Such a thought, when confronted with any generous holy sentiment or with any worthy conception of the Divine character, is practically incredible. The men all around us in whose Church creed such a doctrine is written down do not truly believe it. "They delude themselves," as Martineau well says, "with the mere fancy and image of a belief. The death of a friend who departs from life in heresy affects them in the same way as the loss of another whose creed was unimpeachable: while the theoretic difference is infinite, the practical is virtually nothing." Who that had a child, parent, wife, brother, or other precious friend, condemned to be roasted to death by a slow fire, would not be frantic with agony? But there are in the world literally millions on millions, some of whose nearest and dearest ones have died under circumstances which, by their professed creeds, can leave no doubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguish unutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about as smilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame, in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerly and as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth of this exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma to whose technical terms they formally subscribe.
A small proportion of its professors do undeniably believe the doctrine so far as it can be sanely believed; and accordingly the world is to them robed in a sable shroud, and life is an awful mockery, under a flashing surface of sports concealing a bottomless pit of horror. Every observing person has probably known some few in his life who, in a degree, really believed the common notions concerning hell, and out of whom, consequently, all geniality, all bounding impulses, all magnanimous generosities, were crushed, and their countenances wore the perpetual livery of mourning, despair, and misanthropy. We will quote the confessions of two persons who may stand as representatives of the class of sincere believers in the doctrine. The first is a celebrated French preacher of a century and a half ago, the other a very eminent American divine of the present day. Saurin says, in his great sermon on Hell, "I sink under the weight of this subject, and I find in the thought a mortal poison which diffuseth itself into every period of my life, rendering society tiresome, nourishment insipid, pleasure disgustful, and life itself a cruel bitter." Albert Barnes writes, "In the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why man should suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind. It is all dark dark dark to my soul; and I cannot disguise it."
Such a state of mind is the legitimate result of an endeavor sincerely to grasp and hold the popularly professed belief. So often as that endeavor reaches a certain degree of success, and the idea of an eternal hell is reduced from its vagueness to an embraced conception, the over fraught heart gives way, the brain, stretched on too high a tension, reels, madness sets in, and one more case is added to that list of maniacs from religious causes which, according to the yearly reports of insane asylums, forms so large a class. Imagine what a vast and sudden change would come over the spirit and conduct of society if nineteen twentieths of Christendom believed that at the end of a week a horrible influx of demons, from some insurgent region, would rush into our world and put a great majority of our race to death in excruciating tortures! But the doctrine of future punishment professed by nineteen twentieths of Christendom is, if true, an evil incomparably worse than that, though every element of its dreadfulness were multiplied by millions beyond the power of numeration; and yet all goes on as quietly, the most of these fancied believers live as chirpingly, as if heaven were sure for everybody! Of course in their hearts they do not believe the terrific formula which drops so glibly from their tongues.
Again: it is a fatal objection to the doctrine in question that if it be true it must destroy the happiness of the saved and fill all heaven with sympathetic woe. Jesus teaches that "there is joy in heaven over every sinner that repenteth." By a moral necessity, then, there is sorrow in heaven over the wretched, lost soul. That sorrow, indeed, may be alleviated, if not wholly quenched, by the knowledge that every retributive pang is remedial, and that God's glorious design will one day be fully crowned in the redemption of the last prodigal. But what shall solace or end it if they know that hell's borders are to be enlarged and to rage with avenging misery forever? The good cannot be happy in heaven if they are to see the ascending smoke and hear the resounding shrieks of a hell full of their brethren, the children of a common humanity, among whom are many of their own nearest relatives and dearest friends.
True, a long list of Christian writers may be cited as maintaining that this is to be a principal element in the felicity of the redeemed, gloating over the tortures of the damned, singing the song of praise with redoubled emphasis as they see their parents, their children, their former bosom companions, writhing and howling in the fell extremities of torture. Thomas Aquinas says, "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more richly, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is granted to them."24 Especially did the Puritans seem to revel in this idea, that "the joys of the blessed were to be deepened and sharpened by constant contrast with the sufferings of the damned." One of them thus expresses the delectable thought: "The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever, as a sense of the opposite misery always increases the relish of any pleasure."
24 Summa, pars iii., Suppl. Qu. 93, art. i.
But perhaps Hopkins caps the climax of the diabolical pyramid of these representations, saying of the wicked, "The smoke of their torment shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed for ever and ever, and serve, as a most clear glass always before their eyes, to give them a bright and most affecting view. This display of the Divine character will be most entertaining to all who love God, will give them the highest and most ineffable pleasure. Should the fire of this eternal punishment cease, it would in a great measure obscure the light of heaven and put an end to a great part of the happiness and glory of the blessed."25 That is to say, in plain terms, the saints, on entering their final state of bliss in heaven, are converted into a set of unmitigated fiends, out sataning Satan, finding their chief delight in forever comparing their own enjoyments with the pangs of the damned, extracting morsels of surpassing relish from every convulsion or shriek of anguish they see or hear. It is all an exquisite piece of gratuitous horror arbitrarily devised to meet a logical exigency of the theory its contrivers held. When charged that the knowledge of the infinite woe of their friends in hell must greatly affect the saints, the stern old theologians, unwilling to recede an inch from their dogmas, had the amazing hardihood to declare that, so far from it, on the contrary their wills would so blend with God's that the contemplation of this suffering would be a source of ecstasy to them. It is doubly a blank assumption of the most daring character, first assuming, by an unparalleled blasphemy, that God himself will take delight in the pangs of his creatures, and secondly assuming, by a violation of the laws of human nature and of every principle of morals, that the elect will do so too. In this world a man actuated by such a spirit would be styled a devil. On entering heaven, what magic shall work such a demoniacal change in him? There is not a word, direct or indirect, in the Scriptures to warrant the dreadful notion; nor is there any reasonable explanation or moral justification of it given by any of its advocates, or indeed conceivable. The monstrous hypothesis cannot be true. Under the omnipotent, benignant government of a paternal God, each change of character in his chosen children, as they advance, must be for the better, not for the worse.
We once heard a father say, running his fingers the while among the golden curls of his child's hair, "If I were in heaven, and saw my little daughter in hell, should not I be rushing down there after her?" There spoke the voice of human nature; and that love cannot be turned to hatred in heaven, but must grow purer and intenser there. The doctrine which makes the saints pleased with contemplating the woes of the damned, and even draw much of their happiness from the contrast, is the deification of the absolute selfishness of a demon. Human nature, even when left to its uncultured instincts, is bound to far other and nobler things. Radbod, one of the old Scandinavian kings, after long resistance, finally consented to be baptized. After he had put one foot into the water, he asked the priest if he should meet his forefathers in heaven. Learning that they, being unbaptized pagans, were victims of endless misery, he drew his foot back, and refused the rite, choosing to be with his brave ancestors in hell rather than to be in heaven with the Christian priests. And, speaking from the stand point of the highest refinement of feeling and virtue, who that has a heart in his
25 Park, Memoir of Hopkins, pp. 201, 202.
bosom would not say, "Heaven can be no heaven to me, if I am to look down on the quenchless agonies of all I have loved here!" Is it not strictly true that the thought that even one should have endless woe "Would cast a shadow on the throne of God And darken heaven"?
