see if they do not stand there only upon erroneous premises sustained by prejudices. In the beginning, then, we submit to candid minds that, if the literal eternity of future torment be proclaimed in the New Testament, it is not a part of the revelation contained in that volume; it is not a truth revealed by inspiration; and that we maintain for this reason. The same representations of the everlasting duration of future punishment in hell, the same expressions for an unlimited duration, which occur in the New Testament, were previously employed by the Hindus, Greeks, and Pharisees, who were not inspired, but must have drawn the doctrine from fallible sources. Now, to say the least, it is as reasonable to suppose that these expressions, when found in the New Testament, were
13 Lessing, Ueber Leibnitz von den Ewigen Strafen.
employed by the Saviour and the evangelists in conformity with the prevailing thought and customary phraseology of their time, as to conclude that they were derived from an unerring inspiration. The former is a natural and reasonable inference; the latter is a gratuitous hypothesis for which we have never heard of any evidence. If its advocates will honestly attempt really to prove it, we are convinced they will be forced to renounce it. The only way they continue to hold it is by taking it for granted. If, therefore, the strict eternity of future woe be declared in the New Testament, we regard it not as a part of the inspired utterance of Jesus, but as an error which crept in among others from the surrounding notions of a benighted pagan age.
But, in the next place, we do not admit by any means that the literal eternity of future damnation is taught in the Scriptures. On the contrary, we deny such an assertion, for several reasons. First, we argue from the usage of language before the New Testament was written. The Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, often make most emphatic use of phrases declaring the eternal sufferings of the wicked in hell; but they must have meant by "eternal" only a very long time, because a fundamental portion of the great system of thought on which their religions rested was the idea of recurring epochs, sundered by immense periods statedly arriving, when all things were restored, the hells and heavens vanished away, and God was all in all. If the representations of the eternal punishment of the wicked, made before the New Testament was written, were not significant, with metaphysical severity, of an eternity of duration, but only, with popular looseness, of an extremely long period, the same may be true of the similar expressions found in that record.
Secondly, we argue from the usage of language in and after the New Testament age. The critics have collected, as any one desirous may easily find, and as every theological scholar well knows, scores of instances from the writings of authors contemporary with Christ and his apostles, and succeeding them, where the Greek word for "eternal" is used popularly, not strictly, in a rhetorical, not in a philosophical, sense, not denoting a duration literally endless, but one very prolonged. In all Greek literature the word is undoubtedly used in a careless and qualified sense at least a hundred times where it is used once with its close etymological force. And the same is true of the corresponding Hebrew term. The writer of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs," at the close of every chapter, describing the respective patriarch's death, says, "he slept the eternal sleep," though by "eternal" he can only mean a duration reaching to the time of the resurrection, as plainly appears from the context. Iamblichus speaks of "an eternal eternity of eternities."14 Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, and others, the fact of whose belief in final universal salvation no one pretends to deny, do not hesitate with earnestness and frequency to affirm the "eternal" punishment of the wicked in hell. Now, if the contemporaries of the evangelists, and their successors, often used the word "eternal" popularly, in a figurative, limited sense, then it may be so employed when it occurs in the New Testament in connection with the future pains of the bad.
Thirdly, we argue from the phraseology and other peculiarities of the representation of the future woe of the condemned, given in the New Testament itself, that its authors
14 De Mysteriis Egyptiorum, cap. viii. sect. 10.
did not consciously intend to proclaim the rigid endlessness of that woe.15 "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." Since the word "everlasting" was often used simply to denote a long period, what right has any one to declare that here it must mean an absolutely unending duration? How does any one know that the mind of Jesus dialectically grasped the metaphysical notion of eternity and deliberately intended to express it? Certainly the intrinsic probabilities are all the other way. Such a conclusion is hardly compatible with the highly tropical style of speech employed throughout the discourse. Besides, had he wished to convey the overwhelming idea that the doom of the guilty would be strictly irremediable, their anguish literally infinite, would he not have taken pains to say so in definite, guarded, explained, unmistakable terms? He might easily, by a precise prosaic utterance, by explanatory circumlocutions, have placed that thought beyond possibility of mistake.
