Chapter IV (2)

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 birth They 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."

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.