If a monarch, possessing unlimited power over all the earth, had condemned one man to be stretched on a rack and be freshly plied with incessant tortures for a period of fifty years, and if everybody on earth could hear his terrible shrieks by day and night, though they were themselves all, with this sole exception, blessed with perfect happiness, would not the whole human race, from Spitzbergen to Japan, from Rio Janeiro to Liberia, rise in a body and go to implore the king's clemency for the solitary victim? So, if hell had but one tenant doomed to eternal anguish, a petition reaching from Sirius to Alcyone, signed by the universe of moral beings, borne by a convoy of angels representing every star in space, would be laid and unrolled at the foot of God's throne, and He would read thereon this prayer: "FORGIVE HIM, AND RELEASE HIM, WE BESEECH THEE, O GOD." And can it be that every soul in the universe is better than the Maker and Father of the universe?
The popular doctrine of eternal torment threatening nearly all our race is refuted likewise by the impossibility of any general observance of the obligations morally and logically consequent from it. In the first place, as the world is constituted, and as life goes on, the great majority of men are upon the whole happy, evidently were meant to be happy. But every believer of the doctrine in debate is bound to be unutterably wretched. If he has any gleam of generous sentiment or touch of philanthropy in his bosom, if he is not a frozen petrifaction of selfishness or an incarnate devil, how can he look on his family, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow beings, in the light of his faith seeing them quivering over the dizzy verge of a blind probation and momentarily dropping into the lake of fire and brimstone that burns forever, how can he do this without being ceaselessly stung with wretchedness and crushed with horror by the perception? For a man who appreciatingly believes that hell is directly under our meadows, streets, and homes, and that nine tenths of the dead are in it, and that nine tenths of the living soon will be, for such a man to be happy and jocose is as horrible as it would be for a man, occupying the second story of a house, to light it up brilliantly with gas, and make merry with his friends, eating tidbits, sipping wine, and tripping it on the light fantastic toe to the strains of gay music, while, immediately under him, men, women, and children, including his own parents and his own children, were stretched on racks, torn with pincers, lacerated with surgical instruments, cauterized, lashed with whips of fire, their half suppressed shrieks and groans audibly rising through the floor!
Secondly, if the doctrine be true, then all unnecessary worldly enterprises, labors, and studies should at once cease. One moment on earth, and then, accordingly as we spend that moment, an eternity in heaven or in hell: in heaven, if we succeed in placating God by a sound belief and ritual proprieties; in hell, if we are led astray by philosophy, nature, and the attractions of life! On these suppositions, what time have we for any thing but reciting our creed, meditating on the atonement, and seeking to secure an interest for ourselves with God by flouting at our carnal reason, praying in church, and groaning, "Lord, Lord, have mercy on us miserable sinners"? What folly, what mockery, to be searching into the motions of the stars, and the occult forces of matter, and the other beautiful mysteries of science! There will be no astronomy in hell, save vain speculations as to the distance between the nadir of the damned and the zenith of the saved; no chemistry in hell, save the experiments of infinite wrath in distilling new torture poisons in the alembics of memory and depositing fresh despair sediments in the crucibles of hope. If Calvin's doctrine be true, let no book be printed, save the "Westminster Catechism;" no calculation be ciphered, save how to "solve the problem of damnation;" no picture be painted, save "pictures of hell;" no school be supported, save "schools of theology;" no business be pursued, save "the business of salvation." What have men who are in imminent peril, who are in truth almost infallibly sure, of being eternally damned the next instant, what have they to do with science, literature, art, social ambition, or commerce? Away with them all! Lures of the devil to snare souls are they! The world reflecting from every corner the lurid glare of hell, who can do any thing else but shudder and pray? "Who could spare any attention for the vicissitudes of cotton and the price of shares, for the merits of the last opera and the bets upon the next election, if the actors in these things were really swinging in his eye over such a verge as he affects to see?"
Thirdly, those who believe the popular theory on this subject are bound to live in cheap huts, on bread and water, that they may devote to the sending of missionaries among the heathen every cent of money they can get beyond that required for the bare necessities of life. If our neighbor were perishing of hunger at our door, it would be our duty to share with him even to the last crust we had. How much more, then, seeing millions of our poor helpless brethren sinking ignorantly into the eternal fires of hell, are we bound to spare no possible effort until the conditions of salvation are brought within the reach of every one! An American missionary to China said, in a public address after his return, "Fifty thousand a day go down to the fire that is not quenched. Six hundred millions more are going the same road. Should you not think at least once a day of the fifty thousand who that day sink to the doom of the lost?" The American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions say, "To send the gospel to the heathen is a work of great exigency. Within the last thirty years a whole generation of five hundred millions have gone down to eternal death." Again: the same Board say, in their tract entitled "The Grand Motive to Missionary Effort," "The heathen are involved in the ruins of the apostasy, and are expressly doomed to perdition. Six hundred millions of deathless souls on the brink of hell! What a spectacle!" How a man who thinks the heathen are thus sinking to hell by wholesale through ignorance of the gospel can live in a costly house, crowded with luxuries and splendors, spending every week more money on his miserable body than he gives in his whole life to save the priceless souls for which he says Christ died, is a problem admitting but two solutions. Either his professed faith is an unreality to him, or else he is as selfish as a demon and as hard hearted as the nether millstone. If he really believed the doctrine, and had a human heart, he must feel it to be his duty to deny himself every indulgence and give his whole fortune and earnings to the missionary fund. And when he had given all else, he ought to give himself, and go to pagan lands, proclaiming the means of grace until his last breath. If he does not that, he is inexcusable.
Should he attempt to clear himself of this obligation by adopting the theory of predestination, which asserts that all men were unconditionally elected from eternity, some to heaven, others to hell, so that no effort can change their fate, logical consistency reduces him to an alternative more intolerable in the eyes of conscience and common sense than the other was. For by this theory the gates of freedom and duty are hoisted, and the dark flood of antinomian consequences rushes in. All things are fated. Let men yield to every impulse and wish. The result is fixed. We have nothing to do. Good or evil, virtue or crime, alter nothing.