Fourthly, we have an intense conviction not only that the leaving of such a doctrine by the Savior in impenetrable obscurity and uncertainty is irreconcilable with the supposition of his deliberately holding it in his belief, but also that a belief in the doctrine itself is utterly irreconcilable with the very essentials of his teachings and spirit, his inmost convictions and life. He taught the infinite and unchangeable goodness of God: confront the doctrine of endless misery with the parable of the prodigal son. He taught the doctrine of unconquerable forgiveness, without apparent qualification: bring together the doctrine of never relenting punishment and his petition on the cross, "Father, forgive them." He taught that at the great judgment heaven or hell would be allotted to men according to their lives; and the notion of endless torment does not rest on the demerit of sinful deeds, which is the standard of judgment that he holds up, but on conceptions concerning a totally depraved nature, a God inflamed with wrath, a vicarious atonement rejected, or some other ethnic tradition or ritual consideration equally foreign to his mind and hostile to his heart.
Fifthly, if we reason on the popular belief that the letter of Scripture teaches only unerring truth, we have the strongest argument of all against the eternal hopelessness of future punishment. The doctrine of Christ's descent to hell underlies the New Testament. We are told that after his death "he went and preached to the spirits in prison." And again we read that "the gospel was preached also to them that are dead." This New Testament idea was unquestionably a vital and important feature in the apostolic and in the early Christian belief. It necessarily implies that there is probation, and that there may be salvation, after death. It is fatal to the horrid dogma which commands all who enter hell to abandon every gleam of hope, utterly and forever. The symbolic force of the doctrine of Christ's descent and preaching in hell is this, as Guder says in his "Appearance of Christ among the Dead," that the deepest and most horrible depth of damnation is not too deep and horrible for the pitying love which wishes to save the lost: even into the veriest depth of hell reaches down the love of God, and his beatific call sounds to the most distant distances. There is no outermost darkness to which his heavenly and all conquering light cannot shine. The book which teaches that Christ went even into hell itself, to seek and to save that which was lost,
15 Corrodi, Ueber die Ewigkeit der Hollenetrafen. In den Beitragen zur Beforderung des Vernunft. Denk. n. s. w. heft vii. ss. 41-72.
does not teach that from the instant of death the fate of the wicked is irredeemably fixed.
Upon the whole, then, we reach the clear conclusion that the Christian Scriptures do not really declare the hopeless eternity of future punishment.16 They speak popularly, not scientifically, speak in metaphors which cannot be analyzed and reduced to metaphysical precision. The subject is left with fearful warnings in an impressive obscurity. There we must either leave it, in awe and faith, undecided; or, if not content to do that, we must examine and decide it on other grounds than those of traditional authority, and with other instruments than those of textual interpretation.
Let us next sift and weigh the arguments from reason by which the dogma of the eternity of future misery is respectively defended and assailed. The advocates of it have sought to support it by four positions, which are such entire assumptions that only a word will be requisite to expose each of them to logical rejection. First, it is said that sin is infinite and deserves an infinite penalty because it is an outrage against an infinite being.17 A more absurd perversion of logic than this, a more glaring violation of common sense, was never perpetrated. It directly reverses the facts and subverts the legitimate inference. Is the sin measured by the dignity of the lawgiver, or by the responsibility of the law breaker? Does justice heed the wrath of the offended, or the guilt of the offender? As well say that the eye of man is infinite because it looks out into infinite space, as affirm that his sin is infinite because committed against an infinite God. That man is finite, and all his acts finite, and consequently not in justice to be punished infinitely, is a plain statement of fact which compels assent. All else is empty quibbling, scholastic jugglery. The ridiculousness of the argument is amusingly apparent as presented thus in an old Miracle Play, wherein Justice is made to tell Mercy "That man, havinge offended God who is endlesse, His endlesse punchement therefore may nevyr seese."
The second device brought forward to sustain the doctrine in question is more ingenious, but equally arbitrary. It is based on the foreknowledge of God. He foresaw that the wicked, if allowed to live on earth immortally in freedom, would go on forever in a course of constant sin. They were therefore constructively guilty of all the sin which they would have committed; but he saved the world the ravages of their actual crimes by hurling them into hell beneath the endless penalty of their latent infinite guilt. In reply to those who argue thus, it is obvious to ask, whence did they learn all this? There is no such scheme drawn up or hinted in Scripture; and surely it is not within the possible discoveries of reason. Plainly, it is not a known premise legitimating a result, not a sound argument proving a conclusion: it is merely a conceit, devised to explain and fortify a theory already embraced from other considerations. It is an imaginative hypothesis without confirmation.
