Chapter IV (3)

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."