Fourthly, if the common doctrine of eternal damnation be true, then surely no more children should be brought into the world: it is a duty to let the race die out and cease. He who begets a child, forcing him to run the fearful risk of human existence, with every probability of being doomed to hell at the close of earth, commits a crime before whose endless consequences of horror the guilt of fifty thousand deliberate murders would be as nothing. For, be it remembered, an eternity in hell is an infinite evil; and therefore the crime of thrusting such a fate on a single child, with the unasked gift of being, is a crime admitting of no just comparison. Rather than populate an everlasting hell with human vipers and worms, a hell whose fires, alive and wriggling with ghastly shapes of iniquity and anguish, shall swell with a vast accession of fresh recruits from every generation, rather than this, let the sacred lights on the marriage altar go out, no more bounding forms of childhood be seen in cottage or hall, the race grow old, thin out, and utterly perish, all happy villages be overgrown, all regal cities crumble down, and this world roll among the silent stars henceforth a globe of blasted deserts and rank wildernesses, resonant only with the shrieks of the wind, the yells of wild beasts, and the thunder's crash.
Fifthly, there is one more conclusion of moral duty deducible from the prevalent theory of infinite torment. It is this. God ought not to have permitted Adam to have any children. Let us not seem presumptuous and irreverent in speaking thus. We are merely reasoning on the popular theory of the theologians, not on any supposition of our own or on any truth; and by showing the absurdity and blasphemy of the moral consequences and duties flowing from that theory, the absurdity, blasphemy, and incredibility of the theory itself appear. We are not responsible for the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who charge God with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin of Adam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty of suffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocent because not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause the race to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woe that would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line of generations? Or, to go still further back, why did he not, foreseeing Adam's fall, refrain from creating even him? There was no necessity laid on God of creating Adam. No positive evil would have been done by omitting to create him. An infinite evil, multiplied by the total number of the lost, was done by creating him. Why, then, was he not left in peaceful nonentity? On the Augustinian theory we see no way of escaping this awful dilemma. Who can answer the question which rises to heaven from the abyss of the damned? "Father of mercies, why from silent earth Didst thou awake and curse me into birth, Push into being a reverse of thee, And animate a clod with misery?"
Satan is a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernal cellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot by which he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the world parliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Will the King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to carry out his design?
The doctrine of eternal damnation, as it has prevailed in the Christian Church, appears to the natural man so unreasonable, immoral, and harrowingly frightful, when earnestly contemplated, that there have always been some who have shrunk from its representations and sought to escape its conclusions. Many of its strongest advocates in every age have avowed it to be a fearful mystery, resting on the inscrutable sovereignty of God, and beyond the power of man's faculties to explain and justify. The dogma has been eluded in two ways. Some have believed in the annihilation of the wicked after they should have undergone just punishment proportioned to their sins. This supposition has had a considerable number of advocates. It was maintained, among others, by Arnobius, at the close of the third century, by the Socini, by Dr. Hammond, and by some of the New England divines.26 All that need be said in opposition to it is that it is an arbitrary device to avoid the intolerable horror of the doctrine of endless misery, unsupported by proof, extremely unsatisfactory in many of its bearings, and really not needed to achieve the consummation desired.
Others have more wisely maintained that all will finally be saved: however severely and long they may justly suffer, they will at last all be mercifully redeemed by God and admitted to the common heaven. Defenders of the doctrine of ultimate universal salvation have appeared from the beginning of Christian history.27 During the last century and a half their numbers have rapidly increased.28 A dignified and influential class of theologians, represented by such names as Tillotson. Bahrdt, and Less, say that the threats of eternal punishment, in the Scriptures, are exaggerations to deter men from sin, and that God will not really execute them, but will mercifully abate and limit them.29 Another class of theologians, much more free, consistent, and numerous, base their reception of the doctrine of final restoration on figurative explanations of the scriptural language seemingly opposed to it, and on arguments drawn from the character of God, from reason, and from morals. This view of the subject is spreading fast. All independent, genial, and cultivated thought naturally leads to it. The central principles of the gospel necessitate it. The spirit of the age cries for it. Before it the old antagonistic dogma must fall and perish from respect. Dr. Spring says, in reference to the hopeless condemnation of the wicked to hell, "It puts in requisition all our confidence
26 This theory bas been resuscitated and advocated within a few years by quite a number of writers, among whom may be specified the Rev. C. F. Hudson, author of "Debt and Grace," a learned, earnest, and able work, pervaded by an admirable spirit.
27 Ballou, Ancient History of Universalism.
28 Whittemore, Modern History of Universalism.
29 Knapp, Christian Theology, Woods's translation, sect. 158.
in God to justify this procedure of his government."30
A few devout and powerful minds have sought to avoid the gross horrors and unreasonableness of the usual view of this subject, by changing the mechanical and arithmetical values of the terms for spiritual and religious values. They give the word "eternity" a qualitative instead of a quantitative meaning. The everlasting woe of the damned consists not in mechanical inflictions of torture and numerical increments of duration, but in spiritual discord, alienation from God, a wretched state of being, with which times and spaces have nothing to do.31
How much better were it for the advocates of the popular theory, instead of forcing their moral nature to bear up against the awful perplexities and misgivings as to the justice and goodness of God necessarily raised in them whenever they really face the dark problems of their system of faith,32 resolutely to ask whether there are any such problems in the actual government of God, or anywhere else, except in their own "Bodies of Divinity"! It is an extremely unfortunate and discreditable evasion of responsibility when any man, especially when a teacher, takes for granted the received formularies handed down to him, and, instead of honestly analyzing their genuine significance and probing their foundations to see if they be good and true, spends his genius in contriving excuses and supports for them.
It is the very worst policy at this day to strive to fasten the dogma of eternal misery to the New Testament. If both must be taken or rejected together, an alternative which we emphatically deny, what sincere and earnest thinker now, whose will is unterrifiedly consecrated to truth, can be expected to hesitate long? The doctrine is sustained in repute at present principally for two reasons. First, because it has been transmitted to us from the Church of the past as the established and authoritative doctrine. It is yet technically current and popular because it has been so: that is, it retains its place simply by right of possession. The question ought to be sincerely and universally raised whether it is true or false. Then it will swiftly lose its prestige and disappear. Secondly, it is upheld and patronized by many as a useful instrument for frightening the people and through their fears deterring them from sin. We have ourselves heard clergymen of high reputation say that it would never do to admit, before the people, that there is any chance whatever of penitence and salvation beyond the grave, because they would be sure to abuse the hope as a sort of permission to indulge and continue in sin. Thus to ignore the only solemn and worthy standard of judging an abstract doctrine, namely, Is it a truth or a falsehood? and put it solely on grounds of working expediency, is disgraceful, contemptible, criminal. Watts exposes with well merited rebuke a gross instance of pious frail in Burnet, who advised preachers to teach the eternity of future punishment whether they believed it or not.33 It is by such a course that error and superstition reign, that truckling conformity, intellectual disloyalty, moral indifference, vice, and infidelity, abound. It is practical atheism, debauchery of conscience, and genuine spiritual
30 Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 268.