16 Bretschneider, in his Systematische Entwickelung aller in der Dogmatik vorkommenden Begriffe, gives the literature of this subject in a list of thirty six distinct works. Sect. 139, Ewig keit der Hollenstrafen.
17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars iii. suppl. qu. 99, art. 1.
Thirdly, it has been said that future punishment will be endless because sin will be so. The evil soul, growing ever more evil, getting its habits of vice and passions of iniquity more deeply infixed, and surrounded in the infernal realm with all the incentives to wickedness, will become confirmed in depravity beyond all power of cure, and, sinning forever, be necessarily damned and tortured forever. The same objection holds to this argument as to the former. Its premises are daring assumptions beyond the province of our knowledge. They are assumptions, too, contrary to analogy, probability, the highest laws of humanity, and the goodness of God. Without freedom of will there cannot be sin; and those who retain moral freedom may reform, cease to do evil and learn to do good. There are invitations and opportunities to change from evil to good here: why not hereafter? The will is free now: what shall suddenly paralyze or annihilate that freedom when the soul leaves the body? Why may not such amazing revelations be made, such regenerating motives be brought to bear, in the spiritual world, as will soften the hardest, convince the stubbornest, and, sooner or later, transform and redeem the worst? It is true the law of sinful habit is dark and fearful; but it is frequently neutralized. The argument as the support of a positive dogma is void because itself only hypothetical.
Some have tried to prove eternal condemnation by an assumed necessity of moral gravitation. There is a great deal of loose and hasty talk afloat about the law of affinities distributing souls hereafter in fitted companies. Similar characters will spontaneously come together. The same qualities and grades of sympathy will coalesce, the unlike will fly apart. And so all future existence will be arranged in circles of dead equality on stagnant levels of everlasting hopelessness of change. The law of spiritual attraction is no such force as that, produces no such results. It is broken up by contrasts, changes, multiplicity of other interacting forces. We are not only drawn by affinity to those like ourselves, but often still more powerfully, with rebuking and redeeming effect, to those above us that we may become like them, to those beneath us that we may pity and help them. The law of affinity is not in moral beings a simple force necessitating an endless uniformity of state, but a complex of forces, sometimes mingling the unlike by stimulants of wedded similarity and contrast to bless and advance all, now punishing, now rewarding, but ever finally intended to redeem. Reasoning by sound analogy, the heavens and hells of the future state are not monotonous circles each filled with mutually reflecting personalities, but one fenceless spiritual world of distinctive, ever varying degrees, sympathetic and contrasted life, circulating freshness, variety of attractions and repulsions, divine advancement.
Finally, it is maintained by many that endless misery is the fate of the reprobate because such is the sovereign pleasure of God. This is no argument, but a desperate assertion. It virtually confesses that the doctrine cannot be defended by reason, but is to be thrown into the province of wilful faith. A host of gloomy theologians have taken this ground as the forlorn hope of their belief. The damned are eternally lost because that is the arbitrary decree of God. Those who thus abandon reason for dogmatic authority and trample on logic with mere reiterated assertion can only be met with the flat denial, such is not the arbitrary pleasure of God. Then, as far as argument is concerned, the controversy ends where it began.
These four hypotheses include all the attempted justifications of the doctrine of eternal misery that we have ever seen offered from the stand point of independent thought. We submit that, considered as proofs, they are utterly sophistical.
There are three great arguments in refutation of the endlessness of future punishment, as that doctrine is commonly held. The first argument is ethical, drawn from the laws of right; the second is theological, drawn from the attributes of God; the third is experimental, drawn from the principles of human nature. We shall subdivide these and consider them successively.
In the first place, we maintain that the popular doctrine of eternal punishment is unjust, because it overlooks the differences in the sins of men, launching on all whom it embraces one infinite penalty of undiscriminating damnation. The consistent advocates of the doctrine, the boldest creeds, unflinchingly avow this, and defend it by the plea that every sin, however trivial, is equally an offence against the law of the infinite God with the most terrible crime, and equally merits an infinite punishment. Thus, by a metaphysical quibble, the very basis of morals is overturned, and the child guilty of an equivocation through fear is put on a level with the pirate guilty of robbery and murder through cold blooded avarice and hate. In a hell where all are plunged in physical fire for eternity there are no degrees of retribution, though the degrees of evil and demerit are as numerous and various as the individuals. The Scriptures say, "Every man shall receive according to the deeds done in the body:" some "shall be beaten with many stripes," others "with few stripes."