31 Lange, Positive Dogmatik, sect. 131: Die Aeonen der Verdammten. Maurice, Theological Essays: Future Punishment.
32 See Beecher's Conflict of Ages, b. ii. ch. 4, 13.
33 World to Come, Disc. XIII.
death. Besides, the course we are characterizing is actually as inexpedient in practice as it is wrong in theory. Experience and observation show it to be as pernicious in its result as it is immoral in its origin. Is a threat efficacious over men in proportion to its intrinsic terror, or in proportion as it is personally felt and feared by them? Do the menacing penalties of a sin deter a man from it in proportion to their awfulness, or in proportion to his belief in their reality and unavoidableness? Eternal misery would be a threat of infinite frightfulness, if it were realized and believed. But it is incredible. Some reject it with indignation and an impetuous recoil that sends them much too far towards antinomianism. Others let it float in the spectral background of imagination, the faint reflection of a disagreeable and fading dream. To all it is an unreality. An earnest belief in a sure retribution exactly limited to desert must be far more effective. If an individual had a profound conviction that for every sin he committed he must suffer a million centuries of inexpressible anguish, realizing that thought, would he commit a sin?
If he cannot appreciate that enormous penalty, much less can he the infinite one, which is far more likely to shade off and blur out into a vague and remote nothing. Truth is an expression of God's will, which we are bound exclusively to accept and employ regardless of consequences. When we do that, God, the author of truth, is himself solely responsible for the consequences. But when, thinking we can devise something that will work better, we use some theory of our own, we are responsible for the consequences. Let every one beware how he ventures to assume that dread responsibility. It is surely folly as well as sin. For nothing can work so well as truth, the simple, calm, living truth, which is a chime in the infinite harmony of morals and things. It is only the morbid melodramatic tastes and incompetencies of an unfinished culture that make men think otherwise. The magnificent poetry of the day of judgment an audience of five hundred thousand millions gathered in one throng as the Judge rises to pronounce the last oration over a dissolving universe takes possession of the fancy, and people conceive it so vividly, and are so moved by it, that they think they see it to be true.
Grant for a moment the truth of the conception of hell as a physical world of fiery torture full of the damned. Suppose the scene of probation over, hell filled with its prisoners shut up, banished and buried in the blackest deeps of space. Can it be left there forever? Can it be that the roar of its furnace shall rage on, and the wail of the execrable anguish ascend, eternally? Endeavor to realize in some faint degree what these questions mean, and then answer. If anybody can find it in his heart or in his head to say yes, and can gloat over the idea, and wish to have it continually brandished in terrorem over the heads of the people, one feels impelled to declare that he of all men the most needs to be converted to the Christian spirit. An unmitigated hell of depravity, pain, and horror, would be Satan's victory and God's defeat; for the very wish of a Satanic being must be for the everlasting prevalence of sin and wretchedness. As above the weltering hosts of the lost, each dreadful second, the iron clock of hell ticked the thunder word "eternity," how would the devil on his sulphurous dais shout in triumph! But if such a world of fire, crowded with the writhing damned, ever existed at all, could it exist forever?
Could the saved be happy and passive in heaven when the muffled shrieks of their brethren, faint from the distance, fell on their ears? In tones of love and pity that would melt the very mountains, they would plead with God to pardon and free the lost. Many a mourning lover would realize the fable of the Thracian poet who wandered into Hades searching for his Eurydice; many a heroic son would emulate the legend of the Grecian god who burst through the iron walls of Tartarus and rescued his mother, the unfortunate Semele, and led her in triumph up to heaven.
Could the angels be contented when they contemplated the far off lurid orb and knew the agonies that fed its conscious conflagration? Their gentle bosoms would be racked with commiserating pangs, they would fly down and hover around that anguished world, to moisten its parched tongues with the dropping of their sympathetic tears and to cool its burning brows with the fanning of their wings.
Could Christ be satisfied? he who once was rich but for our sakes became poor? he whose loving soul breathed itself forth in the tender words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? he who poured his blood on Judea's awful summit, be satisfied? Not until he had tried the efficacy of ten thousand fresh crucifixions, on as many new Calvaries, would he rest.
Could God suffer it? God! with the full rivers of superfluous bliss rolling around thy throne, couldst thou look down and hear thy creatures calling thee Father, and see them plunging in a sea of fire eternally eternally eternally and never speak the pardoning word? It would not be like thee, it would be like thine adversary to do that. Not so wouldst thou do. But if Satan had millions of prodigals, snatched from the fold of thy family, shut up and tortured in hell, paternal yearnings after them would fill thy heart. Love's smiles would light the dread abyss where they groan. Pity's tears would fall over it, shattered by the radiance into rainbows. And through that illumination THOU wouldst descend, marching beneath the arch of its triumphal glories to the rescue of thy children! Therefore we rest in hope, knowing that "Thou wilt not leave our souls in hell."
THE conceptions and fore feelings of immortality which men have entertained have generally been accompanied by a sense of uncertainty in regard to the nature of that inheritance, by a perception of contingent conditions, yielding a twofold fate of bliss and woe, poised on the perilous hinge of circumstance or freedom. Almost as often and profoundly, indeed, as man has thought that he should live hereafter, that idea has been followed by the belief that if, on the one hand, salvation gleamed for him in the possible sky, on the other hand perdition yawned for him in the probable abyss. Heaven and Hell are the light side and shade side of the doctrine of a future life. Few questions are more interesting, as none can be more important, than that inquiry which is about the salvation of the soul. The inherent reach of this inquiry, and the extent of its philosophical and literary history, are great. But, by arranging under certain heads the various principal schemes of salvation which Christian teachers have from time to time presented for popular acceptance, and passing them before the mind in order and in mutual lights, we can very much narrow the space required to exhibit and discuss them. When the word "salvation" occurs in the following investigation, it means unless something different be shown by the context the removal of the soul's doom to misery beyond the grave, and the securing of its future blessedness. Heaven and hell are terms employed with wide latitude and fluctuating boundaries of literal and figurative meaning; but their essential force is simply a future life of wretchedness, a future life of joy; and salvation, in its prevailing theological sense, is the avoidance of that and the gaining of this. We shall not attempt to present the different theories of redemption in their historical order of development, or to give an exhaustive account of their diversified prevalence, but shall arrange them with reference to the most perspicuous exhibition of their logical contents and practical bearings.
The first scheme of Christian salvation to be noticed is the one by which it is represented that the interference and suffering of Christ, in itself, unconditionally saved all souls and emptied hell forever. This theory arose in the minds of those who received it as the natural and consistent completion of the view they held concerning the nature and consequences of the fall of Adam, the cause and extent of the lost state of man. Adam, as the federal head of humanity, represented and acted for his whole race: the responsibility of his decision rested, the consequences of his conduct would legitimately descend, it was thought, upon all mankind. If he had kept himself obedient through that easy yet tremendous probation in Eden, he and all his children would have lived on earth eternally in perfect bliss. But, violating the commandment of God, the burden of sin, with its terrible penalty, fell on him and his posterity. Every human being was henceforth to be alien from the love of goodness and from the favor of God, hopelessly condemned to death and the pains of hell. The sin of Adam, it was believed, thoroughly corrupted the nature of man, and incapacitated him from all successful efforts to save his soul from its awful doom. The infinite majesty of God's will, the law of the universe, had been insulted by disobedience. The only just retribution was the suffering of an endless death. The adamantine sanctities of God's government made forgiveness impossible. Thus all men were lost, to be the prey of blackness, and fire, and the undying worm, through the remediless ages of eternity. Just then God had pity on the souls he had made, and himself came to the rescue. In the person of Christ, he came into the world as a man, and freely took upon himself the infinite debt of man's sins, by his death on the cross expiated all offences, satisfied the claims of offended justice, vindicated the inexpressible sacredness of the law, and, at the same time, opened a way by which a full and free reconciliation was extended to all. When the blood of Jesus flowed over the cross, it purchased the ransom of every sinner. As Jerome says, "it quenched the flaming sword at the entrance of Paradise." The weary multitude of captives rose from their bed, shook off the fetters and stains of the pit, and made the cope of heaven snowy with their white winged ascent. The prison house of the devil and his angels should be used no more to confine the guilty souls of men.1 Their guilt was all washed away in the blood of the Lamb. Their spirits, without exception, should follow to the right hand of the Father, in the way marked out by the ascending Redeemer. This is the first form of Universalism, the form in which it was held by several of the Fathers in the earlier ages of the Church, and by the pioneers of that doctrine in modern times. Cyril of Jerusalem says, "Christ went into the under world alone, but came out with many." 2 Cyril of Alexandria says that when Christ ascended from the under world he "emptied it, and left the devil there utterly alone." 3 The opinion that the whole population of Hades was released, is found in the lists of ancient heresies.4 It was advanced by Clement, an Irish priest, antagonist of Boniface the famous Archbishop of Mentz, in the middle of the eighth century. He was deposed by the Council of Soissons, and afterwards anathematized by Pope Zachary. Gregory the Great also refers in one of his letters with extreme severity to two ecclesiastics, contemporaries of his own, who held the same belief. Indeed, this conclusion is a necessary result of a consistent development of the creed of the Orthodox Church, so called. By the sin of one, even Adam, through the working of absolute justice, hell became the portion of all, irrespective of any fault or virtue of theirs; so, by the voluntary sacrifice, the infinite atonement, of one, even Christ, through the unspeakable mercy of God, salvation was effected for all, irrespective of any virtue or fault of theirs. One member of the scheme is the exact counterpoise of the other; one doctrine cries out for and necessitates the other. Those who accept the commonly received dogmas of original sin, total depravity, and universal condemnation entailed upon all men in lineal descent from Adam, and the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Vicarious Atonement, are bound, by all the constructions of logic, to accept the scheme of salvation just set forth, namely, that the death of Christ secured the deliverance of all unconditionally. We do not believe that doctrine, only because we do not believe the other associated doctrines out of which it springs and of whose system it is the complement.
1 Doederlein, De Redemptione a Potestate Diaboli. In Opuse. Theolog.
2 Catechesis xis. 9.
3 De Festis Paschalibus, homilia vii.
4 Augustine, De Haresibus, lxxix.
The reasons why we do not believe that our race fell into helpless depravity and ruin in the sin of the first man are, in essence, briefly these: First, we have never been able to perceive any proof whatever of the truth of that dogma; and certainly the onus probandi rests on the side of such an assumption. It arose partially from a misinterpretation of the language of the Bible; and so far as it has a basis in Scripture, we are compelled by force of evidence to regard it as a Jewish adoption of a pagan error without authority. Secondly, this doctrinal system seems to us equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seems to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful barbarity. How can men be guilty of a sin committed thousands of years before they were born, and deserve to be sent to hopeless hell for it? What justice is there in putting on one sinless head the demerits of a world of reprobates, and then letting the criminal go free because the innocent has suffered? A third objection to this whole view an objection which, if sustained, will utterly annihilate it is this: It is quite possible that, momentous as is the part he has played in theology, the Biblical Adam is not at all a historical personage, but only a significant figment of poetry. The common belief of the most authoritative men of science, that the human race has existed on this earth for a vastly longer period than the Hebrew statement affirms, may yet be completely established. It may also yet be acknowledged that each distinct race of men had its own Adam.5 Then the dogmatic theology, based on the fall of our entire race into perdition in its primary representative, will, of course, crumble.
The second doctrine of Christian salvation is a modification and limitation of the previous one. This theory, like the former, presupposes that a burden of original sin and natural depravity transmitted from the first man had doomed, and, unless prevented in some supernatural manner, would forever press, all souls down to the realms of ruin and woe; also that an infinite graciousness in the bosom of the Godhead led Christ to offer himself as an expiation for the sins, an atoning substitute for the condemnation, of men. But, according to the present view, this interference of Christ did not by itself save the lost: it only removed the otherwise insuperable bar to forgiveness, and presented to a chosen portion of mankind the means of experiencing a condition upon the realization of which, in each individual case, the certainty of salvation depends. That condition is a mysterious conversion, stirring the depths of the soul through an inspired faith in personal election by the unchanging decree of God. The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods of salvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume that mankind are doomed to death and hell in consequence of the sin of Adam, the one asserts that the interference of Christ of itself saved all souls, the other asserts that that interference cannot save any soul except those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure, had from eternity arbitrarily elected.6 This scheme grew directly out of the dogma of fatalism, which sinks human freedom in Divine predestination. God having solely of his
5 Burdach, Carus, Oken, Bayrhoffer, Agassiz. See Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vol. iv. p. 28; Mott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 338.