The first principle of justice exact discrimination of judgment according to deeds and character is monstrously violated and all differences blotted out by the common dogma of hell. A better thought is shown in the old Persian legend which tells that God once permitted Zoroaster to accompany him on a visit to hell. The prophet saw many in grievous torments. Among the rest, he saw one who was deprived of his right foot. Asking the meaning of this, God replied, "Yonder sufferer was a king who in his whole life did but one kind action. Passing once near a dromedary which, tied up in a state of starvation, was vainly striving to reach some provender placed just beyond its utmost effort, the king with his right foot compassionately kicked the fodder within the poor beast's reach. That foot I placed in heaven: the rest of him is here." 18
Again: there is the grossest injustice in the first assumption or fundamental ground on which the theory we are opposing rests. That theory does not teach that men are actually damned eternally on account of their own personal sins, but on account of original sin: the eternal tortures of hell are the transmitted penalty hurled on all the descendants of Adam, save those who in some way avoid it, in consequence of his primal transgression. Language cannot characterize with too much severity, as it seems to us, the injustice, the immorality, involved in this scheme. The belief in a sin, called "original," entailed by one act of one person upon a whole immortal race of countless millions, dooming vast majorities of them helplessly to a hopeless torture prison, can rest only on a sleep of reason and a delirium of
18 Wilson's ed. of Mill's Hist. of British India, vol. i. p. 429, note.
conscience. Such a "sin" is no sin at all; and any penalty inflicted on it would not be the necessary severity of a holy God, but a species of gratuitous vengeance. For sin, by the very essence of ethics, is the free, intelligent, wilful violation of a law known to be right; and every punishment, in order to be just, must be the suffering deserved by the intentional fault, the personal evil, of the culprit himself. The doctrine before us reverses all this, and sends untold myriads to hell forever for no other sin than that of simply having been born children of humanity. Born totally depraved, hateful to God, helpless through an irresistible proclivity to sin and an ineradicable aversion to evangelical truth, and asked to save themselves, asked by a mockery like that of fettering men hand and foot, clothing them in leaden straitjackets, and then flinging them overboard, telling them not to drown! What justice, what justice, is here in this?
Thirdly, the profound injustice of this doctrine is seen in its making the alternative of so unutterably awful a doom hinge upon such trivial particulars and upon merely fortuitous circumstances. One is born of pious, orthodox parents, another of heretics or infidels: with no difference of merit due to them, one goes to heaven, the other goes to hell. One happens to form a friendship with an evangelical believer, another is influenced by a rationalist companion: the same fearful diversity of fate ensues. One is converted by a single sermon: if he had been ill that day, or had been detained from church by any other cause, his fated bed would have been made in hell, heaven closed against him forever. One says, "I believe in the Trinity of God, in the Deity of Christ;" and, dying, he goes to heaven. Another says, "I believe in the Unity of God and in the humanity of Christ:" he, dying, goes to hell. Of two children snatched away by disease when twenty four hours old, one has been baptized, the other not: the angels of heaven welcome that, the demons of hell clutch this. The doctrine of infant damnation, intolerably painful as it is, has been proclaimed thousands of times by authoritative teachers and by large parties in the Church, and is a logical sequence from the popular theology. It is not a great many years since people heard, it is said, the celebrated statement that "hell is paved with the skulls of infants not a span long!" Think of the everlasting bliss or misery of a helpless infant depending on the petty accident of whether it was baptized or not! There are hypothetical cases like the following: If one man had died a year earlier, when he was a saint, he would not have fallen from grace, and renounced his faith, and rolled in crimes, and sunk to hell. If another had lived a year later, he would have been smitten with conviction, and would have repented, and made his peace, and gone to heaven. To the everlasting loss of each, an eternity of bliss against an eternity of woe hung fatally poised on the time appointed for him to die. Oh how the bigoted pride, the exclusive dogmatism of self styled saints, self flatterers equally satisfied of their own election and of the rejection of almost everybody else, ought to sink and fade when they reflect on the slight chances, mere chances of time and place, by which the infinite contingency has been, or is to be, decided! They should heed the impregnable good sense and logic conveyed in the humane hearted poet's satirical humor when he advises such persons to
"Consider well, before, like Hurlothrumbo,They aim their clubs at any creed on earth,That by the simple accident of birthThey might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo."