6 Confession of Faith of Westminster Divines, ch. iii. sect. 3.
own will foreordained that a certain number of mankind should be saved, Christ died in order to pay the penalty of their sins and render it possible for them to be forgiven and taken into heaven without violating the awful bond of justice. The benefits of the atonement, therefore, are limited to the elect. Nor is this to be regarded as an act of severity; on the contrary, it is an act of unspeakable benevolence. For by the sin of Adam the whole race of men, without exception, were hateful to God, and justly sentenced to eternal damnation. When, consequently, he devised a plan of redemption by which he could himself bear the guilt, and suffer the agony, and pay the debt of a few, and thus ransom them from their doom, the reprobates who were left had no right to complain, but the chosen were a monument of disinterested love, because all alike deserved the endless tortures of hell. According to this conception, all men being by their ancestral act and inherited nature irretrievably lost, God's arbitrary pleasure was the cause, Christ's voluntary death was the means, by which a certain number were to be saved. What individuals should compose this portion of the race, was determined from eternity beyond all contingencies. The effect of faith and conversion, and of the new birth, is not to save the soul, but simply to convince the soul that it is saved. That is to say, a regenerating belief and love is not the efficient cause, it is merely the revealed assurance, of salvation, proving to the soul that feels it, by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, that it is of the chosen number. The preaching of the gospel is to be extended everywhere, not for the purpose of saving those who would otherwise be lost, but because its presentation will awaken in the elect, and in them alone, that responsive experience which will reveal their election to them, and make them sure of it, already foretasting it; though it is thought that no one can be saved who is ignorant of the gospel: it is mysteriously ordered that the terms of the covenant shall be preached to all the elect. There are correlated complexities, miracles, absurdities, in wrought with the whole theory, inseparable from it. The violence it does to nature, to thought, to love, to morals, its arbitrariness, its mechanical form, the wrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from the Bible,7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are its sufficient refutation and condemnation. If the death of Christ has such wondrous saving efficacy, and nothing else has, what keeps him from dying again to convince the unbelieving and to save the lost? What man is there who, if he knew that, after thirty years of suffering terminated by a fearful death, he should rise again into boundless bliss and glory while rapt infinitude rung with the paans of an applauding universe, and that by means of his humiliation he could redeem countless millions from eternal torture, would not with a joyous spring undertake the task? And is a common man better than Christ?
The third general plan of Christian salvation which we are to consider differs from the foregoing one in several essential particulars. It affirms the free will of man in opposition to a fatal predestination. It declares that the atonement is sufficient to redeem not only a portion of our race, but all who will put themselves in right spiritual relations with it. In a word, while it admits that some will actually be lost forever, it asserts that no one is doomed
7 Schweizer, Die Lehre des Apostels Paulus vom erlosenden Tode Christi. Theologische Studien und Kritiken, Jahrg. 1858, heft 3.
to be lost, but that the offer of pardon is made to every soul, and that every one has power to accept or reject it. The sacrifice of the incarnate Deity vindicated the majesty of the law, appeased the wrath of God, and purchased his saving favor towards all who, by a sound and earnest faith, seize the proffered justification, throw off all reliance on their own works, and present themselves before the throne of mercy clothed in the righteousness and sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Here the appropriation of the merits of Christ, through an orthodox and vivifying faith, is the real cause as well as the experimental assurance of salvation. This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in the wilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look on it and be healed, so the crucified God is lifted up, and all men, everywhere, are urged to kneel before him, accept his atonement, and thus enable his righteousness to be imputed to them, and their souls to be saved. The vital condition of salvation is an appropriating faith in the vicarious atonement. Without this no one can be saved. Thus with one word and a single breath whole nations and races are whiffed into hell. All that the good hearted Luther could venture to say of Cicero, whom he deeply admired and loved, was the kind ejaculation, "I hope God will be merciful to him!" To those who appreciate it with hostility, and look on all things in its light, the thought that there can be no salvation except by belief in the expiatory death of Christ, hopelessly dooming all the heathen,8 and all infant children, unless baptized in a proxy faith,9 builds an altar of blood among the stars and makes the universe reek with horror. Other crimes, though stained through with midnight dyes and heaped up to the brim of outrageous guilt, may be freely forgiven to him who comes heartily to credit the vicarious death of the Savior; but he who does not trust in that, though virtuous as man can be, must depart into the unappeasable fires. "Why this unintelligible crime of not seeing the atonement happens to be the only sin for which there is no atonement, it is impossible to say." Though this view of the method, extent, and conditions of redemption is less revolting and incredible than the other, still, it does not seem to us that any person whose mental and moral nature is unprejudiced, healthy, and enlightened, and who will patiently study the subject, can possibly accept either of them. The leading assumed doctrines common to them, out of which they severally spring, and on which they both rest, are not only unsupported by adequate proofs, but really have no evidence at all, and are absurd in themselves, confounding the broadest distinctions in morals, and subverting the best established principles of natural religion.10
The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicates the power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. This is the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state of nature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all men are alienated from God, and by the universal original sin universally exposed to damnation, indeed, the helpless victims of eternal misery. In the fulness of time, Christ appeared, and offered himself to suffer in their stead to secure their deliverance. His death cancelled the whole sum of
8 Bretschneider, Entwickelung der Dogmatik, sect. 112, Nos. 37 50.
9 So affirmed by the Council of Carthage, Canon II.
10 The violence done to moral reason by these views is powerfully exposed in Bushnell's Discourse on the Atonement: God in Christ, pp. 193-202.
original sin, and only that, thus taking away the absolute impossibility of salvation, and leaving every man in the world free to stand or fall, incur hell or win heaven, by his personal merits. From that time any person who lived a perfectly holy life which no man could find practically possible thereby secured eternal blessedness; but the moment he fell into a single sin, however trivial, he sealed his condemnation: Christ's sacrifice, as was just said, merely removed the transmitted burden of original sin from all mankind, but made no provision for their personal sins, so that practically, all men being voluntary as well as hereditary sinners, their condition was as bad as before: they were surely lost. To meet this state of the case, the Church, whose priests, it is claimed, are the representatives of Christ, and whose head is the vicegerent of God on earth, was empowered by the celebration of the mass to re enact, as often as it pleased, the tragedy of the crucifixion. In this service Christ is supposed literally to be put to death afresh, and the merit of his substitutional sufferings is supposed to be placed to the account of the Church.11 As Sir Henry Wotton says, "One rosy drop from Jesus' heart Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire."
In one of the Decretals of Clement VI., called "Extravagants," it is asserted that "one drop of Christ's blood [una guttula sanguinis] being sufficient to redeem the whole human race, the remaining quantity which was shed in the garden and on the cross was left as a legacy to the Church, to be a treasure whence indulgences were to be drawn and administered by the Roman pontiffs." Furthermore, saints and martyrs, by their constant self denial, voluntary sufferings, penances, and prayers, like Christ, do more good works than are necessary for their own salvation; and the balance of merit the works of supererogation is likewise accredited to the Church. In this way a great reserved fund of merits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasure they can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it in place of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolve them and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dread machinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale, heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. But whoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receive the sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey the priests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that those who neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost, by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, thereby typifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection and ascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject as alike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd to conscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in history through the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy of an interested body. There is not one text in the Bible which affords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughty pretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have the exclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It is incredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fates forever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mere accident of time
11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. pars iii. qu. 25, art. 1.
and place, or at best on the moral contingence of their acknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannical hierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent of their lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. One is here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Man ought to hear Poems." The lines in Sophocles which declare that the initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life, but that all others shall be wretched, having been read to Diogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion, the notorious robber, be better after death than that of Epaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" It is also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all proper appreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the gross mechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between the bad and the good, as if moral qualities were not personal, but might be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as the accounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoretic falsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as its practical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculous this ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as stated by Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, have entered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have, and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stake the argument on one question. If there be no salvation save by believing and accepting the sacraments with the authority of the Romanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in a hundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved. Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelming proportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonized drops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires of damnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that he believes?
We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkable for its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as those we have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, and severity. The theory referred to promises the natural and inevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on two positions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially and temporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfect wisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of this doctrine point first to observation and experience, and declare that no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable; those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, and hardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that may be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations. True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can endure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessedness come with the morning dawn of a better world. Exact retributions are awarded to all iniquity here; so
12 Julian, lib. vi. ix.
that at the termination of the present state there is nothing to prevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. The substantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good and right: only their action is perverted to evil.13 This perversion will cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus death is the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions for his creatures, again they argue, must be purely gracious and blessed; for Nature, the Bible, and the Soul blend their ultimate teachings in one affirmation that he is Love. Being omnipotent and of perfect wisdom, nothing can withstand his decrees or thwart his plans. His purpose, of course, must be fulfilled. There is every thing to prove, and nothing, rightly understood, to disprove, that that purpose is the eternal blessedness of all his intelligent offspring after death. Therefore, they think they are justified in concluding, the laws of nature, God's regular habits and course of government, the normal arrangement and process of things, will of themselves work out the inevitable salvation of all mankind. After the uproar and darkness, the peril and fear, of a tempestuous night, the all embracing smile of daylight gradually spreads over the world, and the turmoil silently subsides, and the scene sleeps. So after the sins and miseries, the condemnation and hell, of this state of existence, shall succeed the redemption, the holiness and happy peace, of heaven, into which all pass by the order of nature, the original and undisturbed arrangement of the creative Father. This view is advanced by some on grounds both of revelation and reason. It is the doctrine of those Beghards who taught that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; that no one is damned, neither Jew nor Saracen, because on the death of the body the soul returns to God."14 But the proper doctrine of the Universalist denomination is founded directly on Scripture, and seems now to be simply the absolute certainty of final salvation for all. Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will of God, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner, by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwise endless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossil now.15
It will be noticed that by this view salvation is an unlimited necessity, not a contingency, a boon thrown to all, and which no one has power to reject:
"The road to heaven is broader than the world,And deeper than the kingdoms of the dead;And up its ample paths the nations treadWith all their banners furl'd."
This theory contains elements, it seems to us, both of truth and falsehood. It casts off gross mistakes, announces some fundamental realities, overlooks, perverts, exaggerates, some essential facts in the case. There is so much in it that is grateful and beautiful that we cannot wonder at its reception where the tender instincts of the heart are stronger than the stern decisions of the conscience, where the kindly sentiments usurp the province of the critical reason and sit in judgment upon evidence for the construction of a dogmatic creed. We
13 Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. x. art. xvi.: Character and its Predicates.
14 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 209, note 14.
15 See Ballou, Examination of the Doctrine of Future Punishment, pp. 152-157. Williamson, Exposition of Universalism, Sermon XL: Nature of Salvation. Cobb, Compend. of Divinity, ch. ix. sect. 3.
cannot accept it as a whole, cannot admit its great unqualified conclusion, not only because there is no direct evidence for it, but because there are many potent presumptions against it. It is not built upon the facts of our consciousness and present experience, but is resolutely constructed in defiance of them by an arbitrary process of assumption and inference; for since God's perfections are as absolute now as they ever can be, and he now permits sin and misery, there is no impossibility that they will be permitted for a season hereafter. If they are necessary now, they may be necessary hereafter. An experience of salvation by all, regardless of what they do or what they leave undone, would also defeat what we have always considered the chief final cause of man, namely, the self determined resistance of Evil and choice of Good, the free formation of virtuous character. The plan of a necessary and indiscriminate redemption likewise breaks the evident continuity of life, ignores the lineal causative power of experience, whereby each moment partially produces and moulds the next, destroys the probationary nature of our lot, and palsies the strength of moral motive. It is furthermore the height of injustice, awarding to all men the same condition, remorselessly swallowing up their infinite differences, making sin and virtue, sloth and toil, exactly alike in the end. Whose earnestly embraces the theory, and meditates much upon it, and reasons closely, will be likely to become an Antinomian. It overlooks the loud, omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state is incomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visible segment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisible world to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses will satisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. We reject this scheme, as to its distinctive feature, for all those reasons which lead us to accept that final view to which we now turn.
The theory of Christian redemption which seems to us correct, represents the good and evil forces of personal character, harmonious or discordant with the mind of God, as the conditions of salvation or of reprobation. Swedenborg, who teaches that man in the future state is the son of his own deeds in the present state, says he once saw Melancthon in hell, writing, "Faith alone saves," the words fading out as fast as written, because expressive of a falsehood! It is not belief, but love, that dominates the soul, not a mental act, but a spiritual substance. According as the realities of the soul are what they should be, just and pure, or what they should not be, perverted and corrupt, and according as the realities of the soul are in right relations with truth, beauty, goodness, or in vitiated relations with them, so, and to that extent, is the soul saved or lost. This is not a matter of arbitrary determination on one hand; and of helpless submission on the other: it is a matter of Divine permission on one hand, and of free, though sometimes unintelligent and mistaken, choice on the other. The only perdition is to be out of tune with the right constitution and exercise of things and rules. That, of itself, makes a man the victim of guilt and wretchedness. The only salvation is the restoration of the balance and normal efficiency of the faculties, the restoration of their harmony with the moral law, the recommencement of their action in unison with the will of God. When a soul, through its exposure and freedom, becomes and experiences what God did not intend and is not pleased with, what his creative and executive arrangements are not purposely ordered for, it is, for the time, and so far forth, lost. It is saved, when knowledge of truth illuminates the mind, love of goodness warms the heart, energy, purity, and aspiration fill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in its experience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims of its existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmonious fruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, all things work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beams of the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnation and misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever and wherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations with the universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienated mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice, impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is not, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawing fires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as it is to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseased condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers and relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of some physical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain side to a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just as badly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, wherever he may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so to speak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions of salvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle, but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of the universe. "Every devil," Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumference to afflict him." If there are, as there may be, two entirely separate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclose hell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into the other, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perdition or of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but the characteristic condition of the soul, which produces its experience and decides its destination, that is the essential thing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening is intolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but most welcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects, operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostile and retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify the soul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing is transfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven.