It is evidently but the rankest mockery of justice to suspend an infinite woe upon an accident out of the power of the party concerned.
Still further: there is a tremendous injustice even in that form of the doctrine of endless punishment, the most favorable of all, which says that no one is absolutely foreordained to hell, but that all are free, and that life is a fixed season of probation wherein the means of salvation are offered to all, and if they neglect or spurn them the fault is their own, and eternal pain their merited portion. The perfectly apparent inconsistency of this theory with known facts is fatal to it, since out of every generation there are millions on millions of infants, idiots, maniacs, heathen, within whose hearing or power the means of salvation by a personal appropriation of the atoning merit of Christ's blood were never brought; so that life to them is no scene of Christian probation. But, waiving that, the probation is not a fair one to anybody. If the indescribable horror of an eternal damnation be the consequence that follows a certain course while we are on trial in this life, then a knowledge of that fact in all its bearings ought to be given us, clear, explicit, beyond any possibility of mistake or doubt. Otherwise the probation is not fair. To place men in the world, as millions are constantly placed, beset by allurements of every sort within and without, led astray by false teachings and evil examples, exposed in ignorance, bewildered with uncertainties of conflicting doubts and surmises, either never hearing of the way of salvation at all, or hearing of it only in terms that seem absurd in themselves and unaccompanied by sufficient, if by any, proof, and then, if under these fearful hazards they waver from strict purity of heart, rectitude of conduct, or orthodoxy of belief, to condemn them to a world of everlasting agony, would be the very climax of cruelty, with no touch of mercy or color of right.
Beneath such a rule the universe should be shrouded in the blackness of despair, and God be thought of with a convulsive shudder. Such a "probation" would be only like that on which the Inquisitors put their victims who were studiously kept ignorant in their dungeons, waiting for the rack and the flame to be made ready. Few persons will deny that, as the facts now are, a good, intelligent, candid man may doubt the reality of an endless punishment awaiting men in hell. But if the doctrine be true, and he is on probation under it, is it fair that he should be left honestly in ignorance or doubt about it? No: if it be true, it ought to be burned into his brain and crushed into his soul with such terrific vividness and abiding constancy of impression as would deter him ever from the wrong path, keep him in the right. A distinguished writer has represented a condemned delinquent, suffering on, and still interminably on, in hell, thus complaining of the unfairness of his probation: "Oh, had it been possible for me to conceive even the most diminutive part of the weight and horror of this doom, I should have shrunk from every temptation to sin, with the most violent recoil."19
19 John Foster, Letter on the Eternity of Future Punishments.
If an endless hell is to be the lot of the sinner, he ought to have an infallible certainty of it, with all possible helps and incentives to avoid it. Such is not the case; and therefore, since God is just and generous, the doctrine is not true.
Finally, the injustice of the dogma of everlasting punishment is most emphatically shown by the fact that there is no sort of correspondence or possible proportion between the offence and the penalty, between the moment of sinning life and the eternity of suffering death. If a child were told to hold its breath thirty seconds, and, failing to do it, should be confined in a dark solitary dungeon for seventy years amidst loathsome horrors and speechless afflictions, and be frightfully scourged six times a day for that entire period, there would be just proportion nay, an inexpressibly merciful proportion between the offence and the punishment, in comparison with that which, being an absolutely infinite disproportion, does not really admit of any comparison, the sentence to an eternal abode in hell as a penalty for the worst kind and the greatest amount of crime a man could possibly crowd into a life of a thousand years. Think, then, of passing such a sentence on one who has struggled hard against temptation, and yielded but rarely, and suffered much, and striven to do as well as he could, and borne up courageously, with generous resolves and affections, and died commending his soul to God in hope.
"Fearfully fleet is this life," says one, "and yet in it eternal life is lost or won: profoundly wretched is this life, yet in it eternal bliss is lost or won." Weigh the words adequately, and say how improbable is the thought, and how terribly unjust. Perhaps there have already lived upon this earth, and died, and passed into the invisible world, two hundred thousand millions of men, the everlasting doom of every one of whom, it is imagined, was fixed unalterably during the momentary period of his mortal transit from cradle to grave. In respect of eternity, six thousand years and this duration must be reduced to threescore years and ten, since that is all that each generation enjoyed is the same as one hour. Suppose, now, that all these two hundred thousand millions of men were called into being at once; that they were placed on probation for one hour; that the result of their choice and action in that hour was to decide their irrevocable fate, actually forever, to ecstatic bliss or to ecstatic woe; that during that hour they were left, as far as clear and stable conviction goes, in utter ignorance and uncertainty as to the great realities of their condition, courted by opposing theories and modes of action; and that, when the clock of time knelled the close of that awful, that most evanescent hour, the roaring gulf of torture yawned, and its jaws of flame and blackness closed over ninety nine hundredths of them for eternity! That is a fair picture of the popular doctrine of temporal probation and eternal punishment, when examined in the light of the facts of human life. Of course, no man at this day, who is in his senses and thinks honestly upon the subject, can credit such a doctrine, unless indeed he believes that a lawless fiend sits on the throne of the universe and guides the helm of destiny. And lives there a man of unperverted soul who would not decidedly prefer to have no God rather than to have such a one? Ay, "Rather than so, come FATE into the list And champion us to the utterance."
Let us be atheists, and bow to mortal Chance, believe there is no pilot at all at the rudder of Creation's vessel, no channel before the prow, but the roaring breakers of despair to right and left, and the granite bluff of annihilation full in front!
In the next place, then, we argue against the doctrine of eternal damnation that it is incompatible with any worthy idea of the character of God. God is love; and love cannot consent to the useless torture of millions of helpless souls for eternity. The gross contradiction of the common doctrine of hell to the spirit of love is so obvious that its advocates, unable to deny or conceal it, have often positively proclaimed it, avowing that, in respect to the wicked, God is changed into a consuming fire full of hatred and vengeance. But that is unmitigated blasphemy. God is unchangeable, his very nature being disinterested, immutable goodness. The sufferings of the wicked are of their own preparation. If a pestilential exhalation is drawn from some decaying substance, it is not the fault of any alteration in the sunlight. But a Christian writer assures us that when "the damned are packed like brick in a kiln, so bound that they cannot move a limb nor even an eyelid, God shall blow the fires of hell through them for ever and ever."
And another writer says, "All in God is turned into fury: in hell he draws out into the field all his forces, all his attributes, whereof wrath is the leader and general."20 Such representations may be left without a comment. Every enlightened mind will instantly reject with horror the doctrine which necessitates a conception of God like that here pictured forth. God is a being of infinite forgiveness and magnanimity. To the wandering sinner, even while a great way off, his arms are open, and his inviting voice, penetrating the farthest abysses, says, "Return." His sun shines and his rain falls on the fields of the unjust and unthankful. What is it, the instant mortals pass the line of death, that shall transform this Divinity of yearning pity and beneficence into a devil of relentless hate and cruelty? It cannot be. We shall find him dealing towards us in eternity as he does here. An eminent theologian says, "If mortal men kill the body temporally in their anger, it is like the immortal God to damn the soul eternally in his." "God holds sinners in his hands over the mouth of hell as so many spiders; and he is dreadfully provoked, and he not only hates them, but holds them in utmost contempt, and he will trample them beneath his feet with inexpressible fierceness, he will crush their blood out, and will make it fly so that it will sprinkle his garments and stain all his raiment."21 Oh, ravings and blasphemies of theological bigotry, blinded with old creeds, inflamed with sectarian hate, soaked in the gall of bitterness, encompassed by absurd delusions, you know not what you say!
A daring writer of modern times observes that God can never say from the last tribunal, in any other than a limited and metaphorical sense, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire," because that would not be doing as he would be done by. Saving the appearance of irreverence, we maintain his assertion to be just, based on impregnable morality. A recent religious poet describes Jesus, on descending into hell after his crucifixion,
20 For these and several other quotations we are indebted to the Rev. T. J. Sawyer's work, entitled "Endless Punishment: its Origin and Grounds Examined."