We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles of this theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience to which souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on them by an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by free agency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritual world. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particular localities into which spirits are thrust, nor states of consciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character.
Thirdly, condemnation, or justification, is not absolute and complete, equalizing all on each side of a given line, but is a thing of degrees, not exactly the same in any two individuals, or in the same person at all times. Fourthly, we have no reason to suppose that probation closes with the closing of the present life; but every relevant consideration leads us to conclude that the same great constitution of laws pervades all worlds and reigns throughout eternity, so that the fate of souls is not unchangeably fixed at death. No analogy indicates that after death all will be thoroughly different from what it is before death. Rather do all analogies argue that the hell and heaven of the future will be the aggravation, or mitigation, or continuation, of the perdition and salvation of the present. It is altogether a sentence of exact right according to character, a matter of personal achievement depending upon freedom, an experience of inward elements and states, a thing of degrees, and a subject of continued probation.
The condition of the heathen nations in reference to salvation is satisfactory only in the light of the foregoing theory. If a person is what God wishes, as shown by his revealed will in the model of Christ, pure, loving, devout, wise, and earnest, he is saved, whether he ever heard of Christ or not. Are Plato and Aristides, Cato and Antoninus, to be damned, while Pope Alexander VI. and King Philip II are saved, because those glorious characters merely lived at the then height of attainable excellence, but these fanatic scoundrels made a technical profession of Christianity? The "Athanasian" creed asserts that whoever doth not fully believe its dogmas "shall without doubt perish everlastingly." And the eighteenth article in the creed of the Church of England declares "them accursed who presume to say that any man can be saved by diligently framing his life according to the law or sect which he professeth, and the light of nature."16
Another particular in which the present view of salvation is satisfactory, in opposition to the other theories, is in leaving the personal nature of sin clear, the realm of personal responsibility unconfused. Why should a system of thought be set up and adhered to in religion that would be instantly and universally scouted at if applied to any other subject? 17 "No one dreams that the sin of an unexercised intellect, of gross ignorance, can be pardoned only through faith in the sacrifice of some incarnation of the Perfect Reason. No one expects to be told that the violation of the bodily laws can be forgiven by the Infinite Creator only on the ground that some perfect physician honors them by obedience and death. It is by opening the mind to God's published truth, and by conformity to the discovered philosophical
16 Arnauld, Emes, Goeze, and others, have written volumes to prove the indiscriminate damnation of the heathen. On the contrary, Muller, in his "Diss. de Paganorum poet Mortem Conditione," and Marmontel, in his "Belisaire," take a more favorable view of the fate of the ethnic world. The best work on the subject a work of great geniality and ability is Eberhard's "Neue Apologie des Socrates." Also see Knapp's Christian Theology, sect. lxxxviii.
17 Martineau, Studies of Christianity, pp. 153-176: Mediatorial Religion. Ibid. pp. 468-477: Sin What it is, What it is not.
order, or the reception of the adopted remedy, that the mind and the frame experience new life. And our souls are redeemed, not by any expiation on account of which penalties are lifted, but by reception of spiritual truth and consecration of will, which push away penalties by wholesome life." 18
The awful inviolability of justice is shown by the eternal course of God's laws bringing the exactly deserved penalty upon every soul that sinneth. Whoever breaks a Divine decree puts all sacred things in antagonism to him, and the precise punishment of his offences not the worth of worlds nor the blood of angels can avert. The boundless mercy of God, his atoning love, is shown by the absence of all vindictiveness from his judgments, their restorative aim and tendency. Whenever the sinner repents, reforms, puts himself in a right attitude, God is waiting to pardon and bless him, the sun shines and the happy heart is glad as at first, the cloudy screen of sin and fear and retributive alienation being removed. This view, when appreciated, affords as impressive a sanction to law, and as affecting an exhibition of love, as are theoretically ascribed to the doctrine of vicarious expiation. The infinite sanctity of justice and the fathomless love of God are certainly much more plainly and satisfactorily shown by the righteous nature and beneficent operation of the law, than by its terrible severity and arbitrary subversion. According to the present view, the relation of Christ to human redemption is as simple and rational as it is divinely appointed and perfectly fulfilled. Accredited with miraculous seals, presenting the most pathetic and inspiring motives, he reveals the truths and exemplifies the virtues which, when adopted, regenerate the springs of faith and character, rectify the lines of conduct, and change men from sinful and wretched to saintly and blessed. He stirs the stagnant soul, that man may replunge into his native self, and rise redeemed.
For the more distinct comprehension and remembrance of the schemes of Christian salvation we have been considering, it may be well to recapitulate them.
The first theory is this: When, by the fall of Adam, all men were utterly lost and doomed to hell forever, the vicarious sufferings of Christ cancelled sin, and unconditionally purchased and saved all. This was the original development of Universalism. It sprang consistently from Augustinian grounds. It was taught by a party in the Church of the first centuries, was afterwards repeatedly condemned as a heresy by popes and by councils, and was revived by Kelly, Murray, and others. We are not aware that it now has any avowed disciples.
The second conception is, in substance, that God, foreseeing from eternity the fall of Adam and the consequent damnation of his posterity, arbitrarily elected a portion of them to salvation, leaving the rest to their fate; and the vicarious sufferings of Christ were the only possible means of carrying that decree into effect. This is the Augustinian and Calvinistic theology, and has had a very extensive prevalence among Christians. Many church creeds still embody the doctrine; but in its original, uncompromising form it is rapidly fading from belief. Even now few persons can be found to profess it without essential modifications, so
18 T. S. King, Endless Punishment Unchristian and Unreasonable, p. 65.
qualifying it as to destroy its identity.
The third plan of delivering souls from the doom supposed to rest on them attributes to the vicarious sufferings of Christ a conditional efficacy, depending upon personal faith. Every one who will heartily believe in the substitutional death of Christ, and trust in his atoning merits, shall thereby be saved. This was the system of Pelagius, Arminius, Luther. It prevails now in the so called Evangelical Churches more generally than any other system.