21 Edwards's works, vol. vii. p. 499.
meeting Judas, and when he saw his pangs and heard his stifled sobs, "Pitying, Messiah gazed, and had forgiven, But Justice her eternal bar opposed." 22
The instinctive sentiment is worthy of Jesus, but the deliberate thought is worthy of Calvin. Why is it so calmly assumed that God cannot pardon, and that therefore sinners must be given over to endless pains? By what proofs is so tremendous a conclusion supported? Is it not a gratuitous fiction of theologians? The exemplification of God's character and conduct given in the spirit, teachings, and deeds of Christ is full of a free mercy, an eager charity that rushes forward to forgive and embrace the sinful and wretched wanderers. He is a very different being whom the evangelist represents saying of Jesus, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," from Him whom Professor Park describes "drawing his sword on Calvary and smiting down his Son!"
Why may not pardon from unpurchased grace be vouchsafed as well after death as before? What moral conditions alter the case then? Ah! it is only the metaphysical theories of the theologians that have altered the case in their fancies and made it necessary for them to limit probation. The attributes of God are laws, his modes of action are the essentialities of his being, the same in all the worlds of boundless extension and all the ages of endless duration. How far some of the theologians have perverted the simplicity of the gospel, or rather how utterly they have strayed from it, may be seen when we remember that Christ said concerning little children, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven," and then compare with this declaration such a statement as this: "Reprobate infants are vipers of vengeance which Jehovah will hold over hell in the tongs of his wrath, till they writhe up and cast their venom in his face." We deliberately assert that no depraved, insane, pagan imagination ever conceived of a fiend malignant and horrible enough to be worthily compared with this Christian conception of God. Edwards repeatedly says, in his two sermons on the "Punishment of the Wicked" and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," "You cannot stand an instant before an infuriated tiger even: what, then, will you do when God rushes against you in all his wrath?" Is this Christ's Father?
The God we worship is "the Father of lights, with whom there is neither variableness nor shadow of turning, from whom cometh down every good and every perfect gift." It is the Being referred to by the Savior when he said, in exultant trust and love, "I am not alone; for the Father is with me." It is the infinite One to whom the Psalmist says, "Though I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there." If God is in hell, there must be mercy and hope there, some gleams of alleviation and promise there, surely; even as the Lutheran creed says that "early on Easter morning, before his resurrection, Christ showed himself to the damned in hell." If God is in hell, certainly it must be to soothe, to save. "Oh, no," says the popular theologian. Let us quote his words. "Why is God here? To keep the tortures of the damned freshly plied, and to see that no one ever escapes!" Can the climax of horror and
22 Lord, Christ in Hades.
blasphemy any further go? How much more reasonable, more moral and Christ like, to say, with one of the best authors of our time,
"What hell may be I know not: this I know: I cannot lose the presence of the Lord: One arm humility takes hold upon His dear Humanity; the other love Clasps his Divinity: so, where I go He goes; and better fire wall'd Hell with him Than golden gated Paradise without."
The irreconcilableness of the common doctrine of endless misery with any worthy idea of God is made clear by a process of reasoning whose premises are as undeniable as its logic is irrefragable and its conclusion consolatory. God is infinite justice and goodness. His purpose in the creation, therefore, must be the diffusion and triumph of holiness and blessedness. God is infinite wisdom and power. His design, therefore, must be fulfilled. Nothing can avail to thwart the ultimate realization of all his intentions. The rule of his omnipotent love pervades infinitude and eternity as a shining leash of law whereby he holds every child of his creation in ultimate connection with his throne, and will sooner or later bring even the worst soul to a returning curve from the career of its wildest orbit. In the realm and under the reign of a paternal and omnipotent God every being must be salvable. Remorse itself is a recoil which may fling the penitent into the lap of forgiving love. Any different thought appears narrow, cruel, heathen. The blackest fiend that glooms the midnight air of hell, bleached through the merciful purgation of sorrow and loyalty, may become a white angel and be drawn into heaven.
Lavater writes of himself, and the same is true of many a good man, "I embraced in my heart all that is called man, past, present, and future times and nations, the dead, the damned, even Satan. I presented them all to God with the warmest wishes that he would have mercy upon all." This is the true spirit of a good man. And is man better than his Maker? We will answer that question, and leave this head of the discussion, by presenting an Oriental apologue.
God once sat on his inconceivable throne, and far around him, rank after rank, angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim, resting on their silver wings and lifting their dazzling brows, rose and swelled, with the splendors of an illimitable sea of immortal beings, gleaming and fluctuating to the remotest borders of the universe. The anthem of their praise shook the pillars of the creation, and filled the vault of heaven with a pulsing flood of harmony. When, as they closed their hymn, stole up, faint heard, as from some most distant region of all space, in dim accents humbly rising, a responsive "Amen." God asked Gabriel, "Whence comes that Amen?" The hierarchic peer replied, "It rises from the damned in hell." God took, from where it hung above his seat, the key that unlocks the forty thousand doors of hell, and, giving it to Gabriel, bade him go release them. On wings of light sped the enraptured messenger, rescued the millions of the lost, and, just as they were, covered all over with the traces of their sin, filth, and woe, brought them straight up into the midst of heaven. Instantly they were transformed, clothed in robes of glory, and placed next to the throne; and henceforth, for evermore, the dearest strain to God's ear, of all the celestial music, was that borne by the choir his grace had ransomed from hell. And, because there is no envy or other selfishness in heaven, this promotion sent but new thrills of delight and gratitude through the heights and depths of angelic life.
We come now to the last class of reasons for disbelieving the dogma of eternal damnation, namely, those furnished by the principles of human nature and the truths of human experience. The doctrine, as we think can be clearly shown, is literally incredible to the human mind and literally intolerable to the human heart. In the first place, it is, viewed in the abstract, absolutely incredible because it is inconceivable: no man can possibly grasp and appreciate the idea. The nearest approximation to it ever made perhaps is in De Quincey's gorgeous elaboration of the famous Hindu myth of an enormous rock finally worn away by the brushing of a gauze veil; and that is really no approximation at all, since an incommensurable chasm always separates the finite and the infinite. John Foster says, "It is infinitely beyond the highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror of the doom to eternal damnation." The Buddhists, who believe that the severest sentence passed on the worst sinner will be brought to an end and his redemption be attained, use the following illustration of the staggering periods that will first elapse. A small yoke is thrown into the ocean and borne about in every direction by the various winds. Once in a hundred thousand years a blind tortoise rises to the surface of the water. Will the time ever come when that tortoise shall so rise up that its neck shall enter the hole of the yoke? It may, but the time required cannot be told; and it is equally difficult for the unwise man, who has entered one of the great hells, to obtain deliverance. There is a remarkable specimen of the attempt to set forth the idea of endless misery, by Suso, a mystic preacher who flourished several centuries ago. It runs thus. "O eternity, what art thou? Oh, end without end! O father, and mother, and all whom we love! May God be merciful unto you for evermore! for we shall see you no more to love you; we must be separated forever! O separation, everlasting separation, how painful art thou! Oh, the wringing of hands! Oh, sighing, weeping, and sobbing, unceasing howling and lamenting, and yet never to be pardoned! Give us a millstone, says the damned, as large as the whole earth, and so wide in circumference as to touch the sky all around, and let a little bird come in a hundred thousand years, and pick off a small particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire nothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus our pains also; yet even that cannot be."23 But, after all the struggles of reason and all the illustrations of laboring imagination, the meaning of the phrase "eternal suffering in hell" remains remote, dim, unrealized, an abstraction in words. If we could adequately apprehend it, if its full significance should burst upon us, as sometimes in fearful dreams the spaceless, timeless, phantasmal, reeling sense of
23 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 210.
the infinite seems to be threatening to break into the brain, an annihilating shudder would seize and destroy the soul.
We say, therefore, that the doctrine of the eternity of future punishment is not believed as an intellectually conceived truth, because that is a metaphysical impossibility. But more: we affirm, in spite of the general belief in it publicly professed, that it is actually held by hardly any one as a practical vivid belief even within the limits wherein, as an intellectual conception, it is possible. When intellect and imagination do not fail, heart and conscience do, with sickened faintness and convulsive protest. In his direful poem on the Last Day, Young makes one of the condemned vainly beg of God to grant "This one, this slender, almost no, request: When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment is grown weary of its prey, When I have raved of anguish'd years in fire Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire."